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savvy, John-Woo-style action piece audiences have come to expect. One minute Schwarzenegger is camping it up, the next Todd Pickett, as his unwilling successor, is playing his scenes as though he’s Hamlet on a particularly dreary night in Denmark. From beginning to end, Gallows is bad noose.’

      Everybody going up the red carpet that Monday night already knows what Time is going to say; Corliss had made his contempt for the picture very plain in a piece about the state of action movies he wrote two weeks before. Nor does it take an oracle to predict that there will be others who will not like the picture. But the extent of vitriol will prove astonishing, even to those who expected the worst. In the next forty-eight hours, Gallows will garner some of the most negative reviews of the last twelve months, the vehemence of the early news reviewers empowering minor names to pull out the stops. Besides the incomprehensible script, everyone agrees, there is a lacklustre quality to the picture that betrays the cast’s indifference to the entire project. Performances aren’t simply uneven, they seemed designed for entirely different movies: a hopeless mismatch of styles. The worst culprit in this regard? There is no question about that. All the reviewers will agree that the most inadequate performance comes from its star, Todd Pickett.

      People writes that: ‘Mr Pickett is plenty old enough to know better. Thirty-something-year-olds don’t act the way Mr Pickett acts here: his trademark “young man with a chip on his shoulder and a thousand-watt smile,” which was looking stale the second (all right, the third) time he did it, seems particularly out-of-place here. Though it seems incredible that time has passed so fast since America first swooned to the charms of Mr Pickett – he’s now simply too old to play the twenty-something Vincent. Only Wilhemina Bosch, as Vincent’s Prozac-chewing sister, comes out of this mess with any credibility. She has an elegant, beautifully-proportioned face, and she can turn a line with the snappy, East-coast smarts of a young Katharine Hepburn. She’s wasted here. Or, more correctly, our time would be wasted here were she not in the movie.’

      The premiere audience didn’t seem to mind it. On occasion there were audible gasps and loud laughter (perhaps in truth a little over-loud, a little fake) for the jokes, but there were several long stretches in the Second Act, when the movie seemed to lose their interest. Even in the Third Act, when the action relocates to the orbiting space station, and the special effects budget soared, there was very little real enthusiasm. A few scattered whoops of nihilistic delight when the villain’s planet-destroying weapon actually went off, against expectation, and Washington DC is fried to a crisp. But then, as the smoke cleared and Todd, as the new Gallows, proceeded to finish off the bad guys, the audience became restless again.

      About fifteen minutes before the end credits rolled a member of the audience got up from his seat on the aisle and went to the bathroom. A few people caught a look at the man’s face as he looked back at the screen. It was Todd Pickett, lit by the light of his own face. Nobody got up to ask for his autograph.

      Pickett stared at the screen for a moment only, then he turned his back on it and trudged up and out of the cinema. He didn’t go to the restroom. Instead he asked

      one of the ushers if he could be allowed out of the back of the building. The usher explained that the area around the back had no security.

      ‘I just want a quiet smoke with nobody watching me,’ Todd explained.

      The usher said, sure, why not, and led Todd down a passageway that ran behind the screen. Todd looked up at his reversed image on the screen. All he could remember about the scene that was playing was how damn uncomfortable his costume had been.

      ‘Here you go,’ the usher said, unlocking the doors at the end of the corridor, and letting Todd out into an area lit only by the ambient light from the Boulevard.

      ‘Thanks,’ Todd said, giving him a twenty-buck bill. ‘I’ll be back out front by the time the credits roll.’

      The usher thanked him for the twenty-note and left him to himself.

      Todd took out a cigarette, but it never got to his lips. A wave of nausea overtook him, so powerful and so sudden that it was all he could do not to puke down his own tuxedo. Up came the scotches he’d had in the limo as he drove on down to the premiere, and the pepperoni pizza, with three cheeses and extra anchovies, he’d had to add ballast. With the first heave over (something told him there were more to come) he had the presence of mind to look around, and confirm that this nasty little scene was not being spied on, or worse, photographed. Luckily, he was alone. All he had for company back here was the detritus of premieres past; piles of standees and gaudy scenery pieces designed to advertise movies gone by: Mel Gibson against an eruption of lurid flame; Godzilla’s eye; the bottom half of a girl in a very short dress. He got to his feet and stumbled away from the stench of his vomit, making his way through this graveyard of old glories, heading for the darkest place he could find in which to hide his giddy head. Behind him, through the still-open door, he could hear the sound of gunfire, and the muted sound of his own voice:

      ‘Come on out, you sonofabitch,’ he was yelling to some-body.By now, if the movie had been working, the audience would have been yelling and screaming, wild with blood-lust. But despite the over-amped soundtrack, nobody was yelling, because nobody gave a damn. The movie was dying on its feet.

      Another wave of nausea rose up in him. He reached out to catch hold of something so that he didn’t fall down and his outstretched hand knocked over a cardboard cut-out of Tom Cruise, which toppled backwards and hit a cardboard Titanic, which in turn crashed against a cardboard Mighty Joe Young, and so on and so forth, like a row of candy-coloured dominoes, stars falling against ships falling against monsters, all toppling back into a darkness so deep they were an indistinguishable heap.

      Luckily, the noise of his vomiting was covered by the din of his own movie. He puked again, twice, until his stomach had nothing left to give up. Then he turned his back on the vomit and the toppled idols, and stepped away to find a lungful of clean air to inhale. The worst was over. He lit his cigarette, which helped settle his stomach, and rather than returning inside, where the picture was two minutes from finishing, he walked along the side of the building until he found a patch of street-light where he could assess himself. He was lucky. His suit was unspattered. There was a spot of vomit on his shoes, but he cleaned it off with his handkerchief (which he tossed away) and then sprayed his tongue and throat with wintergreen breath-cleanser. His hair was cropped short (that was the way it was in the movie, and he’d kept the style for public appearances), so he had no fear that it was out of place. He probably looked a little pale, but what the hell? Pale was in.

      There was a gate close to the front of the building, guarded by a security officer. She recognized Todd immediately, and unlocked the gate.

      ‘Getting out before it gets too crazy?’ she said to him. He smiled and nodded. ‘You want an escort to your car?’

      ‘Yeah, thanks.’

      One of the executive producers, an over-eager Englishman called George Dipper, with whom Todd had never worked before, was standing on the red carpet, his presence ignored by the press, who were standing around chatting to one another, or checking their cameras before the luminaries reappeared. George caught Todd’s eye, and hurried over, dragging on his own cigarette as though his life depended on its nicotine content.

      There was scattered applause from inside, which quickly died away. The picture was over.

      ‘I think it played brilliantly,’ George said, his eyes begging for a syllable of agreement. ‘They were with us all the way. Don’t you think so?’

      ‘It was fine,’ Todd said, without commitment.

      ‘Forty million, the first weekend.’

      ‘Don’t get your hopes up.’

      ‘You don’t think we’ll do forty?’

      ‘I think it’ll do fine.’

      George’s face lit up. Todd Pickett, the man he’d paid twenty million dollars to (plus a sizeable portion of the back-end) was declaring it fine. God was in His Heaven. For

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