Flicker (22 page)

“What a pathetic old codger,” Clare grumbled as we watched them pull away from Moishe's. “But he was once the best shooter in the business.”

When Zip Lipsky built the place in the late forties, the big pastel house in the Los Feliz hills must have been the sort of showcase that was fashionable among the film-rich he had then just lately joined. Now it looked like a piece of crumbling wedding cake left over from the party. The pink stucco frosting had long since flaked and faded; a hundred earth tremors had left their graffiti of cracks in the walls; the drainpipes drooped at every corner. It was one of the houses that had helped the neighborhood go to seed. Not that you noticed the decay until you'd picked your way well up the overgrown driveway; the grounds behind the rusted iron fencing had run wild, covering the dilapidation of the property with a merciful obscurity.

Even when you got inside, you couldn't be sure the house was inhabited. The gloom dripped like syrup from every dark corner. The windows, weightily curtained and Venetiah-blinded, let in only hints and splinters of light. We were met at the door—Clare, Sharkey, and myself—by the big woman. She was dressed as if for a party that might have been given the year Eisenhower was elected. I'd learned from Clare that she was Mrs. Lipsky. Her eyes went for me right away.

“Come to see the picture show?” she piped in her kewpie doll voice. She was carrying a very large drink. From the slurred sound of her words, I judged it wasn't her first of the day.

Most of the house we passed through looked and smelled unlived in, musty, and cobwebby. There was a lot of heavily upholstered furniture, blatantly tasteless, just as blatantly expensive, and all of a style—as if it had been bought in one big ostentatious splurge. There was the sense that the place was a crypt waiting for its corpse. The one note of color dimly discernible through the gloom was the movie posters that decorated the walls. Most of them were for Lipsky's pictures, but there were a few others more garish than the rest that arrested my attention at once, eliciting a special twinge of delight. They displayed an image that still vibrated deep in my secret inventory
of adolescent erotica. There she was in all her titillating glory: Nylana the Jungle Girl, she of the endless weekly perils. I lingered to examine each treasured depiction. Nylana being carried off across the treetops by a slavering gorilla. Nylana lifted high in the air, swooning and supine, about to be thrown into a pit of writhing snakes by a leering Arab. Nylana half-clothed and suspended by the wrists, struggling above a pyre of red-hot coals while wild-eyed savages cavorted under the Satanic gaze of a witch doctor. Each picture, though crudely rendered by some art-school reject of twenty years ago, brought back the rapine episode that had once taught me the dark psychology of sexual appetite.

Why was Nylana there, in this dismal tomb of a house? Were these remnants of Lipsky's waning career? Had he ever sunk so low in the tar pits of the movie industry?

At the distant rear of the house, we came upon the few rooms that still seemed to be in use: a kitchen in indescribable disorder and a large, glassed-in cabana that looked out upon a cracked and empty swimming pool now filled with debris. This part of the Lipsky home was permeated with the faintly medicinal odors of a sickroom. Here Mrs. Lipsky offered us drinks from a well-stocked wet bar and then led us to a cabin-sized outbuilding across the overgrown patio. This turned out to be a small, but well-kept projection room with seating for about a dozen. Here we found Lipsky, smoking and wheezing away in a plush armchair several times too large for his already small and now much-diminished dimensions. “You bring it?” he snarled as we entered. “The picture? You bring it? You ain't seein' anything if you didn't bring it.”

He couldn't fail to see me loaded down with the canisters. Clare gestured me forward, and I presented them like a peace offering to the chief of a hostile tribe.

The chief was not placated. “What kept y'?” he snapped. Once again, on a warm day, he was wrapped in his blanket.

“You said two o'clock,” Clare answered with strained patience. “We're early.”

“So who told ja you could come early?” the little guy shot back. “I coulda been sleepin'.”

Clare returned the volley gently. “But you're not, are you?”

Spotting Sharkey, Lipsky asked, “Who's that?”

“This is Don Sharkey,” Clare said. “My partner. He's also a great admirer of your work.”

Sharkey stepped forward to shake hands. “I'm pleased to …”

Lipsky cut him short, his gaze still on Clare. “I didn't say you could bring your whole damn family. What is this—a picnic?”

“Don is the best projectionist in the city,” Clare explained.

“Hell he is,” Lipsky shot back. “He don't touch none of my pictures. Only Yoshi handles my stuff.” He gave a thumb-poke over his shoulder toward the projection booth where I could see someone at work on the machines.

