‘Concentrate, Slick,’ said Fielding. ‘This is semi-crucial. The entire package pivots on this. Money wise, Meadowbrook’s the safe choice. I think Nub Forkner would play well with Butch. But Davis is the gamble, the longshot, and that attracts me. Put your instincts to work on it, Slick. I say we go with Spunk.’
‘You better give me a scotch.’
This would entail some self-inspection, alas, since the character was loosely based on me, on myself — Doug, the Sonj the greedy berk, the addict, the betrayer. It now looked like a straight playoff between Christopher Meadowbrook and Spunk Davis, with maybe Nub Forkner as an outside possibility. Meadowbrook I knew all about, a steady ensemble man but no headliner. You’ve seen him. He’s the guy with the freckly yankee-doodle face and the hint of comic spindliness in his floppy-limbed frame. He usually plays older brothers, blushing patsies, jumpy sidekicks, all-smiles Ivy Leaguers. As Doug, Meadowbrook would be cast violently against type, but that was exactly the sort of doubletake effect I was interested in. The other guy, this Davis character, I had heard of but never seen in action, a Broadway boy with one film in the can. Prehistoric was still at the editing stage. We were going to see the roughcut. The word was very good. According to Fielding, Davis was hot.
We alighted at an address on doublebarrelled Park Avenue. Our greeter, who looked like a presidential bodyguard, led us through the lobby and into the executive screening parlour—a six-seater with an air of luxury interrogations, one-way mirrors, corporation propaganda. Davis’s agent was there, Herrick Shnexnayder, a desperate human being who wore a French smock, a prosciutto cravat and the most complicated double pate-job I have ever come across in ten years of show business. One yellowy hank was swiped forward from the nape of his neck, while the other originated from his luxuriant left sideburn. His head looked like a fudge sundae—I swear to God, he could have put a spoon in his ear and a maraschino cherry on his crown and looked no worse. I drank the limitless champagne on offer (most of it soaked without fuss into the parched coral of my tongue) and listened to Herrick’s obsequious banter. Agents, these days, they look like corporation men—but Herrick was more showbiz than Coco the Clown. At one point Fielding mentioned money. The agent smiled like a death-dealing doctor and said, ‘Oh I think, after Prehistoric, we’re looking at five.’ In other words, Spunk’s fee was now half a million dollars. Fielding just nodded and said, ‘And what does his availability look like?’ His availability looked good, partly because, after Prehistoric, no one could afford to hire him. Prehistoric started with a long pan over a series of cave murals: a man, a woman, a fight, a fuck, a tiger—a spaceship. We backed off. A gang or tribe of pre-fire apepeople were huddled about the place: there was Spunk, sharpening his spear. Square-headed, square-lipped, the dark face dense and sinewy. The next morning—or soon, anyway — Spunk was beamed up on to the bridge of the low-lying spaceship by the mischievous, conical, beep-voiced aliens, who then travelled through time and beamed Spunk down again into Greenwich Village, 1980. It was a summer night, so Spunk didn’t look at all conspicuous in his bodyhair, warpaint and loinskin. After staring around and grunting a lot, Spunk reflexively saved a drunken girl from being roughed up in a sidewalk fracas outside a singles’ bar. She takes him home to her swish apartment. More grunting. She assumes he is Lithuanian or Albanian or whatever — Christ knows there are some pretty perfunctory Earthlings on the streets of New York. Spunk accepts a glass or two of firewater and is led to the sack, where he proceeds to give her the pasting of a lifetime. Come dawn, the chick has checked out, but Spunk is still hanging in there— bad diet, presumably… There followed a brilliant scene, as Spunk staggered out to confront the girl’s flatmates. The flatmates are used to the girl’s rugged pick-ups, but Spunk (cracking nuts with his teeth, eating unshelled eggs and raw sausages) is a new wrinkle. With various delicate transitions that left me sighing in assent, the film now turned into a gentle parodic love story, the girl civilizing Spunk — teaching him how to dress, eat, speak — and Spunk decivilizing her: teaching her to kick the booze, the pick-ups, the self-destruction, the money (they go primitive for a while, after Spunk has an urban breakdown. Even I, in my exalted state, could detect some sentimentality here). Throughout Spunk wore a silent gaze of uncomplaining bafflement and reserve, comic but dignified, formidable. He was especially good at the end, when the aliens (who have been monitoring the whole joke, helping Spunk out at awkward moments) beam him back to bc. He knows what’s about to happen, more or less, and tries to explain to the girl with his pitiful resources of gesture and language. Thus Spunk stands bereft on the stark crag, with old winds whistling. He frowns, he tenses — he peers into a sloping hollow. The girl sits there muttering and shivering, with her last cigarette and an electric lighter. Credits. I was deeply moved. Moved? I had a nervous breakdown. The tears were still pissing from my eyes when I fled to the can. No doubt about it, no doubt at all: Davis was going to be a big, big name.