Faith - Lesley Pearse [153]
‘It’s great, far better than I expected,’ Katy chortled. ‘Eat your heart out, Robbie, we’re going to be in the money.’
Laura didn’t stay with Sid in his office at the back of his club as he watched it, she couldn’t. She went into the bar and ordered a double vodka which she gulped down quickly. She didn’t dare think what she’d do if Sid didn’t like it.
But Sid did like it. He had thousands of copies made and sold them on to various outlets in all the major cities. After taking out all the expenses, and repaying the £1,000 loan from Jackie, Laura and Katy got just over £900 each.
While they were jubilant that it had been such a success, the money had taken a long time to come in, and they’d eaten up what little savings they had. They’d both been forced to get bar work while they waited. Now they had to get stuck into making another film and turn it around more quickly.
Maybe if Barney had been a little more clingy or difficult, Laura might have stopped just long enough to consider him. But he was the easiest, most sunny-natured eight-year-old she’d ever met. He didn’t mind coming home from school and letting himself into an empty flat. He’d happily make himself a sandwich and go out to play until she turned up. During the evenings she was on the phone all the time, and sometimes when she put it down she’d find he’d not only gone to bed all by himself, but washed up their supper things and tidied the kitchen too.
She and Katy made ten films that first year and a great deal of money, but it was never as easy again as it had been with the first one. They couldn’t keep using the same people, and finding new talent was time-consuming and difficult. The girls had to be under thirty and attractive, and only someone really down on their luck would entertain the idea of starring in a blue movie. So they had to trawl through strip clubs, bingo halls, even resorting to hanging around Social Security offices to look for someone suitable to approach. But most of the girls they found chickened out the moment they saw the camera, and often they had to offer these girls money to stop them from talking.
Nor could they keep using Laura’s flat. It was expensive to rent a studio and they had to have props and backdrops to make it look professional. Occasionally they took a hotel room for a couple of days, but this was fraught with the danger the hotel manager might suspect they weren’t using it for a sales conference as they’d claimed. They made three films right out in the country in the Borders during the summer, but though isolated places seemed like a good idea while dreaming up a torrid camping story at home, in practice there were cow pats, flies, midges and the cold to contend with. Even reliable, ever-hard Pete, as they jokingly called him, sometimes couldn’t rise to the occasion in a high wind or a sudden shower.
One of the most successful films they ever made was shot at Brodie Farm. Jackie was in London, and Laura had offered to go over to Fife to check how the building work was progressing. As soon as she saw the concrete mixers, scaffolding and piles of bricks she knew it would make a great backdrop for a story-line of a builder seducing the lady of the house and her friend. Jackie had furnished two rooms for herself in the farmhouse, so Laura took everyone out there when the real builders had gone home for the weekend, and by Sunday afternoon they had the film in the can. Jackie would have had fifty fits if she’d known.
Looking back on that period right up till the spring of ’81 was like trying to remember the plots of films or television programmes she’d watched in the past. She could recall certain scenes vividly, even see the actors’ and actresses’ faces clearly, but it was just a montage of slices of action.
A blonde girl called Monica, gagged and tied to a brass bed, was one memorable one. Laura remembered so well