Fletch's Moxie by Gregory McDonald Page B

“Mind if I seek your advice?”
    Mooney said neither yes nor no. He searched the ground around his chair. He had not brought his bag of bottles. He had been convivial in the bars of Key West since before lunch, though.
    “Why would anyone make a bad movie?” Fletch asked.
    “It’s like any other business,” Mooney said. “People make mistakes. No. Allow me to amend that. No other
hindustry
operates with such a stupifyingly high mistake factor. Could you run your business, Mister Peterkin, with a ninety percent error factor?”
    “How could that be?”
    “Making a good film means bringing together exactly the right talents with exactly the right material. Not an easy job.”
    “I still don’t get it. No business can keep running if ninety percent of everything it does is wrong.”
    “And then I can point out to you—as a bitter, burned out old man, mind you—that any business of glamour and big bucks attracts to it more than its share of incompetents and charlatans.”
    Fletch tried to wrap his eyes around Mooney. “Why should you be bitter?”
    “Because I have had more than my share of incompetents and charlatans ruining my sleep and my waking, damaging my work, advising me ill, treating me badly, robbing me—”
    “Ho down,” said Fletch. “Didn’t mean to heat your blood. Too hot a day for that.”
    Mooney inhaled deeply through his nose. He turned his profile to Fletch and exhaled slowly. Fletch wondered if such was an actor’s exercise.
    “I don’t see how any business—or
hindustry,
as you call it—can run with such a high failure ratio.”
    Mooney’s smile was sardonic. “There are many ways this business operates. The simple answer to your question is that just often enough the right materials come together with the right talents. The miracle of art happens. Even people like you put down your barbells and rush out, money in hand, crazed to see what mammon has wrought. And its payday for the
hindustry.
A single flash of light in the night makes safe the dark.”
    “I’m just reading this filmscript.” Fletch jiggled his knee under it. “I don’t know, of course. Never read a filmscript before. It strikes me as pretty terrible. The characters all seem to be like people you meet at a cocktail party—all fronts and no backs. They don’t talk the way people really talk. I do a little writing myself—on days when there are hurricanes. It seems to me, in this filmscript much time and space are wasted while the author is floundering around trying to arrive at an idea. All that should be cut away. Don’t you think writing should begin after the idea is achieved?” Mooney was looking at him like a bull bored with the pasture. “It treats controversial old issues in an insulting, offensive way. Instead of trying to create any sort of understanding, my reading of it is that it is trying to provoke hatred—deliberately.” Again Mooney was surveying the ground around his chair for the bottle bag. “Not a critic of filmscripts, of course,” Fletch said. “But I think anyone would have to be crazy to invest a dime in this rubbish.”
    “Ah, Peterkin,” said Mooney, obviously sitting on his own restlessness. “You just said the magic word:
dime.
Like any other business, the film
hindustry
is about money. Lots of it. Consider this: never does so much money come together over the creation of an illusion.” Mooney moved to get out of his chair but did not make it. “Think about that, if you will. Count your illusions, Mister Peterkin.” Finally, Mooney succeeded in standing up. “The time for a nap has passed,” he announced to the banyan tree, which never napped. “I need a drink to smooth the wrinkles of my day. May I bring you one, Peterson?”
    Slowly, he hoped in a theatrical manner, Fletch squinted all around him before asking, “Who’s Peterson?”
    “Why, you’re Peterson, aren’t you? Oh, I’m sorry. Peterkin. You’re Peterkin. You just said that, I believe. You should