Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (22 page)

“Lot of stuff’s been . . . well, getting off track. I don’t know how or why.”

“And you’re letting them run on?”

“Some,” I said, not meeting her gaze.

“I’d hate to see your studio timeshare bill. You must be
way
over budget.”

“I try not to imagine it. But I’m sure I’ve got a better movie for it.”

She took my hand for a second, but only a second. She was wearing a blue rib-knit sweater. Blue was definitely her color.

“That way lies madness,” she said. “Call Maintenance and get them to blow out the low-level format of your ramdisk a couple of times. Got to run,” she said, her tone changing instantly. “Got a monster to kill.”

“Thanks a lot. Really,” I say. She stops at the door.

“They put a lot of stuff in the GAX,” she said. “No telling what kind of garbage is floating around in there, unused, that can leak out. If you want to play around, you might as well put in a bunch of fractals and watch the pretty pictures.

“If you want to make a movie,
you’ve
got to tell it what to do and sit on its head while it’s doing it.”

She looked directly at me. “It’s just points of light fixed on a plane, Scott.”

She left.

* * *

Delphine Seyrig is giving Guy (me) trouble.

She was supposed to be the woman who asks Guy to help her get a new chest of drawers up the steps of her house. We’d seen her pushing it down the street in the background of the scene before with Marie and Guy (me) in the bakery.

While Marie (Moreau) is in the vintner’s, Seyrig asks Guy (me) for help.

Now she’s arguing about her part.

“I suppose I’m here just to be a tumble in the hay for you?” she asks.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady. Do you want help with the bureau, or what?”

“Bureau? Do you mean FBI?” asks a voice behind Guy (me). Guy (me) turns. Eddy Constantine, dressed as Lemmy Caution in a cheap trench coat and a bad hat, stares at Guy (me) with his cue-ball eyes.

“No! Chest-of-drawers,” says Seyrig.

“Chester Gould?
Dick Tracy?
” asks Constantine.

Guy (me) wanders away, leaving them to argue semantics on the steps. As he turns the corner the sound of three quick shots comes from the street he has just left. He heads toward the wine shop where Marie stands, smoking.

* * *

I almost forgot about the screening of
Monster Without A Meaning
. There was a note on my screen from Lois. I didn’t know she was through or anywhere near it, but then, I didn’t even know what day it was.

I took my cup of bad black coffee into the packed screening room. Lois wasn’t there—she said she’d never attend a showing of one of her movies. There were the usual reps, a few critics, some of her friends, a couple of sequencer operators and a dense crowd of the usual bit-part unknowns.

Boris, Lois’s boyfriend, got up to speak. (Boris had been working off and on for five years on his own movie,
The Beast with Two Backs
.) He said something redundant and sat down, and the movie started, with the obligatory GAX-600 logo.

Even the credits were right—they slimed down the screen and formed shaded hairy letters in deep perspective, like those from a flat print of an old 3-D movie.

John Agar was the scientist on vacation (he was catching a goddamn
mackerel
out of what purported to be a high Sierra-Nevada lake; he used his fly rod with all the grace of a longshoreman handling a pitchfork for the first time) when the decayed-orbit satellite hits the experimental laboratory of the twin hermit mad scientists (Les Tremayne and Leo G. Carroll).

An Air Force major (Kenneth Tobey) searching for the satellite meets up with both Agar and the women (Mara Corday, Julie Adams) who were on their way to take jobs with the mad doctors when the shock wave of the explosion blew their car into a ditch. Agar had stopped to help them, and the jeep with Tobey and the comic relief (Sgt. Joe Sawyer, Cpl. Sid Melton) drives up.

Cut to the Webb farmhouse—Gramps (Olin Howlin), Patricia (Florida Friebus), Aunt Sophonsiba (Kathleen Freeman) and Little Jimmy (George “Foghorn” Winslow) were listening to the radio when the wave of static swept over it. They hear the explosion, and Gramps and Little Jimmy jump into the woodie and drive over to the The Old Science Place.

