Flicker
Authors: Theodore Roszak
FLICKER
Other Books by Theodore Roszak
The Dissenting Academy,
editor and contributor
The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition
Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society
Masculine/Feminine,
editor and contributor with Betty Roszak
Sources,
editor and contributor
Unfinished Animal
Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society
The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking
The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology
Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind,
editor and contributor
America the Wise: The Longevity Revolution and the True Wealth of Nations
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science
Longevity Revolution: As Boomers Become Elders
World, Beware! American Triumphalism in an Age of Terror
Fiction
Pontifex
Bugs
Dreamwatcher
Flicker
The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein
The Devil and Daniel Silverman
A NOVEL BY
THEODORE ROSZAK
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roszak, Theodore.
Flicker / Theodore Rozsak.
p. cm.
“The filmography of Max Castle”: p. 589
I. Title.
PS3586.O8495F5 1991
813'.54âdc20Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 90-24890
CIP
ISBN 1-55652-577-X
Copyright © 1991 by Theodore Roszak
Reprinted by arrangement with the author
Appendix © 2005 by Theodore Roszak
Grateful acknowledgment is given to the following for permission to
reprint “The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats (page 347). Reprinted
with permission of Macmillan Publishing Company from
The Poems of
W. B. Yeats,
edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1924 by
Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1952 by Bertha Georgia
Yeats.
Cover design: Rachel McClain
Front cover image: Christian Michaels/Getty Images
This edition published in 2005 by
Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN-13: 978-1-55652-577-3
ISBN-10: 1-55652-577-X
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2
The stronger the evil, the stronger the film.
A
LFRED
H
ITCHCOCK
5 The Children of Paradise Caper
31 Paleolithic Productions Presentsâ¦
32 The End of the World and Selected Short Subjects
APPENDIX: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE MOVIES
FLICKER
I saw my first Max Castle movie in a grubby basement in west Los Angeles. Nobody these days would think of using a hole in the wall like that for a theater. But in its timeâthe middle fiftiesâit was the humble home of the best repertory film house west of Paris.
Older film buffs still remember The Classic, a legendary little temple of the arts wedged unobtrusively between Moishe's Strictly Kosher Deli and Best Buy Discount Yard Goods. Now, looking back more than twenty years, I can see how appropriate it was that my first encounter with the great Castle should take place in what might have passed for a crypt. It was a little like discovering Christ in the catacombs long before the cross and the gospel became the light of the world. I came like the bewildered neophyte wandering into the dark womb of an unformed faith, and found ⦠what? Not a sign of the kingdom and glory to come. Only a muffled rumor of miracles, an alien rite, an inscrutable emblem scratched on the crumbling wall. Still, in the deep core of his being, the seeker feels conviction stir. He senses the great hungering mystery that lurks before him amid the rubble and rat droppings. He stays and tastes of the sacrament. Transformed, he returns to the world outside bearing an apocalyptic word.
That was how I discovered Castle years before he acquired the cult
following my life's work as scholar, critic, and enthusiast would one day bring him. In my case, the sacramental supper was a single flawed film, a dancing phantom of light and shadow only dimly perceived, less than half understood. Having begun its career as a censored obscenity, the poor, luckless thing had languished for decades in the deep vaults of defunct studios and uncaring collectors. That it had managed to survive at allâat one point as one of the lesser spoils of war, at another as an article of stolen goodsâwas a miracle in its own right. The words of Jesus, so we are told, once existed as nothing more than chalk scrawled on the pavement of bustling cities, trodden underfoot by busy merchants, scuffed by the feet of children at play, pissed upon by every passing dog. Castle's message to the world might just as well have been committed to the dust of the streets. A movie, a thin broth of illusion smeared across perishing plastic, is no less fragile. At a dozen points along the way, it might have vanished beneath the waves of neglect like so many film treasures before and since, an item of unsalvaged cultural flotsam that never found the eye to see it for what it was. That was what Castle's work needed: a beginner's eyeâ
my
eye, before it became too schooled and guarded, while it was still in touch with the vulgar foundations of the art, still vulnerably naive enough to receive that faint and flickering revelation of the dark god whose scriptures are the secret history of the movies.
