Adapted for the Screen

Adapted for the Screen

Copyright 2016 LM Foster

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

9th Street Press

www.9thstreetpress.com

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There is only one plot – things are not what they seem.

― Jim Thompson

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Carolyn Adyon Speaks

A Screenwriter Remembers: My First Movie Shoot

The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Updated

Preproduction: Dorian and Henry

A Historic Meeting

The Shoot

It’s A Wrap

Maurice Claremount Directs Comedy

It’s Been Done, Being Done Again: First Meeting for She’s A Peach

I’d Like to Thank the Academy . . . Not

Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?

The Moving Finger Writes; and, Having Writ, Moves On . . .

And This Week, Guest-Starring Dorian Gray

The Two-Minute Drill

The Way We Were

She Don’t Lie

Love Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

The Cattle Arrive

An Awakening, Rudely Delivered

Trouble in Paradise

A Short Historical Digression

The Nipponophile and a Celebration of Love and Gratitude

Science Fiction Double Feature

Also by LM Foster

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Carolyn Adyon Speaks

How’s that for ego?

Like anyone would ever listen, retorts my Realistic Sense of Self-Worth.

Ya never know, counters Ego again.

It’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility. Someday, people might want to hear my thoughts. After all, I’m credited as co-screenwriter on Dorian and Henry, and even though Wilde purists were not amused, it nonetheless enjoyed a modest success. And the original idea for critically (if not financially) acclaimed Kinship was mine: it even says, From a story by Carolyn Adyon in the opening credits. Maurice Claremount, writer and director of mega-hit Cheyenne Sundown, turned a little tale I made up into a movie that was praised by Time Magazine. He wrote the script for it, because I wasn’t entirely comfortable with screenwriting at the time.

Maybe you’ll never be comfortable with screenwriting, pipes up my Realistic Sense of Self-Worth.

Pish posh, returns my Ego. I’m a storyteller, a raconteuse, as Maury says; I’ve been one since childhood. And a screenplay’s just another way to tell a story. So what if I tend to want to put in a little too much description?

"It’s a movie, Carol! Maury always tells me. We’re going to see what’s going on! You don’t have to describe it!"

At least I’ve finally gotten the formatting down right.

And he’s always there to check me, to imperiously correct me, with total disregard for the ol’ ego. He’s made me tough, reinforced that Realistic Sense of Self-Worth. I’m really just a nobody, an Inland Empire girl who got very lucky. Any and all other aspiring screenwriters should be so lucky.

Maybe my next effort will stand on its own.

My next effort hasn’t been too forthcoming, but I found my two green keys yesterday, and it’s prompted me to start this new journal. At least I’m writing something.

Finding those two pistachio-colored keys on their little ring brought to mind my last journal, and remembering that ponderous epistle and the dark wonders it recounts might’ve planted the seed for another tale between the folds of my brain. At least I’m putting words to blinking cursor, filling in that accusingly blank space. Goodbye, writer’s block!

So, thus.

My last journal is still under lock and key in a safe deposit box in Riverside. After finding my two green keys, I scared up the computer file of that journal, buried on some external hard drive. I skimmed it, resisted the urge to edit, to rewrite. It should stand untouched, a paranoid testament to my disbelief at all the supernatural things happening in my life at the time. It’s another chapter in that tale as old as time: when all of hometown girl’s dreams come true, she’s still too dumb to realize how good she’s got it. She’s doubtful, suspicious.

I wrote down the catalogue of events, the tragedies and joys. Then in true cinematic style, I hid it away, and left a sealed envelope for my former boss, an attorney. Open in the event of Carolyn Adyon’s death or incapacity, it says on the outside. Inside lurks the key to the safe deposit box, the location of the bank.

I took all these precautions because I was worried that my life might be in danger then, and if something happened to me, I wanted the world to know why. If I woke up dead, I’d left instructions for my former employer to publish my true Hollywood story.

Briefly:

It was 2013, and my best friend Ruthanne had a crush on a movie star named Franck O’Day. She always preferred actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood to more modern thespians, and Franck was her very favorite. Unfortunately, he’d died in a plane crash in 1968, two decades before she and I had been born.

But Ruthie, God love her, just knew Franck wasn’t dead.

On the way home from work one afternoon, I noticed two pistachio-colored keys hanging from her keychain, and asked her about them.

And so the saga began. Ruthie told me that the keys were a good luck charm, that they represented a lost movie that would’ve starred this matinee idol, had it ever been completed. The symbolism was not overly complicated: the movie had been entitled Two Green Keys.