It goes just like you imagine from there, except for the monster. It’s all done subjective camera—the monster sneaks up (you’ve always seen something moving in the background of the long master shot before, in the direction from which the monster comes). It was originally a guy (Robert Clarke) coming in to get treated for a rare nerve disorder. He was on Les Tremayne’s gurney when the satellite hit, dousing him with experimental chemicals and “space virus” from the newly discovered Van Allen belt.

The monster gets closer and closer to the victims—they see something in a mirror, or hear a twig snap, and they turn around—they start to scream, their eyeballs go white like fried marbles, blood squirts out their ears and nose, their gums dissolve, their hair chars away, then the whole face; the clothes evaporate, wind rushes toward their radioactive burning—it’s all over in a second, but it’s all there, every detail perfect.

The scene where Florida Friebus melts is a real shocker. From the way the camera lingers over it, you know the monster’s enjoying it.

By the time General Morris Ankrum, Colonel R. G. Armstrong and Secretary of State Henry Hull wise up, things are bad.

At one point the monster turns and stares back over its shoulder. There’s an actual charred trail of destruction stretching behind it; burning houses like Christmas tree lights in the far mountains, the small town a few miles back looking like the ones they built for the Project Ivy A-bomb tests in Nevada. Turning its head the monster looks down at the quiet nighttime city before it. All the power and wonder of death are in that shot.

(Power and wonder are in me, too, in the form of a giant headache. One of my eyes isn’t focusing anymore. A bad sign, and rubbing doesn’t help.)

I get up to go—the movie’s great but the light is hurting my eyes too much.

Suddenly here come three F-84 Thunderjets flown by Cpt. Clint Eastwood, 1st Lt. Leonard Nimoy, and Colonel James Whitmore.

“The Reds didn’t like the regular stuff in Korea. This thing shouldn’t like this atomic napalm, either,” says Whitmore. “Let’s go in and spread a little honey around, boys.”

The jets peel off.

Cut to the monster’s p.o.v. The jets come in with a roar. Under-wing tanks come off as they power back up into a climb. The bombs tumble lazily toward the screen. One whistles harmlessly by, two are dropping short, three keep getting bigger and bigger, then
blam
—
woosh
. You’re the monster and you’re being burned to death in a radioactive napalm firestorm.

Screaming doesn’t help; one hand comes up just before the eyes melt away like lumps of lard on a floor furnace—the hand crisps to paper, curls, blood starts to shoot out and evaporates like verga over the Mojave. The last thing the monster hears is its auditory canals boiling away with a screeching hiss.

Cut to Agar, inventor of the atomic napalm, holding Mara Corday on a hill above the burning city and the charring monster. He’s breathing hard, his hair is singed; her skirt is torn off one side, exposing her long legs.

Up above, Whitmore, oxygen mask off, smiles down and wags the jet’s wings.

Pull back to a panorama of the countryside; Corday and Agar grow smaller; the scene lifts, takes in jets, county, then state; miles up now the curve of the earth appears, grows larger, continue to pull back, whole of U.S., North and Central America appears. Beeping on soundtrack. We are moving along with a white luminescence which is revealed to be a Sputnik-type satellite.

Beeping stops. Satellite begins to fall away from camera, lurching some as it hits the edges of the atmosphere. As it falls, letters slime down the screen: The End?

Credits: A movie by Lois B. Traven.

The lights come up. I begin to breathe again. I’m standing in the middle of the aisle, applauding as hard as I can.

Everybody else is applauding, too. Everybody.

Then my head
really
begins to hurt, and I go outside into the cool night and sit on the studio wall like Humpty-Dumpty.

Lois is headed for the Big Time. She deserves it.

* * *

The notes on my desk are now hand-deep. Pink ones, then orange ones from the executive offices. Then the bright red-striped ones from accounting.

Fuck’em. I’m almost through.

I sat down and plugged on. Nothing happened.

I punched Maintenance.

“Sorry,” says Bobo. “You gotta get authorization from Snell before you can get back online, says here.”

“Snell in accounting, or Snell in the big building?”

“Lemme check.” There’s a lot of yelling around the office on the other end. “Snell in the big building.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.”

* * *

So I have to eat dung in front of Snell, promise him anything, renegotiate my contract
right then and there
in his office without my business manager or agent. But I
have
to get this movie finished.

