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following scene"- he giggled- "begins with Jed coming at us through a door, the cutter feels certain of a nomination if the scene preceding ends with you moving off through a door."
"That's dumb."
"Well, of course it is! It's vomit! It's simply cunting puking mad! Now then, why don't we shoot it and trust me to snip it from the final cut. It should make a rather tasty munch."
Shirley laughed and agreed. John glanced toward the cutter, who was known to be a temperamental egotist given to time-wasting argumentation. He was busy with the cameraman. The director breathed a sigh of relief.
Waiting on the lawn at the base of the steps while the lights were warming, Shirley looked toward Thompson as he flung an obscenity at a hapless grip and then visibly glowed. He seemed to revel in his eccentricity. Yet at a certain point in his drinking, Shirley knew, he would suddenly explode into temper, and if it happened at three or four in the morning, he was likely to telephone people in power, and viciously abuse them over trifling provocations. Shirley remembered a studio chief whose offence had consisted in remarking mildly at a screening that the cuffs of Thompson' shirt looked slightly frayed, prompting Thompson to awaken him at approximately 3 a.m. to describe him as a "cunting boor" whose father was "more that likely mad!" And on the following day, he would pretend to amnesia and subtly radiate with pleasure when those he'd offended described in detail what he had done. Although, if it suited him, he would remember. Shirley thought with a smile of the night he'd destroyed his studio suite of offices in a gin-stoked, mindless rage, and how later, when confronted