Black Is the Fashion for Dying Read Online Free

the day again. Dark Circle converted into a personal triumph. And an even greater triumph with Tiger in the Night. That could really amount to something. A new way of making motion pictures.
    The idea wasn’t actually his. Standish, of CBS, had dropped it at a party one night for anyone to pick up. “You movie moguls are still in the horse-and-buggy days,” he’d said, his swarthy, cocksure face scornful. “Six, eight, ten weeks for a feature-length picture. One set at a time, one camera, one set-up. Waits for lighting, for sound, for the camera to be hauled up, for actors to rehearse, learn their lines, find their places. Maybe three minutes of film a day.”
    â€œSo?” Harry Greenspan had asked.
    â€œSo TV has passed you clucks by and you don’t know it. We use cameras, plural. Six or eight of ’em if necessary. And we shift from set to set, audio and lighting ready and waiting, as fast as the actors can get there. Result: for fifty-two minutes of shooting, a fifty-two minute show!”
    â€œQuality,” Harry Greenspan had muttered.
    â€œSo, okay. We don’t have the quality. That’s budget. You give me the scripts and the sets and the actors and I’ll give you quality until it comes out your ears!”
    And there the idea lay until Tiger in the Night began to run over. Five days finally, at sixteen thousand a day, and Benjy screaming louder each day. And three-quarters of yesterday lost because of Caresse Garnet. He’d called Standish then, borrowed one of his production assistants, and cornered Josh Gordon in the Directors’ Building.
    â€œTelevision monitors. Six cameras. Four sets. Simultaneous action,” Gordon had muttered as he outlined the production assistant’s scheme. “What you need is the ringmaster from Ringling Brothers’ circus.”
    â€œYou won’t do it?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œHave you read your contract, Josh?”
    â€œYeah, I’ve read it, Fatso, and I know you can make it stick, but I don’t have to like it.”
    â€œSuppose I gave you credit for the idea?”
    â€œThat’s a laugh. If Benjy hasn’t got a teletype from you in New York right now, claiming full credit, I’m Eisenhower, bare-assed in a snowdrift.”
    The limousine’s engine raced as the hydromatic dropped down a gear. Fabro saw they were climbing a sleep grade, saw Dawes looking at him through the rear-view mirror. “We’re almost at the top of Bel-Air, Mr. Fabro.”
    â€œDidn’t I tell you Caresse Garnet?”
    â€œNo, sir.”
    â€œWell, consider yourself told.”
    Six cameras and all, it must have worked fine. Around three he’d sent T. J. down to do some snooping and before Gordon caught him and threw him off the set, he learned they’d already shot nine pages. Which meant if tomorrow went as well, Tiger in the Night would make the deadline he’d set, pick up three of the lost days. And he’d be taking bows for a new technique that might save the industry.
    If it wasn’t for Benjy, with his memo-pad mind, the day’s ultimate crisis, this lousy appointment with destiny could have been put off for another year. And by then it wouldn’t be a crisis. There was the teletype message, of course, the last of the day from Benjy, obviously sent from his office after dinner. It read:
    Dark Circle yours but changes must not exceed $30,000.
    Have you forgotten Caresse Garnet?
    But it was past seven when the message arrived and he had arranged for Miss Earnshaw to say, if questioned, he’d left the studio by then. He should have known that was too easy, though. Did know, in a way, because he’d set up a mental chessboard in that gloomy hole on Highland, drinking the raw Scotch, obviously just made in the back room, and figuring eventualities. One of which had burst upon him the moment he set foot in his house at eleven.
    Two half-filled