He got right to the point. “Charlie Frye doesn’t always show up when he’s wanted on-set, and when we have to send someone after him, they find him in his office, sharpening pencils and throwing darts. If he is there at all. He doesn’t make the changes when they’re wanted, which, as you know, is instantly. He’s costing us time.”

“But he does make them.”

“He’s costing us time,” Leon repeated, “and time is crucial. He wrote a brilliant comedic script. Why can’t he make some brilliant comedic changes? He’s your writer, isn’t he?”

The question hung there between us. “Sure, Leon. I’ll talk to him.”

“He’s already been talked to, Roxanne. You set this in motion. You need to see he acts responsibly. This would never have been tolerated in the old days.”

A chill pierced my very bones. “I will take care of this,” I promised, not knowing if I could deliver. Or if Charlie could deliver. Max, of course, could deliver, but he was in Riverside, sixty miles away. I hung up and said to Thelma, “There’s no choice. We need to have Max do the rewrites, and somehow we’ll have to get them to Charlie.”

“That means Charlie will know that Max is in Riverside.”

“He’ll only know for sure Max isn’t in Mexico. We couldn’t do it at all if Max was in Mexico. You see what’s at stake, don’t you?”

“I do,” Thelma conceded, “but I feel like we’re turning on the fan and waiting for the shit to hit it.”

We set up a relay system that stayed in place for the rest of the filming. Charlie telephoned me with the changes Leon wanted, right down to the page numbers. I went to a pay phone, armed with about ten thousand dimes, and telephoned Max, who did the writing. When he was done, Marian phoned the office from a pay phone, asking for a different name every time. Thelma said, “Wrong number.” Marian drove from Riverside. Thelma or I drove from LA. We met halfway and passed the envelope in that cosmopolitan hub, Covina. We met at a different gas station each time. I checked out the Negro Motorist Green Book and refused to meet at any gas station not listed there. Marian thought I was nuts, but since I’d first seen that book the day I met Terrence, I never pass a Shell station without thinking about squatting in a field to pee.