“Well, Don's here to show
our
film,” Clare said. “It has to be handled with complete professional care.”

“Let's set up,” Sharkey muttered sullenly, and led me off with the canisters. Clare and I had warned him not to expect the usual courtesies from Lipsky, but he was nonetheless wounded by the old man's abrupt dismissal.

“Your picture
first!”
Lipsky wheezed.

“Oh no,” Clare countered, suspecting that Lipsky might hold out on us once he'd seen the
Judas.
“
Yours
first.”

“Nothin' doin,' ” Lipsky insisted. It seemed to be his habit to make the maximum trouble about everything that came up. I had the distinct feeling that he relished having someone to needle and was out to make the most of the opportunity. Maybe he even enjoyed Clare's pugnaciousness, though she was doing an unprecedented job of keeping it under control.

Sharkey and I looked over the projection booth while Clare and Lipsky wrangled. We were impressed. It was a better setup than we had at The Classic. There were two magnificent Century thirty-five-millimeter machines with big blowers vented through the ceiling. All the equipment was in prime condition, well-oiled and gleaming. Busily fussing over it was Yoshi, the old Japanese chauffeur who had driven Lipsky to The Classic. His face, as he worked, was skewed into a frown of pain.

“You're the projectionist?” Sharkey asked.

The old man answered, ticking it off on his fingers. “Gardener. Cook. Chauffeur. Crean-up. Arso projectionist, yes.” His tone and expression made it clear that he felt vastly overworked.

“I hope you're a better projectionist than you are a gardener,” Sharkey said. “This place looks like darkest Africa.”

Yoshi pulled a sincerely sad face. “Too ord, too ord,” he moaned, wagging his head. “Fingers too stiff.” He held out two arthritic claws. “Prease, you can do machine?”

When Sharkey agreed, Yoshi gave a grateful bow, then slumped wearily into a chair.

“But we better not let your boss out there know,” Sharkey remarked. “He says you're the only person who can show his movies.”

Yoshi nodded. “Mr. Ripsky very good man. Ord friend. But sometimes fur of shit, you know.”

After a half hour of wrangling, Clare and Lipsky had finally worked out a compromise on the screening order of the films. One of his first, then the
Judas,
then his other movie after that. What followed must have been the purest distillation of Max Castle's film art ever projected at a single showing. Three movies in pristine condition, just as their creator would have wished them to be seen. It was very nearly more than the eye and the mind could absorb. The two films Lipsky had chosen were
Count Lazarus
and
House of Blood,
at that time known to the world, if known at all, as nothing more than tawdry B-movies, the work of a marginal and now long dead talent whose career when he produced the films was bordering on well-deserved obscurity. Anyone reading the screenplays through line by line would have found nothing about these films that distinguished them from the general run of the genre. Just two more of Universal Studio's spooky doings. Even the cast was made up of actors and actresses who were the stock company of that era's werewolf and bloodsucker repertory. Evelyn Ankers, George Zucco, Anne Nagel, Glenn Strange, Dwight Frye. Yet there wasn't a frame of these movies—shown as the mind of Max Castle had conceived them—that wasn't touched with an uncanny power. We—Clare, Sharkey, and I—had all seen flashes of that power in the films we'd shown at the festival. But here the impact was whole and unrestrained. As with the
Judas,
I sat before the storm of images as if I were staring into a hurricane, struggling to keep my presence of mind before a shattering force. And that force was pure cinema: the elemental visual stuff of the art itself. Pictures in motion, one hammering image after another darting along unexplored optical rivers to reach the deep interior of the brain's shadowy continent.

It would have been enough to say that, by anybody's standards, these films were well crafted, so far beyond the ordinary studio standard that only their limited budget placed them in the category of B-movies. But there was more here, something that went beyond craftsmanship. There was in Castle's films a genuine horror, one that froze through to the bone. At no point could I have said precisely
where the film's power lay—except that I was sure it was nothing I'd consciously seen that produced the effect. Rather, it was as if somewhere behind my eyes, another part of me was observing a different world, one in which the vampire and his victim were real, the supernatural events were real, the blasphemy was real. Again, the word “unclean” edged its way into my mind.
Unclean,
as only a thing risen from the grave to prey upon innocent blood could be unclean. The ghoul's essential obscenity was there before my eyes; it had touched me. Not me alone. Clare too. I could tell when the lights came up. She was wearing the same stiff-faced gaze that I'd seen when the
Judas
ended, the face of someone who refused to admit the experience she'd confronted. She managed to stick it out through the first movie, watching as intently as I had. But she wouldn't watch the
Judas
through again, nor
House of Blood,
even though Lipsky had called it his best work. Instead, she excused herself to wait for Sharkey and me in the kitchen.

