reassurance.
  	"Smotherman was a dinosaur," she said as she sipped her vodka. "The only reason 
people put up with his bullshit all those years was because he made everybody a lot of 
money. But let's be honest: he was a low-life. You're a class act. You've got nothing to 
worry about."
  	"I don't know," Todd said, his head throbbing from one too many drinks. "I look 
at myself sometimes..."
  	"And what?"
  	"I'm not the guy I was when I made Gunner."
  	"Damn right you're not. You were nobody then. Now you're one of the most 
successful actors in history."
  	"There's others coming up."
  	"So what?" Maxine said, waving his concerns away.
  	"Don't do that!" Todd said, slamming his palm down on the table. "Don't try and 
placate me! Okay? We have a problem. Smotherman was going to put me back on top, and now 
the son of a bitch is dead!"
  	"All right. Calm down. All I'm saying is that we don't need Smotherman. We'll 
hire somebody to rework the script, if that's what you want. Then we'll find somebody hip 
to direct it. Somebody with a contemporary style. Smotherman was an old-fashioned guy. 
Everything had to be big. Big explosion. Big tits. Big guns. Audiences don't care about 
any of that any more. You need to be part of what's coming up, not what happened 
yesterday. You know, I hate to say it, but perhaps Keever's dying is the best thing that 
could have happened. We need a new look for you. A new Todd Pickett."
  	"You think it's as simple as that?" Todd said. He wanted so much to believed that 
Maxine had the problem solved.
  	"How difficult can it be?" Maxine said. "You're a great star. We just need to get 
people focused on you again." She pondered for a moment. "You know what? We should set up 
a lunch with Gary Eppstadt."
  	"Oh Jesus, why? You know how I hate that ugly little fuck"
  	"An ugly little fuck he may be. But he is going to pay for Warrior. And if he's 
going put twenty million and a slice of the back-end on the table for your services to 
art, you can make nice with the son of a bitch for an hour."
  
  
  THREE
  	It wasn't simply personal antipathy that had made Todd refer to Eppstadt so 
unflatteringly. It was the unvarnished truth. Eppstadt was the ugliest man in Los 
Angeles. Charitably, his eyes might have been called reptilian, his lips unkissable. His 
mother, in a fit of blind affection, might have noted that he was disproportioned. All 
this said, the man was still a narcissist of the first rank. He hung only the most 
expensive suits on his unfortunate carcass: his fingernails were manicured with obsessive 
precision; his personal barber trimmed his dyed hair every morning, having shaved him 
first with a straight razor.
  	There had been countless prayers offered up to that razor over the years, 
entreating it to slip! But Eppstadt seemed to live a charmed life. He'd gone from 
strength to strength as he moved around the studios, claiming the paternity of every 
success, and blaming the failures on those who stood immediately behind him on the 
ladder, whom he promptly fired. It was the oldest trick in the book, but it had worked 
flawlessly. In an age in which corporations increasingly had the power, and studios were 
run by committees of business-school graduates and lawyers with an itch to have their 
fingers in the creative pie, Eppstadt was one of the old school. A powermonger, happiest 
in the company of somebody who needed his patronage, whom he could then abuse in a 
hundred subtle ways. That was his pleasure, and his revenge. What did he need beauty for, 
when he could make it tremble with a smiling maybe! 
  
  	He was in a fine mood when he and Todd, with Maxine in attendance, met for lunch 
on Monday. Paramount had carried the weekend with a brutal revenge picture that Eppstadt 
had taken a hand in making, firing the director off the project after two unpromising 
preview screenings, and hiring somebody else to shoot a rape scene and a new ending, in 
which the violated woman terrorized and eventually dispatched her attacker with a 
hedge-cutter.
  	"Thirty-two point six million dollars in three days," he preened. "In January. 
That's a hit. And you know what? There's nobody in the picture. Just a couple no-name TV 
stars. It was all marketing."
  	"Is the picture any good?" Todd asked.
  	"Yeah, it's fucking Hamlet," Eppstadt said, without missing a beat. "You're 
looking weary, my friend," he went on. "You need a vacation. I've been taking time at 
this monastery-"
  	"Monastery?"
  	"Sounds crazy, right? But you feel the peace. You feel the tranquility. And they 
take Jews. Actually, I've seen more Jews there than at my nephew's Bar Mitzvah. You 
should try it. Take a rest."
  	"I don't want to rest. I want to work. We need to set a start-date for Warrior."
  	Eppstadt's enthusiastic expression dimmed. "Oh, Christ. Is that what this little 
lunch is all about, Maxine?"
  	"Are you making it or not?" Todd pressed. "Because there's plenty of other people 
who will if you won't."
  	"So maybe you should take it to one of them," Eppstadt said, his gaze hooded. 
"You can have it in turnaround, if that's what you want. I'll get business affairs on it 
this afternoon."
  	"So you're really ready to let it go?" Maxine said, putting on an air of 
indifference.
  	"Perfectly ready, if that's what Todd wants. I'm not going to stand in the way of 
you getting the picture made. You look surprised, Maxine."
  	"I am surprised. A package like that...it's a huge summer movie for Paramount."
  	"Frankly I'm not sure this is the right time for the company to be making that 
kind of picture, Maxine. It's a very hard market to read right now. And these expensive 
pictures. I mean, this is going to come in at well north of a hundred thirty million by 
the time we've paid for prints and advertising. I'm not sure that makes solid fiscal 
sense." He tried a smile; it was lupine. "Look, Todd: I want to be in business with you. 
Paramount wants to be in business with you. Christ, you've been a gold-mine for us over 
the years. But there's a generation coming up-and you know the demographics as well as I 
do-these kids filling up the multiplexes, they don't have any loyalty to the past."
  	Eppstadt knew what effect his words were having, and he was savoring every last 
drop of it.
  	"You see, in the good old days, the studios were able to carry stars through a 
weak patch. You had a star on a seven-year contract. He was being paid a weekly wage. You 
could afford a year or two of poor performance. But you're expensive, Todd. You're 
crucifyingly expensive. And I've got Viacom's shareholders to answer to. I'm not sure 
they'd want to see me pay you twenty million dollars for a picture that might only