Chapter Nine. It's a Minsky!

The house was certainly nice enough. A Victorian painted a dark blue with crimson trim and maintained every bit as lovingly as the car. The neighborhood, however, was something else.




The sitting room they entered was all mahogany and overstuffed furniture and heavily shaded lamps. The air smelled of pine oil.




"But let’s get down to business," Pop said. "Sit, please! Sit!" The boys lowered themselves into elaborate chairs with lace antimacassars.





"The biggest hit Pop ever made was a car chase through Hancock Park! Of course, this was before they built the houses there."




"I was one of the big machers!" Pop said. " Zukor used to borrow money from me!"




Pop told them how he’d come to America as an enterprising greenhorn and made his first fortune in portable sewing machines...




...how he'd seen his first motion picture projector before the turn of the century, and how the new gadget had reminded him of a sewing machine because “you make it go and the wheels turn around and from it comes something that makes people happy.”




He told them how he’d battled the big Eastern trusts and helped move the business to Hollywood.



He listed the great actresses he’d helped launch, women with names like Olive and Mabel whom Ed could immediately see with great nimbuses of hair blotting out the sun...




...and the hits he’d turned out when the words “It’s a Minsky!” were your guarantee of class.





They weren’t parked in the shadow of the Thalberg Building or the Selznick Mansion or the white-colonnaded Warners Administration Building, having just signed a fat contract with the back-slapping executives of a great studio...




...but on a half-razed street in Bunker Hill where a relic of the distant past had hired them to modernize the Keystone Cops.






They swung by the Hollo-Palm Groceteria and loaded up on Vienna sausages, Ritz crackers, canned olives, Kraft cheese spread with pimentos, and a jug of burgundy.




“I just saw Ernst Lubitsch sneaking out of her bungalow the night before last. You think he doesn’t have an image?"




“I didn’t think it was possible,” Horace said, “but you guys have actually outdone yourselves!”





“And we don’t want some tired old hack director lousing it up,” Johnny said, "or some goddamn artiste trying to make it into his own screwy vision.” “Jesus,” Ed said with a shudder. “What if Pop gives it to Orson Welles?”




They asked Hugh if he'd want to play the lead. "Not the killer robot," he said.




"Viveca Lindfors?" Ed asked.
“No, the other Swede," Johnny said. "The wrestler.”




Hugh was recommending a friend named Ann Savage who was sick of playing bad girls on Poverty Row and might leap at the chance to try something new.





So Johnny treated himself to a matinee at a dump on Fairfax that showed old silent flickers for a dime.




"Those rooftops in Brooklyn, Abie!" Pop said. "Did we have times?"





The still Chinaski had constructed in the men’s room of the Wet Whistle—even while his hands trembled with delirium tremens—was the only reason that beloved establishment had survived wartime liquor rationing.




Wardrobe was Johnny’s inspiration: Sid Fingerman, who sold them their clothes on credit.




"Isn't he in the loony bin?" Johnny asked. "Nah," Ed said, "I heard he got out and lives with mother at Pico Gardens."




Actually communicating with Pepe proved to be more difficult than Ed had hoped, as he’d recently pleaded with his mother not to betray him to los federales.




Several trips to the housing project were required until they could catch him on the way to the butcher shop to buy a new donkey jawbone.




"Shorty Ampalayong," Ed said. "Wasn't he a houseboy once? For James Wong Howe, if I remember right."




"And if we camp at Spring Street Billiards long enough," Johnny said, "we'll find him!"