Gross accidents and public humiliations.

Raymond Jones was nearing the zenith of his career as Auteur and Cineaste when he fell off the South of France, attempting to coerce a Fellow Cineaste’s wife into the coastal scrub for what he described as a little light fingering.

The Fellow Cineaste’s Wife had laughed coquettishly at his suggestion; he was of course highly influential in film finance and an outright refusal could do nothing but harm. She lifted her sun glasses and gave him her best shy smile, “I’m afraid I’d only disappoint,” she moued deliciously.

Raymond, raising an ironic eyebrow, missed her anxious darting look for someone from the film unit to come and interrupt them. The crew, however, were all too mindful of the great man’s reputation and, more specifically his psychotic rages, to dare intervene. She was on her own.

Raymond stretched out a languid arm to lean insouciantly against where he assumed the whitewashed corniche wall should be. Alas, it had petered out some meters before but his languor had forbidden him to check. Suddenly she was on her own for real.

He fell forty meters, loudly, to the rocks below. The Fellow Cineaste’s Wife cradled her face in her hands and screamed. The more nimble of the film unit stumbled down the rocky paths to where Raymond lay, his blood seeping into the famously polluted waters.

He was dead by the time the emergency services arrived. And his producers were already in hard negotiations with the insurers. Harsh words on completion bonds and rescheduling filled the air above the gurney bearing the corpse to the ambulance.

Raymond’s tearful personal assistant asked the Fellow Cineaste’s Wife what his last words had been. But she said she was too shocked to remember.

They were, in fact, “Help me, you cunt!”