For those of you still following, heres the penultimate part of The Lexicons Child (Part 4 of 5) Hollywood had never come calling for Stephen Ferber before. THE SKIN GAME had been optioned for six months by some tin pot British company before it had become a bestseller but the movie had never reached beyond the scripting stage. Hed let it go for virtually nothing in those days, which made the figures his agent gushed at him down the phone impossibly tempting. And all this before the book was even published. Dreams came no sweeter, even in Tinseltown . By the time he put down the handset half an hour later, Ferber was convinced that he, and his baby THE WINDWALKERS were blessed. The day after the phone call, Max developed a fever which was followed rapidly by the outbreak of a livid rash across his chest and neck. By the evening, a matrix of hard wheals had risen on his upper torso, they continued down his back and across his buttocks. At Marias insistence Ferber called Doctor Meacham out to look at the child. The doctor examined the scar like ridges the marked the boys body for some time, before hastily writing out a prescription for a course of antibiotics which he said should help take the swelling down. The childs temperature was a little bit above average, but nowhere near as high as it had been earlier that afternoon when Maria had taken it. So whats wrong with him? Ferber asked at last. The old man turned away, eager to avoid any prolonged eye contact, and fiddled with the clasp of his briefcase. Its nothing to worry about... The doctor replied, his brusque Irish brogue waivering slightly. A few days rest, try and stop him scratching if you can, keep him and his bedclothes clean. plenty of baths... Of course. But whats wrong with him? The doctor fingered his beard for a moment without replying. Chickenpox he said eventually, just a rather uncommon variety. And, because he was a doctor, Stephen Ferber believed him. He and Maria took turns to stay with Max. They were anxious , silent hours, during which Ferber found his mind wondering to thoughts of the young girl who had turned his life upside down. He tried to chart the flow his life might have been if she hadnt appeared at the signing, or if he had declined her offer to help him get over his writers block. Everything had happened so quickly that he hadnt really had time to consider Maxs future. If she never came back, would the child, like her book THE WINDWALKERS be accepted as his? Could he shoulder that responsibility? The more he asked that question of himself, the more he came to realise that the two came hand in hand, and that he probably already had. Two days later, as Meacham had promised, the child was back to normal, and Ferber thought little more about it, other than wondering at the speed of Maxs recovery. But he was, after all and extraordinary child, and little about him surprised Ferber any more. If someone had told him that Max would be walking and talking within six months, hed probably have believed that too. Something that Ferber would never have believed six months previously was that hed be sitting in the first class cabin of an LA bound 747 to talk about a film of one of his books. And not just any film, this was going to be a Major motion picture, with enough money in the budget to settle the gross national debt of a dozen third world countries. Ferber looked out of the window as the aircraft began its final descent into LAX. It was a hot, muggy day and there wasnt much to see. He remembered something his agent had told him once, and smiled to himself. Thats not smog over LA...its a air of bullshit. There was a limousine waiting to take him to his hotel which was a good forty minutes drive through the lunchtime traffic. Raul, his Mexican driver, seemed to lose interest in him once he knew that Ferber was a writer. He got an idea why a couple of hours later as he sat in his hotel room watching Entertainment tonight. They ran a feature where they stopped ten people at random on Hollywood Boulevard and asked them how the script was going. Eight out of the ten came up with variations on, its in development, its really close to being greenlit, or its having a final polish. These days it seemed the short order cooks at Arbys and the waitresses at Dennys were no longer waiting for the big acting break, they all wanted to be screenwriters or script doctors. The following morning a car picked him up from his hotel and took him down to the production offices on South Robertson Boulevard. The building was less grand than hed imagined, but it was good to give flesh at last to an address that had only been a heading on the endless flood of emails which had passed between the production company, his agent and their lawyers. Less than two months had passed since hed seen the first draft of the option and assignment, and now they were on the verge of being executed. His agent had brokered a deal which would pay him handsomely, and her 20 percent of that figure. He went into the meeting excited and confident, and emerged thirty minutes later richer but deflated. He checked out of the hotel that afternoon, called Maria from the airport, and two hours later was on a flight back to London. At first he couldnt bring himself to look at the handsomely bound script that he had been handed at the end of the meeting. None of the inflight movies appealed to him so he settled down to compound his agony. He got the stewardess to fix him two straight shots of Jack Daniels to soften the blow. He read the title page... THE WINDWALKERS Screenplay by Charles Baez. God hed been naive. Hed walked into that meeting with the first few pages of his own screenplay, certain that theyd jump at the chance of him adapting his own, soon to be best selling novel. It all made such sense to him - who better to write an adaptation than the author himself? Who else could know the story better. Who else could give the characters the psychological weight that he could? THE WINDWALKERS was his baby damn it! His baby! Why was it that whenever Hollywood got hold of a shit hot story the first thing they did was get someone else to rewrite it!
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 19:42:18 +0000
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