Irene Turner was paging through “Right of Way” last week -- maybe it was in her L.A. apartment near the Strip, the one with the Spanish poster of “The Big Heat” on the wall -- and she was thinking about the hole in the heart of our screenplay-to-be.
“When I looked back at the story so far, I thought it had some cool set-pieces and interesting twists and turns, but Hizzoner (Mayor Napolitano) needed some emotional resonance. Something had to hit home.”
Yeah, I know, it’s the same problem I’ve been hammering at lately in my Script Notes. Is it any wonder the girl with the noir-sounding name wrote an entry that grabbed my attention like the business end of a .45?
The fix, Irene figured, was to put Napolitano in one place with the two people he cares about most. “And since those two were married,” she said, “well... it's always good to get a love triangle together in the same room. Even if one them is dead.”
That’s why this week’s pages (64-66) take place in the downtown morgue, where we see Napolitano torn between the very cold corpse of his good friend Larry and the very hot presence of Larry’s wife, Celeste, who, having slipped a captor’s bindings, drifts into the scene with torn Versace, a sob story and a bad case of rope-burn.
Even better, it all plays out under the disapproving eye of Napolitano’s other longtime friend Hendricks, the county coroner.
Napolitano is starting to feel the heavy burden of his misdeeds, and so are we.
He also wrangles Celeste’s version of the kidnapping story, which fingers her daughter Rachel as mastermind. Rachel, it seems, was funneling Larry and Celeste’s dough to the powerful cult group, The Order, and wasn’t too thrilled when her parents cut her off.
This of course directly contradicts Rachel’s side of things, which we heard a couple of weeks ago, before Napolitano caught the butt of a gun with his face and she disappeared into a black Bentley with a coke-snorting fat man.
Like the dames in our story, Irene can also pull a quick disappearing act when the heat is on. Faced suddenly with a pressing deadline that promised a payday worth even more than the LAOSP t-shirt, she handed off her pages-in-progress to yours truly for completion and adamantly insisted on sharing credit.
I wondered briefly if my experience with her had all been a dream. Then this note appeared in my inbox:
“See you next full moon outside some dreary Bunker Hill post-war apartment,” she wrote.
“I'll be the one leaning against a streetlight in a trench coat. Face shadowed, stilettos tall. A cop car will pass, flip on its siren. You'll turn back to greet me -- and I'll be gone.”
