Jennifer hit her pause button. "What?"
"Al Pacino just dumped."
"When?"
'Ten minutes ago. Blew Marty off, and walked."
"What? We shot four days of B-roll on the set in Tangier. His picture opens this weekend - and he's slated for the full twelve." A twelve minute segment on Newsline, the most-watched news show on television, was the kind of publicity that money couldn't buy. Every star in Hollywood wanted on the show. "What happened?"
"Marty was chatting with him during makeup, and mentioned that Pacino hadn't had a hit in four years. And I guess he got offended, and walked."
"On camera?"
"No. Before."
"Jesus," Jennifer said. "Pacino can't do that. His contract calls for him to do publicity. This was set up months ago."
"Yeah, well. He did."
"What's Marty say?"
"Marty is pissed. Marty is saying, What did he expect, this is a news show, we ask hard-hitting questions. You know, typical Marty."
Jennifer swore. "This was just what everyone was worried about."
Marty Reardon was a notoriously abrasive interviewer. Although he had left the news division to work on Newsline - at a much higher salary - two years before, he still viewed himself as a hard-hitting newsman, tough but fair, no-holds-barred - though in practice he liked to embarrass interviewees, putting them on the spot with intensely personal questions, even if the questions weren't relevant to the story. Nobody wanted to use Marty on the Pacino shoot, because he didn't like celebrities, and didn't like doing "puff pieces." But Frances, who usually did the celeb pieces, was in Tokyo interviewing the princess.
"Has Dick talked to Marty? Can we salvage this?" Dick Shenk was the executive producer of Newsline. In just three years, he had skillfully built the show from a throwaway summer replacement, into a solid prime-time success. Shenk made all the important decisions, and he was the only person with enough clout to handle a prima donna like Marty.
"Dick is still at lunch with Mr. Early." Shenk's lunches with Early, the president of the network, always lasted late into the afternoon.
"So Dick doesn't know?"
"Not yet."
"Great," Jennifer said. She glanced at her watch: it was 2 P.M. If Pacino had dumped, they had a twelve-minute hole to fill, and less than seventy-two hours to do it. "What've we got in the can?"
"Nothing. Mother Teresa's being recut. Mickey Mantle isn't in yet. All we have is that wheelchair Little League segment."
Jennifer groaned. "Dick will never go with that."
"I know," Deborah said. "It sucks."
Jennifer picked up the fax her assistant had dropped on the console. It was a press release from some PR group, one of hundreds that every news show received each day. Like all such faxes, this one was formatted to look like a breaking news story, complete with a headline at the top. It said:
JAA DELAYS CERTIFICATION OF N-22
WIDEBODY JET CITING CONTINUED
AIRWORTHINESS CONCERNS
"What's this?" she said, frowning.
"Hector said give it to you."
"Why?"
"He thought there might be something in it."
"Why? What the fuck's the JAA?" Jennifer scanned the text; it was a lot of aerospace babble, dense and impenetrable. She thought: No visuals.
"Apparently," Deborah said, "it's the same plane that caught fire in Miami."
"Oh. Hector wants to do a safety segment? Good luck. Everybody's seen the tape of the burning plane already. And it wasn't that good to begin with." Jennifer tossed the fax aside. "Ask him if he has anything else."
Deborah went away. Alone, Jennifer stared at the frozen image of Charles Manson on the screen in front of her. Then she clicked the image off, and decided to take a moment to think.
Jennifer Malone was twenty-nine years old, the youngest segment producer in the history of Newsline. She had advanced quickly because she was good at her job. She had shown talent early; while still an undergraduate at Brown, working as a summer intern like Deborah, she had done research late into the night, hammering away at the Nexis terminals, combing the wire services. Then, with her heart in her mouth, she had gone in to see Dick Shenk, to propose a story about this strange new virus in Africa, and the brave CDC doctor on the scene. That led to the famous Ebola segment, the biggest Newsline break of the year, and another Peabody Award for Dick Shenk's Wall of Fame.
In short order, she had followed with the Darryl Strawberry segment, the Montana strip-mining segment, and the Iroquois gambling segment. No college intern in memory had ever gotten a segment on air before; Jennifer had four. Shenk announced he liked her spunk, and offered her a job. The fact that she was bright, beautiful, and an Ivy Leaguer did not hurt, either. The following June, when she graduated, she went to work for Newsline.
The show had fifteen producers doing segments. Each was assigned to one of the on-camera talent; each was expected to deliver a story every two weeks. The average story took four weeks to build. After two weeks of research, producers met with Dick, to get the go-ahead. Then they visited the locations, shot B-roll for background, and did the secondary interviews. The story was shaped by the producer, and narrated by the on-air star, who flew in for a single day, did the stand-ups and the major interviews, and then flew on to the next shoot, leaving the producer to cut the tape. Sometime before air, the star would come into the studio, read the script the producer had prepared, and do the voice-overs for visuals.
When the segment finally aired, the on-camera star would come off as a real reporter: Newsline jealously protected the reputations of its stars. But in fact the producers were the real reporters. The producers picked the stories, researched and shaped them, wrote the scripts and cut the tape. The on-camera talent just did as they were told.