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BLUES
    SCENE 34—EXTERIOR EVENING, STREET IN FRONT OF BANK
    MEDIUM ANGLE ON Ross and Dehlia, dressed up as if they were “out for an innocent stroll.” They are supposed to be casing the job, but Ross is introspective. He stops.
    ANGLE ON REAL ESTATE OFFICE, ROSS’S POV
    CU OF LISTING SHEETS OF ONE-FAMILY HOUSES
    ANGLE ON Ross’s face
    ANGLE ON Dehlia’s face, looking at him:
    TWO SHOT OF both of them.
    ROSS
    There was a time when I needed to be an outlaw. But it’s different now. (CLOSE ON his face.) Since you and me’ve been on the road together, lover, it’s all different. Now I’ve got you and I want to be part of the world we’ve been looking in on. Looking in on from the outside for a long, long time.
    The bank-robbing lovers in the film come upon a small midwestern river town filled with abandoned factories and characters whose lives have been ruined by rampant capitalism. They decide to make one last heist then follow the lead of all the returning World War II veterans: buy a house in the ’burbs and raise babies.
    More than even minimal or essential movies, Pellam loved good movies. He was not convinced that Missouri River Blues was a good movie. The script contained a number of time bombs—long speeches, shoot-outs, car chases and stylish camera directions. But a script is merely a promise. What Sloan would make of it, nobody, perhaps not even Sloan himself, could know at this point.
    It was not Pellam’s job, in any case, to career-counsel visionaries. He did what he’d been hired to do. He read the script ten times, got a sense of whatit was about, did his outline of the scenes, blocked them out, consolidating similar ones to minimize travel between locations. Then he clocked seven hundred miles on the Winnebago as he threaded through Maddox and environs, shot sixty packs of Polaroids, met with the mayor and the city’s insurance company, then wrote up his report and shipped it off.
    Within a day Sloan and the director of photography flew to St. Louis and drove north, where Sloan approved most of the locations. They jetted back that night to finish casting.
    For the next week Pellam helped the key grip with site preparation and deciding what cranes and other equipment would be needed for the shooting. Sloan and the cast and crew had arrived in a swirl of frenzied excitement. Grip trucks, camera cranes, Winnebagos, location vans. This movie was bigger news in Maddox than FDR and William Jennings Bryan combined.
    As on most sets, the atmosphere was boisterous in the first few days of shooting. Pellam had had some fun. Because scouts are often first on the scene, newly arrived personnel ask them for tips on places to eat and things to see. A young hotshot actor, playing one of Ross’s gangsters, asked Pellam bluntly where he could get laid and how much would it cost.
    Pellam thought for a bit, then remembered an ad he had seen not long after he arrived in Maddox. “It’ll be cheap but you’ve got to drive a ways.” He gave the actor elaborate directions that sent him ten miles into the boonies. He returned an hour later, fuming, and stormed onto the set, where Pellam and the crew greeted him with high-pitched squeals and calls of soo-eee!
    Pellam had sent him to the St. Charles County Hog and Ham Museum.
    But that had been a month ago, and now the time for jokes was over. Missouri River Blues was badly over schedule and vastly over budget. The producer from the studio financing the film had sent a representative—Sloan referred to him, openly, as “the stoolie”—to goose things along. The problem, in Pellam’s view, was that while Sloan could entice performances from characters fighting to the death with lasers or changing themselves into charges of electricity, he did not, despite his aspirations to art, know what he wanted in less apocalyptic scenes: love, betrayal, friendship, longing . . . So the introspective scenes were gradually replaced by more shoot-outs and chases and extreme