Then I have to go over to Accounting and sign a lot of stuff. I call Bernie and Chinua and tell them to come down to the studio and clean up the contractual shambles as best they can, and not to expect to hear from me for a week or so.

Then I call my friend Jukai, who helped install the first GAX-600 and talk to him for an hour and a half and learn a few things.

Then I go to Radio Shack and run up a bill of $6,124, buy two weeks’ worth of survival food at Apocalypse Andy’s, put everything in my car, and drive over to the office deep under the bowels of the GAX-600.

* * *

I have locked everyone else out of the mainframe with words known only to myself and Alain Resnais. Let
them
wait.

* * *

I have put a note on the door:

Leave me alone. I am finishing the movie. Do not try to stop me. You are locked out of the 600 until I am through. Do not attempt to take me off-line. I have rewired the 600 to wipe out everything, every movie in it but mine if you do. Do not cut my power; I have a generator in here—if you turn me off, the GAX is history. (See attached receipt.) Leave me alone until I have finished; you will get everything back, and a great movie too.

* * *

They
were
knocking. Now they’re pounding on the door. Screw’em. I’m starting the scene where Guy (me) and Marie hitch a ride on the garbage wagon out of the communist pig farm.

* * *

The locksmith was quiet but he couldn’t do any good, either. I’ve put on the kind of locks they use on the
outsides
of prisons.

They tried to put a note on the screen.
BACK OFF
, I wrote.

They began to ease them, pleading notes, one at a time through the razor-thin crack under the fireproof steel door.

Every few hours I would gather them up. They quit coming for a while.

Sometime later there was a polite knock.

A note slid under.

“May I come in for a few moments?” it asked. It was signed
A. Resnais
.

GO AWAY
, I wrote back.
YOU HAVEN’T MADE A GOOD MOVIE SINCE
LA GUERRE EST FINIS
.

I could imagine his turning to the cops and studio heads in his dignified humble way (he must be pushing ninety by now), shrugging his shoulders as if to say, well, I tried my best, and walking away.

* * *

“You must end this madness,” says Marie. “We’ve been here a week. The room smells. I smell. You smell, I’m tired of dehydrated apple chips. I want to talk on the beach again, get some sunlight.”

“What kind of ending would that be?” I (Guy) ask.

“I’ve seen worse. I’ve
been
in much worse. Why do you have this obsessive desire to re-create movies made fifty years ago?”

I (Guy) look out the window of the cheap hotel, past the edge of the taped roller shade. “I (Guy) don’t know.” I (Guy) rub my chin covered with a scratchy week’s stubble. “Maybe those movies, those, those things were like a breath of fresh air. They led to everything we have today.”

“Well, we could use a breath of fresh air.”

“No. Really. They came in on a stultified, lumbering dinosaur of an industry, tore at its flanks, nibbled at it with soft rubbery beaks, something, I don’t know what. Stung it into action, showed it there were
other
ways of doing things—made it question itself. Showed that movies could be free—not straightjackets.”

“Re-creating
them
won’t make any new statements,” said Marie (Moreau).

“I’m trying to breathe new life into
them
, then. Into what they were. What they meant to . . . to me, to others,” I (Guy) say.

What I want to do more than anything is to take her from the motel, out on the sunny street to the car. Then I want to drive her up the winding roads to the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean. Then I want her to lean over, her right arm around my neck, her hair blowing in the wind, and give me a kiss that will last forever, and say, “I love you, and I’m ready.”

Then I will press down the accelerator, and we will go through the guard rail, hang in the air, and begin to fall faster and faster until the eternal blue sea comes up to meet us in a tender hand-shaped spray, and just before the impact she will smile and pat my arm, never taking her eyes off the windshield.

“Movies are freer than they ever were,” she says from the bed. “I was there. I know. You’re just going through the motions. The things that brought about those films are remembered only by old people, bureaucrats,
film critics
,” she says with a sneer.

“What about you?” I (Guy) ask, turning to her. “You remember. You’re not old. You’re alive, vibrant.”

My heart is breaking.

She gives me (Guy) a stare filled with sorrow. “No I’m not. I’m a character in a movie. I’m points of light, fixed on a plane.”

A tear-gas canister crashes through the window. There is a pounding against the door.