I expected the old man to take offense at her departure; she was walking out on the film he considered his finest. He was too eagerly awaiting the
Judas
to care what Clare did. But Mrs. Lipsky, noting Clare's exit, lost no time in making the most of the opportunity. She quickly eased in beside me with a wink and a giggle. Ten minutes into the film and her foot began working aggressively at mine. Another five, and her hand was on my arm. “Excuse me,” I said, running for cover. “I have to check the projector.” I watched the rest of the movie with Sharkey from the booth.

Lipsky sat through the
Judas
with his attention riveted to the screen, his chicken-bone frame erect and alert. Even from the rear of the theater, his gasps of appreciation were audible, punctuating every key shot in the film. At several points, I could hear him muttering to himself, “That's it, Maxy … that's the ticket … perfect … perfect!” By the end of the film, he was accompanying every movement with body English, living the story. When the lights came back, he crumpled like a racer at the finish line. Mrs. Lipsky went to him to adjust his oxygen pack. “Poor Zippy!” she baby-talked him. “Does he get too 'cited?” Lipsky looked up at her, his eyes shining with tears and too choked to speak. He opened his mouth and closed it like a dying fish, but all that came out was, “… Max … ”

He didn't stay to see the last movie, but made his way out of the room. Later, Sharkey and I found him with Clare in the kitchen, huddling over the table, the two of them filling the room with a pall
of cigarette smoke. It looked as if a respectful conversation had been passing between them. I judged that seeing the
Judas
had mellowed the old guy and made him willing to talk, at least to Clare. When Sharkey and I arrived, he clammed up and moved off into the cabana. He made no reply to my thanks as we left. At the door, Mrs. Lipsky managed to get hold of my hand and give it a hard squeeze. “You hurry right back, y'hear?” she said. “We got lots and lots of movies to show.”

On the way home, I was bursting to discuss the films. But Clare carried on as if she didn't hear me talking. “Poor sick old geezer.” She sounded as if she really cared.

“Obnoxious little fart,” Sharkey added.

“Be kind,” Clare said. “He's flying on one lung. He won't last long. Emphysema. Worse, he's dying of terminal bitterness. He got kicked around a lot, you know. After they hit him with the blacklist, he had to shoot under other names to get work, or go begging around Europe. He was already too sick then for that. He's got a right to his grudge.”

“How'd he get on the list?” Sharkey asked.

“I gather he was a political lefty from way back. Ran in his family. Just about the time Joe McCarthy invaded Hollywood, Zip got involved making a documentary on Paul Robeson—with a lot of his own money. Purely a labor of love. Next thing he knew, he was up shit creek. He was called before the committee. Uncooperative witness. Only reason he wasn't jailed was his health. Maybe also his size. Even McCarthy wasn't vile enough to bully a midget around in public. Anyway, there wasn't much publicity mileage in a mere cameraman. So they just destroyed his career. He fell a long way from the top of his profession. That leaves a lot of bruises.”

“When did he start working with Castle?” I asked.

“That goes back farther than I would've guessed. Zip worked on
The Martyr.
He was on the film crew Castle took to Italy. He was one of the grips. He says everybody treated him like a sort of mascot—something dwarves have to live with. But not Castle. Castle began to groom him as a shooter. Zip was just a kid at the time. Of course, Castle wasn't that much older himself, but Zip remembers him as this sort of fatherly figure. Castle saw the talent in Zip and cared enough to bring it out. If I'm not mistaken, Zip rather worships the man for that. Apparently, Castle was going to make Zip his own personal handcrafted cameraman. After
The Martyr
crashed, Zip stuck by him. Quite a friendship. From the mid-thirties on, Zip was
getting plenty of work on his own. Major studio stuff. A lot of junk, but some high-level things too. No matter what, he always insisted on working with Castle, even without credit. Here's a scoop for you. When Orson Welles came to RKO, one of the first people he talked to was Castle. Asked him what film he ought to make, now that he had a blank check from the studio. Castle suggested
Heart of Darkness
—the Conrad novel. It was a pet project he'd been nursing for years. Welles went for it. And Zip was going to be his shooter. Of course, that fell through. Welles went on to make
Citizen Kane
with Gregg Toland. Big loss for little Zip. But he got lucky, picked up other good things.”