Like most Americans of my generation, my love affair with the movies reaches back farther than I can remember. For all I can say, it began with prenatal spasms of excitement and delight. My mother was a great and gluttonous moviegoer, a twice-a-week, triple-feature and selected-short-subjects fiend. She used the movies the way millions of Americans did at the tail end of the dismal thirties: twenty-five cents' worth of shelter from the heat of summer and the cold of winter, a million dollars' worth of escape from the long, bitter heartbreak of the Depression. It was also the best way to avoid the landlord lurking on the doorstep at home to collect the back rent. It may be that more than a little of the archetypal detritus that fills the unswept corners of my mindâTarzan's primordial mating call, the cackle of the Wicked Witch of the West, the blood-howl of the Wolf Manâinfiltrated my fetal sleep through the walls of the womb.
In any case, I've always regarded it as prophetic that I was born in the year that is fondly remembered as the high noon of Hollywood's Golden Ageâ1939âthe
annus mirabilis
when the great baronial studios showered the nation with a largesse of hits, just before the
storms of war submerged cinematic dreams beneath historical nightmares. I gestated through
The Wizard of Oz, Snow White, Stagecoach, Wuthering Heights.
Mother's labor pains began, in fact, halfway through her third entranced viewing of
Gone With the Wind
âin sympathy, so she claimed, with Olivia de Havilland giving birth during the burning of Atlanta. (With the ambulance waiting at the curb, she refused to leave for the maternity ward until the management refunded her dollar-and-a-quarter admissionâa hefty price in those days.)
Once born and breathing on my own, I was nursed through Joan Crawford matinees, I teethed on the Three Stooges. In early adolescence, I suffered my first confused sexual tremors when, at the action-packed conclusion of episode nine, we left Nylana, the blouse-bursting Jungle Girl, supine across a heathen altar, about to be ravished by a crazed witch doctor.
All this, the dross and froth of the movies, settled by natural gravitation into the riverbed of my youthful consciousness and there became a compacted sludge of crude humor and cheap thrills. But my devotion to filmâto
Film,
the movies revered as the animated icons of high artâthis began with The Classic during my first years at college. It was that period many now regard as the Heroic Age of the art-film house in America. Outside New York, there were at the time perhaps a few dozen of these cultural beacons in the major cities and university towns, many of them beginning to earn reasonably well from the newfound audience for foreign movies, some even taking on a few amenities: Picasso brush-stroke reproductions in the lobby, Swiss chocolates at the candy counter.
And then there were the struggling repertory and revival houses like The Classic, few in number, poor but pure. These weren't so much a business as a brave crusade dedicated to showing the films people
ought
to see, like them or not. Invariably, they were shoestring operations, store fronts with the windows paneled over and the walls painted black. You sat on folding chairs and could hear the projectionist fighting with his recalcitrant equipment behind a partition at the rear.
The Classic had taken up residence in a building that originally housed one of the city's first and finest picture palaces. On its opening night some time in the late twenties, a fire broke out and the place was gutted. Over the next twenty years, the surviving auditorium served as everything from a soup kitchen to a Chautauqua lecture
hall. One-night-stand evangelists and passing medicine shows had frequently rented the space. Finally, before it closed down soon after the war, it had gone over to Jewish vaudeville. Faded posters for Mickey Katz as “Berny the Bull Fighter,” “Meier the Millionaire,” or “The Yiddisher Cowboy” could still be found hanging askew in the lobby when I started visiting. The Classic had been salvaged out of the building's capacious basement, which was as darkly sequestered as any Gothic dungeon. You entered along a dim alley next to Moishe's Deli off Fairfax Avenue. Several shadowed yards along, a discreet sign lit by a frame of low-wattage bulbs pointed around the back of the building and down a short flight of stairs. Even with people illegally huddled in the aisles, The Classic couldn't have held more than an audience of two hundred. There was only one touch of refinement: the price of the ticket included a small paper cup filled with a bitter brew that was to be my first bracing taste of espresso. Often the little cups got spilled, which left the theater's unscrubbed floors perpetually sticky underfoot.
The crowd I ran with in those early college days included an elite corps of theater-arts and film-studies majors who were advanced movie addicts. With religious scrupulosity, they took in everything that played at The Classic, which was run by one of their own kind from the previous generation, an early postwar dropout named Don Sharkey, who had discovered the art of cinema during a bohemian sojourn in Paris after being mustered out of the army. Sharkey and his woman friend Clare kept The Classic running on sweat capital and pure love. They sold the tickets, ran the projectors, mimeographed the film notes, and swept outâif any sweeping was ever doneâat the end of the evening. Silent classics and vintage Hollywood movies rented cheap in those days, if you could get them at all. Even so, except for what they took in from the occasional second-run foreign film, Sharkey and Clare picked up little more than spare change from the business and had to earn from other jobs. The Classic was their way of getting others to chip in on the rentals so they could see the movies they wanted to see.