On a booth at Chasen, Duke had Barbara Bouchet sat beside him, radiant as always. She was laughing at something Clint had just said.
Across the table, Clint Eastwood sat with his long legs stretched out under the booth, one arm draped across the back of the seat, beside him was Roxanne Tunis, Eastwood's companion, not his wife but Duke didn't want to ask.
"Fascist of the year," Duke said, raising his glass of bourbon. "That's what they're calling you. Congrats."
Eastwood's mouth twitched into a half-smile. He picked up his own glass of scotch and clinked it against Duke's.
"I'll put it on the wall," Eastwood said. "Right next to the box office numbers."
Dirty Harry had opened in early December, and the studio phones hadn't stopped ringing since.
An R-rated picture, hard, violent, morally uncompromising and the returns were astonishing. Not just good. Record-setting.
"You read the Kael piece?" Barbara asked, her Italian accent wrapping around Pauline Kael's name, butchering it a little.
"Read it?" Eastwood leaned back. "Someone cut it and mailed it to my house. I though it was Duke."
"'Fascist medievalism,'" Duke quoted from memory, because he made it a point to memorize the attacks of these critics. "'An immoral picture that panders to the vigilante fantasies of a frightened populace.' She really went for it."
"She let America have it," Eastwood corrected. "I'm just a guy holding the gun. She's mad at the audience for cheering."
Duke swirled his bourbon.
He'd been thinking about this exact dynamic for the past two weeks, ever since the early screening numbers had started coming in.
The critical establishment, Kaels, Sarrisites, the New York intellectual class that believed cinema was a branch of moral philosophy had drawn a line in the sand.
On one side stood the "responsible" filmmakers, the ones who made pictures about the complexity of the human condition and the ambiguity of justice.
On the other side stood Dirty Harry Callahan, who asked a man on the wrong end of a .44 Magnum whether he felt lucky.
But the audience had chosen sides. And they hadn't chosen Pauline Kael.
"Here's what she doesn't understand," Duke said, setting his glass down with a decisive thud.
"And what most of these critics will never understand, because understanding it would require them to spend ten minutes outside of Manhattan."
"The American public isn't watching your picture and thinking about fascism. They're not thinking about political theory. They're thinking about the fact that their car got broken into last week and the cops shrugged."
Eastwood nodded slowly. "That's exactly it."
"It's narrative efficiency," Duke continued. "That's all it is. People are exhausted by bureaucracy. They go to work and deal with bureaucracy. They come home and watch the news and see bureaucracy failing. They go to the movies and they want to see a man who skips the paperwork and solves the problem. It's just entertaintment."
"Try telling that to the New Yorker," Roxanne said quietly, with a small smile.
"I wouldn't waste the postage," Duke replied.
The waiter appeared, and refilled water glasses that didn't need refilling.
Duke ordered another round for the table without asking if anyone wanted one. Nobody objected. They were here to celebrate.
"The beautiful thing," Duke said, "is that they've done marketing for us. Every time Kael writes another thousand words about how dangerous your film is, another hundred thousand people buy tickets to see what all the fuss is about. She's the best publicist we have, and she's working for free."
Eastwood laughed at that. "I should send her flowers."
"Send her a residuals check," Barbara suggested. "She's earned it."
---
Two days later, the Paramount lot, Duke's office, on the second floor of the administration building, scripts were stacked on every horizontal surface.
Empty coffee cups, seven of them, by Duke's count, though he'd stopped counting after the fourth, stood among the wreckage.
And in the middle of this chaos, perched on the edge of a leather chair with his legs crossed and his eyebrows raised, sat Mel Brooks.
"You want to shoot it in a month," Brooks said.
"One month," Duke confirmed, not looking up from the script pages he was marking with a red pen. "Four weeks. Thirty days. However you want to count it."
Brooks uncrossed his legs, crossed them the other way, and leaned forward. "Duke. Sweetheart. My friend. Light of my professional life. You cannot shoot a feature film in one month."
"I can if the script is right and I already did with Love Story."
"The script," Brooks said, picking up the most recent draft from the desk and holding it at arm's length, "is about a relationship falling apart. That's it. That's the whole picture. A man and a woman meet, fall in love, and then-"
He made an exploding gesture with his hands. "Kaput. Where's the movie in that?"
"The movie is in the dialogue, in the performances and that every single person who buys a ticket has either been through this exact experience or is currently going through it and doesn't know it yet."
