"Coldheart Canyon (preview edition)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive - Coldheart Canyon)

ceremony was full evening dress. Though she'd been representing other agents when
she first took Todd on, she'd let them all go once his career began to demand her
complete attention. Thereafter she lived and breathed the Pickett business,
control-ring every element of his life, private and professional. The price she
asked studios for his services rapidly rose to unheard of heights, and she drove the
deal home every single time. She had an opinion about everything: rewrites, casting,
the hiring of directors, art-directors, costume designers and directors of
photographers. Her only concern were the best interests of her wonder-boy. In the
language of an older but similarly feudal system, she was the power behind the
throne; and everyone who worked with Todd, from the heads of studios to humble
hair-stylists, had some encounter with her to relate, some scar to show.
Needless to say, the Pickett magic couldn't remain unchallenged forever.
There were always new stars in the ascendancy, new faces with the new smiles
appearing on the screen every season, and after ten years of devotion the audience
that had doted on Todd in the mid-to-late eighties began to look elsewhere for its
heroes. It wasn't that his pictures performed less well, but that others performed
even better. A new definition of a blockbuster had appeared; money-machines like
Independence Day and Titanic, which earned so much so quickly that pictures which
would once have been called major hits were now in contrast simply modest successes.
Anxious to regain the ground he was losing, Todd decided to go back into
business with Smotherman, who was just as eager to return to their glory days
together. The project they'd elected to do together was a movie called Warrior, a
piece of high concept junk about a street-fighter from Brooklyn who is brought
through time to champion a future earth in a battle against marauding aliens. The
script was a ludicrous concoction of clichИs pulled from every cheesy
science-fiction B-movies of the fifties, and an early budget had put the picture
somewhere in the region of a hundred million dollars simply to get it on screen, but
Smotherman was confident that he could persuade either Fox or Paramount to
green-light it. The show had everything, he said: an easily-grasped idea (primitive
fighting man outwits hyper-intelligent intergalactic empire, using cunning and brute
force); a dozen action sequences which called for state-of-the-art effects, and the
kind of hero Todd could perform in his sleep: an ordinary man put in an
extraordinary situation. It was a no-brainer, all лround. The studios would be fools
not to green-light it; it had all the marks of a massive hit.
He was nothing if not persuasive. In person, Smotherman was almost a parody
of a high-voltage salesman: fast-talking, short-tempered and over-sexed. There was
never an absence of 'babes', as he still called them, in his immediate vicinity; all
were promised leading roles when they'd performed adequately for Smotherman in
private, and all, of course, were discarded the instant he tired of them.
Preparations for Warrior were proceeding nicely. Then the unthinkable
happened. A week shy of his forty-fourth birthday, Smotherman died. He'd always been
a man of legendary excess, a bottom-feeder happiest in the gamier part of any city.
The circumstances of his death were perfectly consistent with this reputation: he'd
died sitting at a table in a private club in New York, watching a lesbian sex show,
the coronary that had felled him so massive and so sudden he had apparently been
overtaken by it before he could even cry out for help. He was face down in a pile of
cocaine when he was found, a drug he'd continued to consume in heroic quantities
long after his contemporaries had cleaned up their acts and had their sinuses
surgically reconstructed. It was one of the thirty-five illegal substances found in
his system at the autopsy.