Flicker (96 page)

Nothing special. But I felt it held out the promise of comforting darkness. My eyes invited it nearer. It spread larger on the screen, then fell away teasingly, returned, swelled. I waited for it eagerly; it would be an end to watching, to the strain of alertness. It would be shelter—from the light, from the mushroom cloud, from the vindictive
eye. The dark shape closed on my field of vision, filling the screen with its black breast, sponging away the light, putting everything to rest.

And then the film was over. “The End” had come to its end.

I never saw Busby Berkeley at the Crucifixion. Reel twenty-nine, where I was told I would find this supreme moment enshrined, turned out to be dust and fragments like all the rest. But how much more powerful an example of the flicker could it have offered? “The End” was as strong a dose as I could have handled—and accomplished with the most primitive means, with nothing more than a razor blade and some strands of tape. Whether he believed in the orphans' version of the teaching or not, he'd cobbled together the apocalypse to end all apocalypses. At least my exile had brought the satisfaction of proving me right. He was without doubt as great a moviemaker as I'd told the world he was.

Later that day when he woke from his nap, we talked it over.

“Some of the films were damaged,” I told him hesitantly.

“A lot of them, I should think.”

“Quite a lot.”

“Most of them?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“
All
of them?”

“Not all.”

“You were able to see something?”

“A little. Mainly ‘The End.' ”

“Good. I finished that not so long ago.”

“Is it really ‘the end'? Of the whole movie, I mean?”

“It more or less rounds things off. If more of the rest had survived, I might go back and make changes. Reel five, for example. Very rough. And twelve, I would have blushed to have you see that. However, as things stand … ”

“It was very effective, what I could see of it.”

“You liked it?”

“I wouldn't say ‘like.' I can't honestly say I ever liked any of your movies. But I appreciated it.”

“Good.”

“I'm afraid it came apart in the machine.”

“Only to be expected.”

“I mean
all
apart. It's … ruined.”

“You expect me to be heartbroken?”

“I saved the pieces.”

“No need. As I said, the real movie is in here.”

I breathed a sigh of deep relief and went on to ask about some fine points. Among them: “The street scene … what was it?”

“I really have no idea. I assumed it was some kind of drill. From the war. In London. People taking shelter during an air raid perhaps. Maybe to see how smoothly things went. Would you believe, there were reels and reels of it, some fast, some slow. I took out the slow parts and worked on them a little.”

“Ingenious.”

“You think so?”

“Who else would have seen the possibilities?”

He gave a modest shrug that wasn't really meant to disguise the pride behind it. “I work with what I have.” After a moment, a question occurred to him. “At the conclusion, the big explosion I put in … I came across it in a science fiction film. This was the J-bomb?”

“H-bomb, yes.”

“One bomb?”

“Just one.”

“Very powerful.”

“Very.”

“It's quite magnificent to see—the great cloud, the burst of light.”

“It covers the world with radiation.” He was unfamiliar with the word. “A sort of electrical poison. It kills everything it touches. They say a few hundred of them could wipe out all life on earth … except possibly for the cockroaches.”

“And how many of these bombs are there?”

“The last I remember, thousands. Tens of thousands.”

“Ah!”

“So you see.”

“Yes, I see. Well, we must get down to work.”

“Work?”

“You and I. We have a lot of films to use up before 2014.”

“You want me to work on films with you?”

“You have other plans?”

When he put it that way, I had no choice but to accept his proposition. How else was I going to pass the time? All I had to do was move myself across the island and furnish a corner of his bungalow, which was quite a bit more livable than my cramped little hotbox of a cabin. I informed the caretakers of my change of address, letting
them know that I expected my food and supplies to be forwarded. They pretended not to understand, but I didn't bother repeating myself. The next morning after I'd relocated myself, my breakfast arrived on schedule, brought in the little boat. Since then I talk to the man and woman, whichever pair is on the job, assuming they know what I'm saying. They do, but they never answer.

