Page 63 of Twice
“Itwasn’ta movie.”
That silenced me. Gianna had a talent for saying one thing that dammed up a conversation faster than a cork in a bottle.
?
In hindsight, I wish I’d left it there. But I didn’t. I was intrigued by the idea of a film. I knew a literary agent from my magazine work, and I asked him to get involved. He made some calls, talking up the story. The next thing I knew, I was flying to Los Angeles to meet with multipleinterested parties, which my agent said was the best possible scenario.
“Just tell the tale as dramatically as you can,” he instructed, “and before you leave let them know you’re meeting with other people. I’ll do the rest.”
And so, to rooms full of fascinated faces, I told the story again and again during four studio meetings. The first three were largely the same. An airy office and a sizable conference table. Bottles of Perrier. Young executives cooing about the drama of the robbery while tossing around names of famous actors who could play the various parts.
Just before the last meeting, in a huge conference room on a high floor of a Hollywood talent agency, I asked if I could use the phone to call Gianna. She sounded frustrated when she answered.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“The shutter broke on my camera. I just had it fixed last year. Now I have to take it in again.”
“We should buy a new camera.”
“I don’t need a new camera. I just need a shutter that works.”
“Sorry.”
“I was hoping to go to the Bronx Zoo tomorrow.”
“Again?”
“Yes, again. Why?”
“Nothing.”
The zoo was all she had left of her photography dreams. She often went there when I was out of town.
“Well, I hope you can fix it,” I said.
“I will. Sorry. I’m just frustrated. How are your meetings going?”
“Good, I think. They seem interested.”
“When are you coming home?”
Just then the door swung open and four people entered. Three of them looked like the other executives I had met, young men in jeans, baseball caps, shirts untucked, but the fourth was a woman you would have noticed from another zip code. I knew her face from the movies, but when you see such a familiar face in the flesh, you blink, as if something about it can’t be real. Her hair was blond as wheat, her eyes shielded by amber sunglasses, her skin perfectly tanned, her teeth almost impossibly white. But it was the command with which she moved that captivated me. I wondered: Do stars become stars because of a quality the rest of us don’t have, or is it learned? Either way, she took my breath.
“Alfie...?” I heard Gianna say again. “When are you coming home?”
“Let me call you back. We’re gonna start.”
I hung up before she finished her “OK” as the woman approached and extended her hand.
“Hi, I’m Nicolette Pink,” she said.
“I know,” I mumbled back.
?
Now, I’ll spare you all the business details that followed, Boss. Suffice it to say a bidding war ensued, as my agenthad predicted, and we had multiple offers to make the movie for a crazy price, but ultimately chose the studio that had Nicolette Pink as its partner, because she wanted to direct the film and star in it as Marisol. She was, at the time, maybe the biggest actress in the country, the winner of several major awards, although her most popular film was a raunchy comedy in which she played an oversexed high school teacher.
We signed the papers and they sent me a sizable check—and another to Jaimie and Marisol in Mexico. They hired a big-name screenwriter who wrote a script that only loosely followed the real story. He took numerous liberties, including this one: instead of me being married, in the movie I was single and ended up falling in love with Marisol (played by Nicolette, with her blond hair colored a sable shade). The explanation was that the film “needed a love story.” I had no say in this—you give away such rights when you take the money—and was completely surprised when I read it.
