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and Pellam were resuming a conversation cut short minutes before by an ornery mobile phone. Pellam believed the name of the man with whom he was having this animated talk had passed his way a moment before, but he’d missed it in the onslaught of words.
    “Uh, who’s this again?”
    “Tony Sloan,” the surprised, staccato voice fired back.
    “Okay.” They had never met. Pellam knew Sloan, of course. But then, so did everyone who read Premiere or People or Newsweek . A former producer of TV commercials, he had directed last year’s Circuit Man, a computer sci-fi political thriller, a megahit that had snagged Oscars for best special effects and best sound and had grossed thirty-six million dollars its first weekend against a total budget of seventy-eight million.
    Pellam had seen the first two of Sloan’s films and none of the rest. He preferred not to work for directors like Tony Sloan—special-effects directors, he considered them, not people directors—but that day in Montana he had listened to the man with some interest, for two reasons. First: After his recent hit Sloan could write very large checks to those he hired and never be questioned by his studio. Second: Sloanwas explaining with a gravity surprising for a child of television that he wanted to make a movie with some meat on it. “Artistically, I want to expand. A Badlands tone, you know what I mean? Minimal. Essential.”
    Pellam had liked Badlands and his favorite films were minimal and essential. He felt he should hear Sloan out.
    “John, I’ve asked around. People say you been all over the country. They say you’re a walking site catalog.”
    Perhaps not. But Pellam did have many scrapbooks filled with Polaroid snaps of quirky, cinematic locales just right for the sort of feature film that Sloan was describing. Moreover, Sloan had less location experience than most directors because his flicks were usually soundstage setups and computer graphics transfers. To make his movie he’d need a solid location manager.
    “Keep talking,” Pellam said.
    “They’re bank robbers,” Sloan was explaining. “Young bank robbers. It’s a vehicle—for like Aidan Quinn and Julia Roberts before she was Julia Roberts. I don’t want to go with anybody who’s been on the cover of People . Nobody bankable. It’s got me scared, but I need to make this change. Between you and me I’m suffocating under the system. You know what I’m saying?”
    Pellam did and he told Sloan so.
    “They’re not understood, this couple. They’re angry, they’re disaffected—”
    Listening to Sloan back then, Pellam had seen what he believed were the Black Hills. They weren’t black at all, but were dark blue. They were very faraway, but in the awesome, undisturbed sky towering above, they looked both regal and unsettling.
    “It sounds vaguely familiar, Tony.”
    “I know, you’re thinking Bonnie and Clyde, ” Sloan said.
    Ah, right. That was what Pellam had been thinking.
    “This’s different,” the director continued. “It’s called Missouri River Blues. You hear about it? Orion was kicking it around a few years ago before it was belly-up time. These characters are real. They live and breathe. Dunaway and Beatty were . . . Dunaway and Beatty. What can I say? Good movie, one of my primal influences. But I’m going beyond it. Okay, Ross, that’s the boyfriend, he’s in prison and going crazy. He’s going to kill himself. He can’t take it anymore. We open on these incredible shots of a lock-down. That’s when . . . See, in prison—”
    “When they close up the maximum-security cellblock for the night.”
    “Right. How’d you know that?”
    “Tell me about the film, Tony.”
    “I’ve got the DP working on a special micro lens. Angles on the insides of the locks and bars clanging shut. It’s beautiful. So we get a sense of confinement. Everything closing around him. Well, Ross escapes, and he and Dehlia—”
    “Dehlia?”
    “. . . he and Dehlia