CHAPTER 98 - Little Girl Blue
Sony Tower.
Tuesday, 1st July 2008.
Scripts did not usually arrive at Sony Tower.
They arrived at Sony’s own film division in Culver City. Scripts arrived with a cover letter on letterhead. They arrived, at minimum, with a courier who had been paid enough to wait for a signature without sighing.
What arrived at half past ten on Tuesday morning was a courier in a wet mesh singlet, dripping onto the marble of the thirty-fourth floor, holding out a clipboard with a biro tied to it by a length of butcher’s string.
“Fontaine,” the kid said to the reception. “Somebody’s gotta sign.”
Eppie was down in five minutes. She signed for it, then took it upstairs.
The package was a padded envelope, reinforced at one corner with parcel tape that had been applied by hand and not by a machine. Inside were two scripts, brass-bradded, and one index card.
The thin one was one hundred and six pages. The thick one was one hundred and thirty-one, and its title page read THE PRO, original screenplay by A. Vasseur, second revised draft, and in the corner, in pencil, in a hand that belonged to no typesetter, someone had written, pp.71-74. Read at your own peril.
Someone had run both drafts through a watermarking printer, so that on every single page, running diagonally from the bottom left to the top right in eight per cent grey, were the words FONTAINE and a six-digit number. It was an anti-piracy measure.
The index card was ruled, and it had come with a personalised message.
| Miss Fontaine — There are two. The thin one is mine. The thick one is what I won at auction. Our script doctor says you should see the original as well to understand our intent. There is every opportunity to say no. The role requires youth, delicacy and maturity, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. — J. Ferroni
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