The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [189]
He smiled as he drove away. He had been willing to go as high as five hundred if necessary, but it had cost Schroeder that extra two fifty for calling him a kike. And now he, Zev Abramski, was the owner of a studio.
He had done his homework and knew how the movie business worked. He knew about the importance of distributors and how a few companies had already formed their own chains and cut out the independents, and he saw that was the future. There were just two major problems: He didn’t know a single person in the business, not even an extra, and his ten thousand dollars, his savings and the money from the sale of his business, was not enough to achieve what he wanted.
The Hotel Hollywood was filled with movie folk, and there was a constant flow of gossip and rumors and inside information. Zev hung about in the dining room or on the veranda, sipping a glass of orange juice and keeping his ears open, hearing things he wished he hadn’t, like which director was bedding which star and which star was bedding the waitress, as well as the price of a Sennett two-reeler and what Griffith’s Broken Blossoms had cost. He knew the amount of Pickford’s latest contract—more than a million—and that a day’s pay for an extra was five bucks. He scanned the trade papers and hung around the studios, waiting in casting offices and listening to their talk. He became a professional eavesdropper, he saw every movie in town, and he heard on the grapevine that there were two bankers sympathetic to moviemakers: a young Californian by the name of Motley Flint, head of First National Security, and Amadeo Giannini, head of the Bank of Italy.
Zev chose Giannini because he was used to dealing with Italians on the Lower East Side and he liked them. And also because he had heard that Giannini’s childhood had been as tragic as his own—an immigrant’s son, he had seen his own father murdered by a neighbor. A successful produce broker, Giannini had retired at the age of thirty-one. He had become a banker and in 1901 he opened the Bank of Italy. Zev heard it said admiringly that Giannini always played his hunches, betting on the individual when he gave out his loans, and that “character” was his collateral.
They assessed each other silently in Giannini’s office. Zev saw a shrewd, middle-aged Italian; he had known dozens like him in New York. The only difference was this Italian was a very successful man and now he held power over his life. The banker saw a slight, pale intelligent young Jew, still looking like a landsman in his black funeral suit.
Zev quickly explained his position and that he wanted his studios to turn out product eighteen hours a day with the actors, directors, and cameramen working on a rota basis. Cheap and cheerful, he said earnestly, the stuff to take people out of their own drab and miserable lives for five or ten minutes at a time. A volume business to finance the real core of his plan, his own distribution system and his own chain of picture palaces. And then he would make real movies.
“Tell me, what do you call real movies, Mr. Abramski?” the banker asked, smiling.
“Spectacle, glamour, history. Showing ordinary people things they could never dream of seeing in their whole lives….” He looked at Giannini and said simply, “Magic.”
The banker laughed. “And how much is it going to cost me to finance ‘Magic’?”
Zev gulped and then said boldly, “I have ten thousand dollars of my own and I am asking you for fifty.”
Giannini