My new roommate isn't difficult to live with. Between his work in the garden, his long naps, his frequent evenings with the dope pipe—which I now share in moderation—I'm left with a good deal of time on my hands. One of my ongoing projects: compiling the great man's filmography, which needs to be revised every month or so as his memory dims or brightens. Otherwise, I read, very slowly, making the books last. My German is becoming much better, thanks to his collection of classics and his tutoring. I memorize poems. I begin pieces of writing and then throw them away.

“Don't waste the paper,” he once warned me.

“Why not? What am I saving it for?”

“You may want to write your memoirs.”

“Are you kidding?”

“You never can tell. Boredom is a great stimulus. See what it has done for my art.”

Our sessions at Paleolithic Productions happen unpredictably as the spirit moves him. Sometimes we work for several days in succession; sometimes the studio stands empty for a month or two at a time. I let him set the pace. A great deal has to do with the supplies on hand. When the cement runs out or the tape is used up, he keeps the film in his head for weeks. But when we finally get down to work, it can be with a mind-splitting intensity, hour after hour. He's shown me lots of his tricks, but I leave the difficult work to him, preferring less demanding assignments. As for example: clipping the logo off all the Universal Studios movies made before 1946. He tells me the old Universal globe was worked over by orphan editors who smuggled a peculiarly potent subliminal glimmer into three of the twinkling highlights. I cut these out and save them up.

Another task I've been assigned: assembling yards and yards of blank leader, white or black, on which he spreads his glazes and then makes cryptic scribbles—usually his weirdly disturbing polyp-and-tentacle animations. He uses these grotesque little doodles for certain grisly montage effects. He tells me they represent carnal appetite
running wild. Since the carnal appetite gets no more exercise on this godforsaken island than the native ladies are willing to provide once a lunar month or so, I say the more of that the better. I've managed to teach them the rudiments of
bhoga,
which seems the ideal diversion for one in my circumstances.

As for anything beyond low-level jobs, I'm far too clumsy to achieve the precision my boss at Paleolithic Productions requires. Even with his dimming eyesight, he can dissect the figures in a frame of film with surgical skill, or finesse a splice within a hairbreadth—all with instruments that remain stubbornly blunt no matter how many times I sharpen them for him on a tiny fragment of whetstone. The other month he devoted three days to excising tiny, tiny cutouts of Brigitte Helm from a tattered print of Fritz Lang's
Metropolis.
He wanted “just that movement, that gesture … the shoulders this way, the head cocked just so”—some seventy seconds of action to be grafted over jungle footage salvaged from a Tarzan film. “You see,” he explained. “The Lady of the Beasts. Perfect casting.”

Early on, I asked him the obvious question: Why does he take the trouble, since he never watches the results of his efforts? Why not keep the movie wholly mental? He tells me he needs the discipline. The task implants the image in his memory. It has another function: it allows him to decide when a film is “done” so he can forget it and pass on. “Otherwise,” he says, “I would keep monkeying and monkeying.”

So it goes. We work in our cave like a brace of witches concocting the most unlikely cinematic hybrids. William S. Hart shoots it out with Benito Mussolini, King Kong sails aboard Battleship
Potemkin,
Mae West makes love with Woody Allen beneath a downpour of Olympic diving champions.
Eye of newt, toe of frog.
However he wishes to spend our time, I raise no questions. I'm content to be his gofer. Not that I have far to go for what he needs. No farther than the back of the cave to search the shelves for stock on hand and bring back what hasn't rotted away in the box. His memory for film imagery is phenomenal. He tells me, “The khalif in
The Thief of Baghdad
—Conrad Veidt, isn't it?—he wears a green jewel here on his chest. It catches the light just so … about twenty minutes into the movie. Please to look for it.” Or “In
Umberto D.,
at the end, the wall in the corridor, it has a certain texture, very diseased, very morbid. Find that.” I look, and sure enough I find what he wants in the viewer.
When the supply boat brings us movies he hasn't seen, we run them on the little projector. He watches once and remembers every frame for future reference.

