Chapter 4

Normally the president of Continental Pictures wasn’t a man easily impressed. But when he got wind of the discovery Marvin Drenk had made in the Arizona desert, he knew he just had to see it for himself; if even half the things he’d heard about it were true, he’d be the envy of every other studio boss in Hollywood by the next morning. An honest-to-Pete shrink ray right here on his own lot! He couldn’t wait to see the looks on the faces of those jealous idiots at Columbia and Paramount when they got a peep at the new gizmo Drenk had brought back with him....not to mention the way old Darryl Zanuck’s eyes were going to pop out of their sockets.

He sprinted out to the soundstage like Roger Bannister doing the four-minute mile.¹ When he got a good luck at Dr. Reinhardt’s shrink, the Continental president did a double take. "That thing’s huge!" he murmured in what had to be one of the great understatements of Hollywood history.

"Not half as huge as your profits are going to be once we put this baby to work." Marvin Drenk grinned. In his mind’s (bloodshot) eye, he could already see audiences gasping in a mixture of disbelief and awe at the sight of actual giant roaches scuttling across their screens. A shiver of anticipation went through him as he imagined himself getting a Best Picture Academy Award...

"Mr. Drenk?" A feminine voice abruptly jolted him out of his Oscar reverie. He turned and saw that it was Maisie Jones. She obviously had something on her mind-- which was a lot more than could be said about him, quite frankly.

"Yes, Miss Jones?"

Uneasily glancing at the Reinhardt 2000, Maisie asked the not-so-great director: "Are you sure that thing’s safe?"

"Definitely!" Drenk replied with a little too much enthusiasm, making Paul Bartlett think that Drenk was either a bare-faced liar or a full-fledged lunatic.² In any case, he definitely didn’t want to be around that thing if it ever blew up or went haywire(which, knowing Marvin Drenk, was more likely to happen sooner rather than later). He excused himself and went back to his trailer as fast as his frequently sore legs could carry him.³

For the rest of that day at the Continental Pictures backlot, all anybody could talk about was Reinhardt and his Cosmic Matter Expander. It wasn’t yet common knowledge that Drenk was going to use it to make real giant roaches, but just about everybody on the studio’s payroll could sense he had something major up his sleeve.⁴ There hadn’t been a crowd this big gathered in one corner of the Continental Pictures lot since the day that the head of the studio wardrobe department tried to commit suicide by jumping off the roof of the studio commissary.⁵ Drenk  was feeling ten feet tall⁶ from all the attention he was getting-- and he loved every second of it. He was just itching to put the Reinhardt 2000 to work immediately creating real giant roaches; he could already picture the ad campaign Continental’s publicity department would cook up for his next Giant Cockroach movie...

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After things had (more or less)settled down at the Continental Studios, a construction crew working under Drenk’s direction began to build a cattle pen-like corral where the giant roaches would stay when they weren’t being filmed. The crew’s foreman had looked at Drenk like he was completely insane⁷ when he told them what the corral was for, but a look from the Continental president and the promise of time-and-a half pay had dissuaded the foreman from pressing the issue further. Meanwhile, Drenk himself ventured into the seedier parts of Hollywood gleefully collecting all the roaches he could get his grossly overpaid hands on.⁸ He was eager to see the fruits of his labor(no matter how gross those fruits might be) blossom in a hurry.

Once construction on the roach corral was finished, Drenk threw himself into his next great task-- finding actors brave enough, crazy enough, or cash-poor enough to agree to appear in his next Cockroach movie. It was a job even more complicated than it sounds; like storm surges battering the Gulf coast before a hurricane, Drenk’s less-than-stellar reputation preceded him everywhere he went and 90 percent of the first hundred people he tried to cast in his film turned him down flat.⁹ Even the guys who made blue movies in those cheapo studios on the other side of town ran like rabbits when they saw him coming.¹⁰

He finally managed to locate dupes-- er, actors to appear in his movie when he made a visit to a community college up the coast. For reasons only a higher power or a well-trained psychologists could even attempt to explain, the students and faculty at this community college agreed to appear in Drenk’s next Cockroach movie in return for a cash donation to the school scholarship fund from Continental Pictures. Of course the odds of Robert F. Kennedy being invited to the next Nixon family reunion were greater than those of Continental Pictures having any cash available to cover the donation costs, but the dean of the college wasn’t exactly the most polished desktop in the lecture hall, if you get the drift.

On the day the roach corral was completed, a magazine writer came to the set of Continental Pictures to see what all the fuss was about with this so-called Cosmic Matter Enhancer. He’d been burned  before by rumors of world-changing inventions that turned out to be either hoaxes or absolute failures, so he was pretty skeptical about whether the Enhancer would actually work. But it wouldn’t take long to make a believer out of him....

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Back in his private office, Marvin Drenk was busy at work writing letter after letter to every person who had ever(at least according to him) slighted or wronged him during his life.¹¹ He entertained himself by imagining the looks on his critics’ faces when they heard about the Enhancer and the real-life giant roaches it was going to create. Why, they’d be practically tripping over themselves rushing to apologize to him for having committed the egregious sin of doubting his greatness as a filmmaker!

Or at least that was the way he thought things would turn out. But as Robert Burns(or maybe it was Jack Benny) once proclaimed, the best-laid plans of mice and men sometimes go astray.