Ashes to Ashes: Volume 19 (The

His name is Armitage McLeod, but he is better known in the business as Anonymous Army. That’s because he toils in the shadows, highly talented and well paid but none of his best movies lists his name as a screenwriter. He is a script doctor, caring little for credit. Every major studio has used him over and over again and he always delivers. He is also one of Joe Bernardi’s oldest and dearest friends, a man who literally saved Joe’s life on more than one occasion. And so, when the phone rang in his office, Joe listened panic-stricken as Army reached out in a garbled plea for help that abruptly ended in mid-sentence. It took Joe two days to find out where Army was calling from and when he did he hopped the next available plane to Yuma, Arizona, where they were shooting a Jimmy Stewart survival picture called ‘The Flight of the Phoenix’. When he arrived, he found that Army was among the missing, having disappeared without a trace throwing the production into turmoil. Despite what most directors believe, a production without a talented writer standing by for emergencies, is a production in deep trouble. Thus, began a search for his old friend which suddenly threw Joe into the middle of a drug war between notorious mobster Mickey Cohen and the Crips, a bloodthirsty black gang spawned by the L.A. ghettos. His attempts to find his old friend are stymied at every turn by a bigoted chief of police and when the body of an attractive young woman is found in the desert close by the film location, Joe finds himself having to answer for a lot more than curiosity.