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drive around the countryside, robbing armored trucks mostly. They’re highwaymen, modern highwaymen. Ross’s driven by his fear of the lock-down. She’s driven by the social convention that forces women to be homemakers. Claustrophobia. The script plays off the risk of freedom versus thefear of imprisonment. Which is worse? Prison with its security, freedom with its dangers?”
    “It sounds a lot like Bonnie and Clyde. ”
    “No, no, the characters are all different. Also the freedom of love versus its confinement. Oh, and the kids’re concerned about the environment.” He added significantly, “This’s the early fifties. They’re concerned about A-bomb testing.”
    “A-bombs,” Pellam said. “That’s very socially conscious.” Sloan completely missed the irony and Pellam asked, “Set in Missouri, I presume?”
    “Medium-sized town,” Sloan said. “The postwar boom has passed it by. That sort of town.”
    “ Bonnie and Clyde was set in Missouri,” Pellam pointed out. “Part of it anyway.”
    “It’s not like Bonnie and Clyde, ” the director said icily.
    Pellam flipped through his mental Rolodex of locations he knew in the Midwest. “I did a job in Kansas a few years back. Small town on a river. How’s Kansas?”
    “I want Missouri. The title, you know.”
    Pellam asked, “Could you tell Kansas from Missouri?”
    “I grew up in Van Nuys. I can’t tell Ohio from Colorado. But that’s not the point. I want Missouri.”
    “Got it.”
    Sloan now paused. “The thing is, John, I’ve got some timing problems here.”
    The tail of the sentence wagged silently.
    “Timing.”
    “You know, I’ve had nothing but headaches with the project. You know the Time article about me? Last year?”
    “I missed it,” Pellam said.
    “When they called me the ‘High-tech Visionary’?”
    Pellam said that whatever they had called him, he’d still missed the article.
    “I mean, Sony or Disney would have written a check for the GNP of France if I’d made the sequel.”
    Son of Circuit Man, Pellam thought, then reconsidered. He said, “ Circuit Man Rewired. ”
    “Ha, John. Very good. Very funny. But Missouri River ? It was a battle to get the green light. It’s an action film, but it’s a period action film, and it’s an intelligent period action film. That scared people.”
    Perhaps competing with Kurosawa and Altman and John Ford—and Arthur Penn, the director of Bonnie and Clyde —scared people, too.
    “So what are you saying, Tony?”
    “I’m saying that I’m in a bind. I got the go-ahead yesterday and I need locations in two weeks, absolute maximum.”
    Pellam laughed a laugh that terrifies producers and directors. It means: Not only are you asking the impossible but I don’t need the job nearly badly enough to put up with the crap I know I’m going to have to put up with to do what you want.
    “Six,” Pellam said. He was, in fact, ready to leave that night—just as soon as the Black Hills turned truly black and he finished his beer. But two weeks was impossible to find sites for the hundreds of setups in a full-length feature.
    It was the moment when one of them would say, “Four weeks” and they would shake hands, remotely, on the compromise.
    Tony Sloan said, “You find me locations in two weeks and I’ll pay you twenty-five thousand dollars.”
    Pellam felt heat flow from his black hair down into his throat. He believed his skin was flushed. “Well—”
    “Thirty-five.”
    Thirty-five thousand?
    “I’m a desperate man, Pellam. I’m not going to bullshit you.”
    After a pause, Pellam asked, “Tony, tell me, does a Texas Ranger track them down in the end and machine-gun them to death?”
    “It is a goddamn different movie, Pellam.”
    “Deal. Express Mail the script to me care of Kansas City GPO.”
    Two days later, Pellam drove over the city limits into Maddox, Missouri, braked the Winnebago to a stop, and knew he’d just earned himself some big money.
    MISSOURI RIVER