Sometimes he does go wrong, though not often. Once he instructed me: “In
Lady from Shanghai,
look for the shot where Rita Hayworth shows her garter when she steps from the boat. About twelve minutes in. So very provocative how she does it. We need about twenty frames of the thigh, especially the shadow under the skirt.”

I looked. I couldn't find what he wanted. “No such shot,” I reported.

“You're certain?” He frowned. “There should have been. Orson slipped up.”

Like him, I never watch the films we make. It would hurt too much to see them come apart in the machine, as they surely would. My gratification lies in trying to watch the movie that's running through the camera of his mind. That isn't easy. From his description, he's working for effects never achieved before, and possibly not by him either. He calls what we make “short subjects,” some of them only a few minutes long, but each seemingly drawn out of a vast backlog of planned films he has stored up over a lifetime.

Another job I've mastered: composing the titles for these brief novelties. I cut words from the films on hand, lay them out at random on the editing bench for him to ponder. He hovers over the scrambled language like an ancient sibyl searching to find the will of the gods in leafmeal or marrow shards. Then—“Aha!”—he hits upon something he likes and I go to work with magnifying glass and tweezers cementing the verbal confetti on a piece of selected film. I've become very quick and neat at this kindergarten task, though I have no idea what to make of the names he assigns to his productions.
My Favorite Executioner, Half a God Is Better Than One, The Punisher Who Loved Too Much, Beauty and the Beast Discover the Pleasures of Prohibition, The Devil Among the Daffodils.
Do the titles have any relationship to the films? I doubt it. I think he invented the job to keep me occupied.

From time to time, he draws a rusted oil can from under the editing bench; it contains a collection of bottles, boxes, pouches made from knotted rags. He calls it his “Special Effects Department”—a motley assortment of items he saves from our supplies or finds along the beaches. These he sets aside to stick, smear, or tape on film stock with the hope of producing strange visual results. He was overjoyed
to discover that I had a small tin of talcum powder in my shaving kit. Might he borrow some for his Special Effects Department, he asked eagerly. Take the whole tin, I told him. Talcum, it turns out, is among his favorite materials; under Scotch tape, he says, it will create the same ghostly atmosphere Carl Dreyer once achieved by blowing flour across his sets in
Vampyr.

Just the other day, I came upon him rummaging through the can; he brought out a rag packet containing a glittery dust. This he began sprinkling over a strip of film; then he cemented it down. He had a pile of the stuff on the bench; it looked like nearly microscopic, translucent sequins. “What's this?” I asked.

“Fly's wings,” he answered. “I've been catching them in the orchard. They get trapped in the fruit when it rots, thousands of them. The wings have a prismatic surface. Very ethereal. They will fill the screen with rainbows.”

Would they? He could only be guessing. I took his word for it, trying to imagine the effect as he must see it in his imagination. The movie he was adorning with his magic dust had the working title
High Marx for the Greatest Jesus Ever Sold.
He calls it “An antimonophysite political exposé farce.” He makes up genres like that, leaving me to wonder what the hell he's talking about. The film uses some of the most boring footage we've ever received: a Catholic instructional documentary on the making of communion wafers. Lots of nuns rolling dough. But cut into it is one of his most precious possessions: excerpts from
The Maltese Falcon.
Over the years he's acquired four or five scrappy prints of the movie, none of them complete. Now and then he hauls it out to retouch a scene here, a shot there. We've talked about the film several times.

“Huston never saw the possibilities of the story,” he complains. “He was so very pure, so reportorial. I gave him such good ideas. What a movie that could have been!”

So he's been making up for that ever since. Holding a piece of the film to the light, I saw it was a shot of the bird itself. He was flocking it with an iridescent gossamer coating. “It does catch the light,” I said, noticing the evanescent colors that shimmered against the emulsion.

“So much could be hidden in that light,” he sighed. “Movies within movies within movies.” Pointing to the cartons beneath the bench, he assured me, “If I could shoot my own scenes, I could bury all this—forty reels—in just three minutes of that light. The entire history
of human obsolescence packed into less time than it takes Abbott to tell Costello who's on first.”