Ruthie explained. It’s something that Franck’s fans can share. Nobody’s ever heard of the movie, unless they’ve heard of him, so it’s a little way that we can identify each other, so to speak. Almost like a secret handshake.

I had certainly never heard of the guy, so Ruthanne showed me his fan site on the interwebs. Without a whole lot of originality, it was called TwoGreenKeys.com. Ruthie read aloud from it: Keep sending all your good wishes and love energies to Franck. While his health had been faltering a little lately, your healing energies have once again put him on the road to recovery. Keep sending in those keys! Watch this space for news of a personal appearance in the not too distant future! Ruthanne blinked solemnly. See, I told you he wasn’t dead.

What was that about love energies? And keys?

"There’s a belief that people can send healing energies to others. It works like this. You find two keys. Any two will do. You meditate on them – fill them with your good wishes, your love for Franck – then you send them with a self-addressed stamped envelope to the fan club. Franck receives the energy and love from them – and infuses each with a little of his own grateful energy. They’re painted green to complete the symbolism of the movie title, and mailed back to you.

I own something that he actually touched, Carol! Something that’s imbued with a little of his energy, a little of him. What better good luck charm is there than that?

I had no response. Ruthanne sighed, smiled a little sheepishly. I know you don’t believe any of this. But Franck’s life, not to mention his beliefs on healing energies – it would all make a great book.

Ruthie, my childhood friend, knew how much I’d always aspired to be a writer, and with very little effort, she soon talked me into penning her beloved Franck’s biography. Emails with the webmaster of TwoGreenKeys.com were exchanged; I even joined the fan club myself, received my own two green keys in the mail.

All that claptrap about healing energies – I wouldn’t believe any of it, right up until I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was all true; until I began to benefit from it. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Damned if Ruthanne and I didn’t get to actually meet Franck O’Day.

Not only wasn’t he dead, he looked great. He had a few wrinkles, and his once black hair was now an iron gray. But on the other hand, he was eighty. No one would’ve guessed it. He didn’t look a day over fifty.

Ruthanne was charmed, as she couldn’t help but be charmed, what with finding out that her favorite old-timey actor wasn’t dead. What with getting to actually meet him and all. Finding out that he looked great. If you were a fan of Marlon Brando, it would’ve been like getting to meet him and discovering that he looked just a few years older than he did in On The Waterfront, instead of the wreck he’d become by The Island of Doctor Moreau. Not to mention finding out that he wasn’t dead at all.

Ruthie was thrilled. She was ecstatic. She was in love.

After our first visit, we drove back to Beverly Hills again the following weekend, and lo and behold, Franck’s iron gray, old man’s hair color was gone. He’d dyed it, restored it once again to the inky black of his decades-passed youth. Now he looked forty.

I listened to Franck tell his life story – it was a doozy, full of sex and love and death and betrayal and success in old-Hollywood. It goes without saying that the oddest chapter was about the energy. The energy, Franck revealed, was the reason he’d stayed in Japan so many years after the plane crash that had not in actuality killed anyone but the unfortunate pilot.

At some stripe of monastery in the wilds of Japan, Franck related, he and his fellow Hollywood refugee, director Robert Ecksmith (Who? I’d thought) had learned to harness this mystery of the universe. Much later, Franck would explain the phenomenon to me in detail: When you love something, you give off a special kind of energy. The things you love, they soak it up – who looks happier and healthier than a beloved child, or a pampered house pet? Even plants respond to love. It’s a force of nature. In Japan, I learned to recognize this energy – to harness it, to assimilate it.

He claimed that it wasn’t plastic surgery that made him seem so well preserved for his age. It wasn’t dye from a box or salon that had changed his locks back to their glossy, youthful black. It was the admiration of his fans, come to him via emails and keys. And it was Ruthie’s admiration in person.

Franck told me that after he’d returned to the States, unannounced, in 2006, he’d often go to midnight showings of his one hit movie, High Times in Manhattan. Incognito (but who would’ve recognized him, anyway?) he’d sit in the back row, and, all that adoration directed at my character on the screen would bounce off and come back to me in waves. It keeps me young.

At first, of course, I didn’t buy any of it. It was unbelievable. It was insane.

Franck decided it was time for his comeback, so Ruthie and the webmaster of TwoGreenKeys.com organized and promoted a fan club meeting, a semi-private screening of High Times in Manhattan. Franck chose a tiny venue for the historic event: an old, creaky, Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall in godawful Las Vegas. He didn’t want to announce his reappearance to the whole world, he said. He only wanted to see his real fans.

