Two Weeks in Another Town by Irwin Shaw

wiped out in his performance.
    “The godamn Italians,” Delaney said. “They can’t resist a bargain. They got him for half his usual salary, so they didn’t ask any questions and they signed him. Why don’t you shut up?” he growled at the screen, where Stiles was telling the girl that he loved her but that he felt he had to leave her for her own good.
    The showing ended abruptly, in the middle of a sequence which Jack remembered, from reading the script, was somewhere in the last third of the story. The lights went on and Delaney turned to Jack. “Well, what you think?” he asked.
    “I can see why you want somebody else’s voice for Stiles,” Jack said.
    “The sonofabitch,” Delaney said, almost automatically. “Cirrhosis of the liver is too good for him. What about the rest of it?”
    “Well.” Jack hesitated. After all, he hadn’t seen Delaney for more than ten years and he wasn’t sure how frank he could be after the interruption in their friendship. In the old days, Delaney had used Jack as critic and sounding board for everything he did. In the world of sycophants and money-hunters in which Delaney lived, Jack had performed a great service for his friend. His standards had been youthfully strict, his taste astringent, his nose for falseness and pretension sharp, and he had been mercilessly candid with Delaney, who from time to time called him a supercilious young snot, but who listened, and more often than not redid the work of which Jack disapproved. Delaney did as much for Jack, never sparing him for a moment when he felt Jack was not doing his best. They had made three pictures together in three years, in this loose, informal, candid arrangement. The pictures had been among the best of their time and they had created the Delaney legend, on which, in a fashion, he still lived. Delaney had never approached that level again. He and Jack had had a sardonic, symbolic phrase that they used with each other, both for their own work or the work of others, when they detected the sugariness or false violence or pseudo-profundity that was so easy to get away with in the booming Hollywood of those days. “It’s terribly original,” they would say to each other, drawling the words out affectedly. Or if the offense was greater, “It’s terribly, terribly original, my dear boy….”
    Now, after seeing the film that Delaney had run for him in the projection room, Jack wanted to say, “It’s terribly, terribly original, my dear boy….” But remembering the tension in Delaney’s voice in the car the night before and the fierce appeal that had lain under the surface of his words, Jack sensed that it would be better to feel his way before he ventured any real criticism. “The script is pretty weak,” he started.
    “The script!” Delaney said bitterly. “You can say that again.”
    “Who wrote it?” Jack asked.
    “Sugarman,” Delaney said, spitting out the name as though it left a bad taste in his mouth. “The crook.”
    “That’s surprising,” said Jack. Sugarman had written three or four good plays in the past fifteen years, but there was no hint in what Jack had read the night before or seen that morning of any of the talent of his other work.
    “He came here for three months,” Delaney said, accusingly, “and went to all the museums and sat in the cafés with all the crappy, unwashed painters and writers that this town is lousy with, and he told everybody I was a stupid sonofabitch, and he wouldn’t write a line the way I could shoot it and I wound up rewriting the whole godamn thing. Writers! The same old story. You can have Sugarman.”
    “I see,” Jack said noncommittally. From the time he had begun to be successful, Delaney had fought with all the writers he had worked with and had finally taken to rewriting his scripts himself. He had the reputation around Hollywood of a director who had written himself into failure, and producers who were tempted to hire him were apt to say to his