"Mel, I brought you in because you're the best comedy guy in town. Don't make me regret that by telling me what I already know. I know it's thin on plot. That's the point. I stripped the plot out on purpose."
In his past life, the production had been a ten-month problem, with a director who shot miles of unusable footage, an editor who had to essentially rebuild the film from scratch in post-production, and a final product that succeeded almost in spite of itself.
Duke didn't have ten months. He didn't want ten months.
Ten months was an artist who didn't know what his own movie was about until someone else told him.
Duke knew what this movie was about. He'd known since the moment he wrote the first draft.
"I cut the murder subplot," Duke said flatly.
"I noticed," Brooks replied. "I also noticed you cut about forty pages of material that was, frankly, some of the funniest stuff in the script."
"Funny isn't enough. Every scene in this draft either advances the relationship or reveals character. If it does neither, it's gone. Oh and no lobster scene."
"You cut the lobster scene?" Brooks looked genuinely worried. "Duke, the lobster scene is gold."
Duke paused. He picked up his coffee, found it empty, set it back down with mild disappointment. "The lobster scene stays," he conceded, since he also had doubts.
Brooks settled back in his chair and flipped through the script again. The story moved in a straight line from meeting to breakup, with the humor and the heartbreak woven so tightly together that you couldn't pull one thread without unraveling the other.
"So," Brooks said, looking up with the glint in his eye that meant he was about to say something he thought was clever, "who's playing the neurotic?"
"Hoffman."
The glint died. Brooks blinked. "Dustin Hoffman."
"Dustin Hoffman."
A silence fell over the office, and Brooks set the script down carefully.
"Duke," he said, with a patient tone, "Dustin Hoffman is a genius. I would be the last person to deny that. The man can act rings around anyone in this town. But he's not a romantic lead."
"Why not?"
"Because he's-" Brooks gestured vaguely at the air, as if trying to sculpt the problem with his hands. "He's too intense, too neurotic. A little bit too Jewish."
"The character is Jewish."
"The character is New York Jewish. That's a specific thing. And Dustin is... a californian Jew, he's brilliant, Duke, but he's no charmer."
Duke shook his head, wondering in the back of his mind if Dustin Hoffman was actually not from New York. "That's exactly why I want him. The whole point of this picture is he's too smart for his own happiness."
Brooks opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. "You're not wrong," he admitted. "But you're also describing a character that Middle America is going to find exhausting."
"Middle America found The Graduate plenty watchable."
"The Graduate had Mrs. Robinson. Women like that help."
Duke allowed himself a small smile, he had forgotten Mel's wife was Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, he had once joked about finding her atractive in The Graduate, and Mel would tease him about it every once in a while.
"The female lead has to be the opposite of Hoffman, light, effortless, the kind of woman who makes you believe the whole world is simpler than it actually is. The clash between someone who overthinks everything and someone who doesn't think enough."
"And you think you can get all of that in the can in thirty days."
"I know I can. Because I've cut everything that doesn't serve the film. It's enough. Trust me."
Brooks studied him for a long moment. Then he smiled. "Wait, I know the perfect actor for your little movie."
---
The Paramount executive dining room was emptying out by four in the afternoon. Duke sat at a corner table with a plate of food he'd barely touched, watching Jeffrey Katzenberg approach.
Katzenberg sat down across from Duke without waiting to be invited.
"Tokyo," Katzenberg said, as if the single word explained everything.
"Tokyo," Duke repeated, waiting.
"It's-" Katzenberg paused, "Duke, I've seen things in that studio that I didn't think were possible. The MadHouse team, the way they work, the way they think about visual storytelling, it's not like anything we do here. The Blue Beetle designs. The color work. The way they handle movement. It's jus-"
"Amazing?" Duke offered.
Katzenberg pointed at him. "Yeah, every frame is alive. They're drawing things that our animation department wouldn't attempt in their wildest dreams, and they're doing it on half the budget. The Japanese work ethic is, I mean, these guys are sleeping in the studio and there's no complains."
Duke nodded. This confirmed what he'd suspected, what he'd been banking on when he'd first reached out to MadHouse months ago.
The Japanese animation industry was operating on a different level than anything in the West.
The ambition, the craftsmanship, the obsessive dedication to the art, it was a resource that no American studio had properly tapped.
Cheap labor was also an important factor.
"Good," Duke said. "Now tell me about the problem."
