I had to hand it to him. He'd not only apologized. He'd used the right excuse.

"Mort?"

At first I didn't want to be bothered. I had my own work to think about, and The Warlords would probably be so bad that it would contaminate my mind.

But then my curiosity got the better of me. I couldn't help wondering what Ric would do to improve junk.

"Mort?"

"When do you want me to look at what you've done?"

"How about right now?"

"Now? It's after nine. It'll take you an hour to get here and – "

"I'm already here."

"What?"

"I'm on my car phone. Outside your gate again."

Ric sat across from me in my living room. I couldn't help noticing that his tan was darker, that he was wearing a different designer jacket, a more expensive one. Then I glanced at the title page on the script he'd handed me.

THE WARLORDS revisions by Eric Potter I flipped through the pages. All of them were typed on white paper. That bothered me. Ric's inexperience was showing again. On last-minute rewrites, it's always helpful to submit changed pages on different-colored paper. That way, the producer and director can save time and not have to read the entire script to find the changes.

"These are the notes the director gave me," Ric said. He handed me some crudely typed pages. "And these" – Ric handed me pages with scribbling on them -"are what the star gave me. It's a little hard to decipher them."

"More than a little. Jesus." I squinted at the scribbling and got a headache. "I'd better put on my glasses." They helped a little. I read what the director wanted. I switched to what the star wanted.

"These are the notes the producer gave me," Ric said.

I thanked God that they were neatly typed and studied them as well. Finally I leaned back and took off my glasses.

"Well?"

I sighed. "Typical. As near as I can tell, these three people are each talking about a different movie. The director wants more action and less characterization. The star has decided to be serious -he wants more characterization and less action. The producer wants it funny and less expensive. If they're not careful, this movie will have multiple personalities."

Ric looked at me anxiously.

"Okay," I said, feeling tired. "Get a beer from the refrigerator and watch television or something while I go through this. It would help if I knew where you'd made changes. Next time you're in a situation like this, identify your work with colored paper."

Ric frowned.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"The changes."

"So? What about them?"

"Well, I haven't started to make them."

"You haven't? But on this title page, it says 'revisions by Eric Potter.'"

Ric looked sheepish. "The title page is as far as I got."

"Sweet Jesus. When are these revisions due?"

"Ballard gave me a week."

"And for the first three days of that week, you didn't work on the changes? What have you been doing?"

Ric glanced away.

Again I noticed that his tan was darker. "Don't tell me you've just been sitting in the sun?"

"Not exactly."

"Then what exactly?"

"I've been thinking about how to improve the script."

I was so agitated I had to stand. "You don't think about changes. You make changes. How much did you say you were being paid? A hundred thousand dollars?"

Ric nodded, uncomfortable.

"And the Writers Guild insists that on work for hire you get a portion of the money as soon as you start."

"Fifty thousand." Ric squirmed. "Linda got the check by messenger the day after I made the deal with Ballard."

"What a mess."

Ric lowered his head, more uncomfortable.

"If you don't hand in new pages four days from now, Ballard will want his money back."

"I know," Ric said, then added, "But I can't."

"What?"

"I already spent the money. A deposit on a condo in Malibu."

I was stunned.

"And the money isn't the worst of it," I said. "Your reputation. That's worse. Ballard gave you an incredible break. He decided to take a chance on the bright new kid in town. He allowed you to jump over all the shit. But if you don't deliver, he'll be furious. He'll spread the word all over town that you're not dependable. You won't be hot anymore. We won't be able to sell another script as easily as we did this one."

"Look, I'm sorry, Mort. I know I bragged to you that I could do the job on my own. I was wrong. I don't have the experience. I admit it. I'm out of my depth."

"Even on a piece of shit like this."

Ric glanced down, then up. "I was wondering… Could you give me a hand?"

My mouth hung open in astonishment.

Before I could tell him no damned way, Ric quickly added, "It would really help both of us."

"How do you figure that?"

"You just said it yourself. If I don't deliver, Ballard will spread the word. No producer will trust me. You won't be able to sell another script through me."

My head began to throb. He was right, of course. If I wanted to keep selling my scripts, if I wanted to see them produced, I needed him. There was no doubt in my mind that as old as I was, I would never be able to sell another script with my name on it. I finally had to admit that all along, secretly, I had never intended the deception with Ric to be a one-time-only arrangement.

I swallowed and finally said, "All right."

"Thank you."

"But I won't clean up your messes for nothing."

"Of course not. The same arrangement as before. All I get out of this is fifteen percent."

"By rights, you shouldn't get anything."

"Hey, without me, Ballard wouldn't have offered the job."

"Since you already spent the first half of the payment, how do I get that money?"

Ric made an effort to think of a solution. "We'll have to wait until the money comes through on the spec script we sold. I'll give you the money out of the two hundred thousand that's owed to me."

"But you owe the Ferrari dealer a bundle. Otherwise Linda's responsible for your debt."

"I'll take care of it." Ric gestured impatiently. "I'll take care of all of it. What's important now is that you make the changes on The Warlords. Ballard has to pay the remaining fifty thousand dollars when I hand in the pages. That money's yours."

"Fine."

It wasn't until later that I realized how Ric had set a precedent for restructuring our deal. Regardless of his promise to pay me what I was owed, the reality was that he had pocketed half the fee. Instead of getting fifteen percent, he was now getting fifty percent.

The script for The Warlords was even worse than I'd feared. How do you change bad junk into good junk? In the process, how do you please a director, a star, and a producer who ask for widely different things? One of the rules I've learned over the years is that what people say they want isn't always what they mean. Sometimes it's a matter of interpretation. And after I endured reading the script for The Warlords, I thought I had that interpretation.

The director said he wanted more action and less characterization. In my opinion, the script already had more than enough action. The trouble was that some of the action sequences were redundant, and others weren't paced effectively. The biggest stunts occurred two-thirds of the way into the story. The last third had stunts that suffered by comparison. So the trick here was to do some pruning and restructuring – to take the good stunts from the end and put them in the middle, to build on them and put the great stunts at the end, all the while struggling to retain the already feeble logic of the story.

The star said he wanted less action and more characterization. As far as I could tell, what he really wanted was to be sympathetic, to make the audience like the character he was playing. So I softened him a little, threw in some jokes, had him wait for an old lady to cross a street before he blew away the bad guys, basic things like that. Since his character was more like a robot than a human being, any vaguely human thing he did would make him sympathetic.