Just a handful of people had arrived for the event when Franck tried to send Ruthie back to our hotel to fetch the guestbook that he’d forgotten there. She refused to go. She was having too much fun meeting and greeting Franck’s real fans, most of whom she’d recruited herself for the event, in Riverside and LA.

So Franck asked me to go, called me a cab, gave me a wad of money for the fare. Forgetting the guestbook – I thought perhaps his eighty-year-old mind wasn’t what it used to be, no matter how good he looked otherwise.

It should’ve only taken a few minutes, a half-hour at the most. But the always-killer Vegas traffic was atrocious that night; the cabbie hopped on the freeway and was immediately confronted with a jackknifed big rig. I was gone almost two hours.

When I got back, red and yellow flames were devouring the VFW hall.

Ruthanne Midley, my very best friend in the whole world, died in the fire, along with Franck himself, as well as seventy-three others. I was the only one attending the event, in fact, to survive, because I had been off running Franck’s errand when the place caught.

I went back home to Riverside and grieved. I missed Ruthie terribly, and I even missed Franck, despite the fact that I’d considered him to be quite full of himself, always entirely aware of his movie star’s good-looks and the effect they’d had on his fans. I’d found him to be shrewd, crafty, old-Hollywood-dangerous. But his undeniable charm was inescapable, and after he died, I discovered that I missed him, too, almost as much as I missed Ruthie.

A year passed, then a year and a half. I began to put my life back together, to move on. Then I heard Franck’s voice come out of my television. It was a trailer for some new western, no faces, just voices, and a shot of a steam locomotive exploding. I recognized Ryan Gosling’s voice, his name, at the end of the trailer. The other actor’s name was unknown to me: Alvee Smith-Killem. But he had Franck’s voice.

It just couldn’t be. Franck was dead. I did a little research online, found a picture of this Alvee Smith-Killem of the ridiculous name, this unknown. Sometimes you’ll see a young actor, and you’ll think that he looks just like an older actor, from back in the day, when he was young. Sometimes, the resemblance is amazing, uncanny. So much so, that you wonder if this young one could be the old one’s son, from some yesteryear’s dalliance with an original fan, perhaps. And at first glance, this was what I thought of Alvee Smith-Killem: that he could be Franck O’Day’s son – no, he’d have to be a grandson – any son of Franck’s would be in at least his fifties, if not his sixties.

I’d found this Alvee person’s picture on IMDb, a promotional shot from his very first feature, some English flick called Downpour, that I’d never heard of, just like I’d never heard of him. He looked like he was maybe twenty-three or twenty-five.

I knew of no extant photos of Ruthanne’s idol at twenty-five – but if there had been a photo of Franck at that age, looking just as wild and sexy as he wanted to be, then this would’ve been it. I felt like I was losing my mind, because not only did Alvee Smith-Killem resemble Franck a great deal, as if they could be related. Alvee Smith-Killem was Franck O’Day.

It was nuts, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. I rented a car, journeyed to LA, to the secluded Beverly Hills manse where we’d first met the old actor, where Ruthie had fallen in love with him in person, just like she’d fallen in love with his character from High Times in Manhattan. Where I’d interviewed him.

I felt silly pushing the intercom button in front of the gate. Franck O’Day was dead. Some other rich and famous personage owned this grand house now. What was I going to say?

A man’s voice came through the intercom’s grill. Yes?

Seriously, what was I gonna say? I know you’re in there, I know you’re not dead? I knew nothing of the kind.

Then inspiration struck. During our interviews, telegrams had often been the deus ex machina that had moved the old actor’s story to the next scene, so I said, I’ve got a telegram for Franck O’Day.

The same voice, muffled. What?

I said, I’ve got a telegram for Franck O’Day.

I counted to ten before the gate rattled open.

(I’ll just cut and paste a little here, from my original journal.)

When I drove up the curving driveway, I beheld Alvee Smith-Killem standing halfway down the steps, looking curiously in my direction. He was wearing a light-blue, short-sleeved shirt, unbuttoned, thrown carelessly over a wife-beater. He wore jeans and black, high-topped Converse. I couldn’t gauge the sum of his expression, because he was wearing a pair of Ray-Bans, as perfectly black as the curly hair that reached nearly to his shoulders.

I pulled up in front of the old stone staircase, got out of the car, and looked up over its roof at him.

Alvee Smith-Killem smiled, and Franck’s mellifluous voice exclaimed, Carol!

The man that walked down the steps was not wearing an impeccably tailored, slate gray suit, as befitted an actor in his waning years. No. Alvee was dressed perfectly for someone his age, but he still had Franck’s gait.

