Ordinary Joe
A brilliant, fast-paced comedy about life behind the scenes in the film business, and how to survive when your greatest fantasy comes true and threatens to wreck your perfectly ordinary life.After the movie, when the credits roll up you might see his name flash past: ‘Joseph West’ and think nothing of it. Not an actor, not a director, Joe is just one of the money men, kept at arms distance from the talent. Until one night in New York the talent comes calling.Olivia Finch is lit from within, an actress who was born to it but can’t stand the superficiality anymore. Now all she wants is a real conversation with an ordinary guy – and Olivia Finch always gets what she wants. Cue Joe, married, ordinary accountant, Joe.And then cue a snowball of deception, acting and confusion that puts Joe in the limelight, his marriage in trouble and a dead body on the ground in this hilarious caper.
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Ordinary Joe
JON TECKMAN
The Borough Press,
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Copyright © Jon Teckman 2015
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Cover photographs © Henry Steadman
Jon Teckman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780008118785
Source ISBN: 9780008118778
Version 2015-05-18
‘[you are both] so much in my thoughts at all times especially when I am successful and have greatly prospered in anything, that the recollection of [you] is an essential part of my being’
after Charles Dickens
Table of Contents
The first thing I noticed about Olivia Finch – that very first time I saw her in the flesh – wasn’t her breasts bouncing like pale pink pomegranates as she worked herself into a frenzy on her lover’s lap, nor even her ‘billion-dollar backside’ – an epithet conferred upon her in a recent article in Variety,which reported that ‘Olivia Finch’s rear end is now a bigger box office draw than the faces of most of her Hollywood rivals.’ No – God’s truth – the first thing I noticed was the small, amateurish tattoo scratched into her left bicep in blue ink. ‘John 3:16’ it read. I looked it up in the Gideon when I got back to my room that evening: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. I asked her about it later – when all the madness was at its maddest – and she told me it was just a stupid thing she’d had done when she was a kid and off her face on cheap booze. But, she said, she still liked the message: the idea that one person could love another so much that they would give up everything for them.
That first time, all I could think about was how come I’d never noticed the tattoo before. It certainly hadn’t been apparent in her Oscar-nominated role as Cleopatra in the recent remake of Antony and Cleopatra. They must have CGI-ed it out in the edit. It’s impossible to know what’s real and what’s faked in the movies these days. Olivia’s breasts looked real enough, but who knows what work she’d had done to them. And what she was doing to her co-star Jack Reynolds – while a small group of us stood watching in spellbound silence, occasionally nodding our appreciation as the couple pulled off a particularly complex manoeuvre – looked real too, but, of course, was only acting.
I was standing in a makeshift studio in Queens, dressed in a set of ill-fitting blue overalls, watching top director Arch Wingate re-shoot scenes for his latest movie, Nothing Happened. Standing next to me, his huge frame squeezed uncomfortably into a similar outfit, stood the film’s producer, Buddy Guttenberg, beaming like a spoiled child on Christmas morning. The overalls had been his idea. ‘I’ve been in this business twenty-five years, Joey,’ he’d told me as we put on our costumes in an empty trailer in the studio car park, ‘and I still haven’t been allowed on a closed set unless I’ve been togged up as a gaffer or fucking electrician.’
Wingate had a justified reputation for being a perfectionist. The joke in Hollywood was that he would still be re-editing the film while the posters were going up outside the cinema. His passion and attention to detail made him one of the best film-makers in the business but also one of the most expensive. As one of the people responsible for raising the money for this film and ensuring a return on our investment, I should have been concerned about how much he was spending on almost imperceptible improvements to his creation. As a film buff, though, I was delighted by the chance to watch the great man in action.