Katzenberg's excitement dimmed and shifted in his seat. "Roddenberry."
"What about him?"
"He wants more money. Per episode. He says the current budget for the animated series isn't sufficient to maintain, and I'm quoting here 'the scientific and philosophical integrity that Star Trek demands.'"
Duke set down his fork. He didn't sigh. He didn't roll his eyes. He simply looked at Katzenberg with an expression that was neutral.
"How much more?"
Katzenberg named a figure, $100,000 per episode.
It was not an astronomical sum, Gene Roddenberry was many things, but he wasn't financially delusional, but it represented a meaningful percentage increase that, multiplied across a full season of episodes, added up.
"No," Duke said.
"I told him you'd say that."
"Then why are you telling me?"
"Because he's not going to take no quietly. He's already talking to the writers about it. He's framing it as a quality issue. He's saying that if we cut corners on the science, the fans will know, and the brand will suffer."
Duke picked up his water glass, took a slow drink, and set it back down. "Television is a volume business, Jeffrey. We're making a weekly animated series for Saturday morning syndication. The audience is twelve-year-olds eating cereal. They're not cross-referencing the warp drive specifications with MIT physics papers."
"Gene would disagree."
"Gene can disagree all he wants. Tell him he can keep his Socialist philosophy, but he has to fit it into our margins. If he can't make a compelling episode of television for the budget we've allocated, that's a creativity problem, not a funding problem."
Katzenberg nodded.
"There's something else," Katzenberg said, and his voice dropped slightly, taking on a cautious tone. "I think some of Gene's... resistance... isn't entirely about the budget."
"Explain."
"He's difficult, Duke. And I think some of it has to do with you personally."
Duke's expression didn't change. "Go on."
"He's a pacifist. You know that. The whole Star Trek ethos, it's built on this idea that humanity evolves past violence, past war, past all of it. And you're-"
Katzenberg paused, choosing his words with unusual care. "You're a Vietnam veteran. And you haven't... you haven't used any of your public visibility to speak against the war. Gene apparently sees that as... I don't know. A philosophical incompatibility."
"I didn't buy this studio to win Gene Roddenberry's approval of my service record," Duke said. "He provides the scripts. I provide the checks. That is the totality of our professional relationship."
"If he wants a podium, he can go to a church. If he wants to produce a television show, he stays on budget and he stays on schedule. His feelings about me are his business. They are not mine, and they are certainly not Paramount's."
Katzenberg nodded quickly. "Understood."
"Is there anything else about Gene?"
"No. That's everything."
"Then let's talk about something that matters."
They stood up from the table and walked out of the dining room together, crossing the lot toward the administrative building.
"I'm creating DC Studios," Duke said, as casually as if he were announcing that he'd ordered new curtains for his office.
Katzenberg stopped walking. Duke kept going for three more steps before turning back to find the young executive frozen on the pathway, staring at him.
"You're what?"
"DC Studios. A dedicated division. A full production entity that arranges both animated and live-action in an integrated way., but it probably be in two years still"
Katzenberg caught up to him in two quick strides, his mind visibly racing behind his eyes. "What's the slate?"
"Archie and me have decided on three projects to start. A Wonder Woman television series, live-action, one-hour format. A Superman feature film, with a big budget, and theatrical release. And the Blue Beetle animated series, which you've already seen the pre-production of in Tokyo."
"That's-" Katzenberg ran a hand through his hair. "Duke, that's a massive undertaking-"
"Is why I'm telling you about it now. I need someone who can manage the workflow. Someone who can keep the Tokyo team on schedule while simultaneously overseeing domestic production."
They had reached the administrative building. Duke held the door open.
"There's going to be a title attached to this," Duke said, following him inside. "President of DC Studios. Total creative oversight. The person in charge of development, production, and distribution for every project that carries the DC brand."
Katzenberg turned to look at him.
"That title," Duke continued, "is going to go to whoever proves they can handle what I've just described. It's a company wide competition, but personally it's probably either you or Eisner,."
He let that hang in the air for a moment.
"I'm not offering you the job, Jeffrey. I'm offering you the audition. What you do with it is up to you."
Katzenberg straightened. He looked, in that moment, like exactly what Duke needed him to be, hungry, capable, and ambitious.
"I won't let you down," Katzenberg said.
"I know you won't," Duke replied.
___
Hey, im trying to explore the character more in depth in terms of personality