He took off his sunglasses as he trotted around the car and enveloped me in a bear hug, picked me up off my feet. Then he released me, set his shades on the roof of the car, and held me by the hands. The blue eyes smiling out of Alvee’s twenty-five-year-old face were Franck’s.

Ruthanne had once typed up a description of her idol for me, which was to have been included in the biography that, because she and Franck had died, would now never be. The lengthy paragraph had been a fan’s paean to her favorite star’s beauty. Part of it had read: His teeth, just ever so slightly, endearingly crooked, lend an everyman, boy-next-door quality to his otherwise flawless face.

In the year and a half since I had seen him last, Franck had gotten his teeth straightened. They were now perfect, like Bradley Cooper’s teeth. Movie stars couldn’t have crooked teeth in the era of HD. But they were still his teeth. There could be no doubt.

How nice of you to come! Franck’s voice said, and Alvee hugged me again.

How nice of you to come? Like I’d just dropped in unexpectedly for a little visit. How nice of you to come? Really? Not like he had returned from the grave, again, younger, more devastatingly attractive than ever. Not like that at all.

A million things to say flew through my mind. At last I chose the simplest. What happened, Franck?

It was the energy, Carol.

He smiled humorlessly at my familiar look of disbelief. He retrieved his sunglasses from the roof of my rented car, folded them, put them into his pocket. He took me by the hand and led me up the staircase to where he’d been standing. We sat on the step.

He spoke of the VFW Hall, of all his real fans. "I just sat there with my eyes closed, feeling the energy channel through me, feeling it wash away all the years. I knew that I’d wake up the next day, feeling alive and refreshed, as if I’d had some incredible spa treatment. Except no spa can do what that adoring energy can do, Carol, if you know how to assimilate it. I knew I would wake up the next day feeling alive and refreshed, but I also knew that I’d look younger. I would be younger.

"But then something went wrong. There was just too much! All those people, my biggest, most loyal fans! Suddenly, the projector on the ceiling exploded, and dropped onto the podium, sending sparks and shards of plastic everywhere. The room was plunged into darkness. Flames raced across the ceiling. The podium was on fire. It was the only light in the room. People were screaming and backing up, overturning chairs, getting tangled in them, all to escape the heat.

I wasn’t holding Ruthie’s hand anymore. The screen was on fire. The place was filling up with smoke. Everybody was trying to get to the door, but the flames – people were screaming, crying. I kept looking for Ruthie, calling her name.

Franck buried his face in his hands and sobbed. I put my arm around his shoulders. He cried, but I remained curiously dry-eyed. His story wasn’t quite finished yet.

I don’t remember getting out, don’t remember running to the pizza place at the end of the plaza. But I remember trying to get in, banging on the window. The door was locked and the pizza guy was sitting at a table, reading. I remember him not even looking up, saying, ‘We’re closed!’ I remember pounding on the window, remember screaming at him, telling him to call someone, telling him that the VFW Hall was on fire. I remember him looking in that direction, scrambling back around the counter, yanking the phone off the hook . . .

Franck drew a deep, shuddering breath, then let it out again. There was only one thing for me to do then. I staggered around the corner of the building . . . I took my phone out of my pocket and called Bobby.

"Bobby? Bobby Ecksmith?"

But really, was it so impossible to believe? Eighty-two-year-old Franck O’Day was twenty-five again, standing here in front of me, just as fine as he wanted to be. Why shouldn’t Robert Ecksmith – Franck’s friend, his director – still be alive, too? They had been in that plane crash in Japan together, after all.

Of course. Franck swiped at the tears on his face. "Who else would I call?

"Bobby told me to start walking down Las Vegas Boulevard. I’d barely made it under the 515 before a cab picked me up and took me to the airport. A man with an English accent met me there. ‘I’m Dr. Urstig, Mr. O’Day,’ he said. ‘Do you have your passport with you?’

My passport was in my pocket. That was something that Bobby had taught me. Always carry your passport. You never know when you might have to leave the country.

From his estate in England, the once-famed director had made all the arrangements, pulled the necessary strings. We got on a little plane, and Dr. Feelgood gave me some kind of a sedative. The next thing I knew, I was disembarking at Heathrow, still smelling like smoke. I’m sure we changed planes somewhere, but I don’t remember it.

For a year and a half, I’d been probably the only person in the US that had known that matinee idol Franck O’Day had not perished when his plane disappeared in Japan in 1968. For a year and a half, I’d believed that he’d burned to death in a little VFW Hall in Vegas. Yet here he was, not only alive, but young again.

The rest of my first journal chronicles how I, for lack of a better expression, took up with Franck and Bobby. Except, of course, Franck was now Alvee and Robert Ecksmith was Maurice