The Last Don - Mario Puzo [12]
She bought him off for the next three years, but she wasn’t surprised by what he did at the Academy. An old trick. This time just a little joke . . . but the next time, that bottle would be full of acid.
“There’s a big flap at the Studio,” Molly Flanders told Claudia De Lena that morning. “A problem with Athena Aquitane. Because of the attack at the Academy Awards, they’re worried she won’t go back to work on her picture. And Bantz wants you at the Studio. They want you to talk to Athena.”
Claudia had come to Molly’s office with Ernest Vail. “I’ll call her as soon as we finish here,” Claudia said. “She can’t be serious.”
Molly Flanders was an entertainment lawyer, and in a town of fearsome people she was the most feared litigator in the motion picture business. She absolutely loved fighting in the courtroom, and she nearly always won because she was a great actress and had a superb grasp of the law.
Before getting into entertainment law, she had been the premier defense attorney in the state of California. She had saved twenty murderers from the gas chamber. The worst any of these clients had to suffer was a few years for different degrees of manslaughter. But then her nerves had given way and she had switched to entertainment law. She often said it was less bloody and it had greater and more witty villains.
Now she represented A-picture directors, Bankable Stars, top-notch screenwriters. And on the morning after the Aca-demy Awards, one of her favorite clients, Claudia De Lena, was in her office. With her was her screenwriting partner of the moment, a once famous novelist, Ernest Vail.
Claudia De Lena was an old friend, and though one of the least important of Flanders’s clients, the most intimate. So when Claudia asked her to take on Vail, she agreed. Now she regretted it. Vail had come with a problem that even she couldn’t solve. Also, he was a man she could feel no affection for, though she usually learned to like even her murder clients. Which made her feel a little guilty about giving him bad news.
“Ernest,” she said, “I went over all the contracts, all the legal papers. And there is no point in your continuing to sue LoddStone Studios. The only way you can get the rights back is to croak before your copyright expires. Which means sometime in the next five years.”
A decade before, Ernest Vail had been the most famous novelist in America, praised by critics, read by a vast public. One novel had a franchise character LoddStone had exploited. They bought the rights, made the picture, and achieved an enormous success. Two sequels also made a fortune in profit. The Studio had on its drawing board four more sequels. Unfortunately for Vail his first contract had given all the rights to the characters and title to the Studio, on all planets in the universe, in all forms of entertainment, discovered and undiscovered. The standard contract for novelists who had not yet amassed clout in movies.
Ernest Vail was a man who always had a grim, sour expression on his face. For which he had good reason. The critics still acclaimed his books, but the public no longer read them. Also, despite his talent, he had made a mess of his life. During the last twenty years his wife had left, taking their three children with her. On the one book that had become a successful movie, he had made a one-time score, but the Studio would make hundreds of millions over the years.
“Explain that to me,” Vail said.
“The contracts are foolproof,” Molly said. “The Studio owns your characters. There’s only one loophole. Copyright law states that when you die all rights to your works revert to your heirs.”
For the first time Vail smiled. “Redemption,” he said.
Claudia asked, “What kind of money