I Don't Know How the Story Ends (12 page)

The Rescue

It was almost a week before circumstances converged to allow the kind of shooting Ranger wanted to do for Sam's innovation—“circumstances” meaning Jimmy Service's mood (or job), Mother's plans, Sam's work, the streetcar schedules, and the sun's disposition. In anticipation of which, Ranger explained to me how the double-exposure technique would work. We would shoot three scenes: one of Sylvie pleading with the villainous father to come home, one of me likewise pleading, and one of Ranger manfully confronting.

Villainous Father's part would be played unknowingly by Jimmy Service on the left side of the frame, which Sam would cover with a half-circle of black cardboard. Matching the action would not be difficult for the first two scenes, since the father was supposed to be ignoring us anyway. But Ranger's confrontation would be extremely tricky, because Mr. Service would have to show some response to the young man threatening to paste his ears back. Sam had taken note of his father's reactions as he shot them, and marked where they were on the film counter. Ranger would try to match them, and of course we would only be allowed one take of each scene.

But if all went well, when the film was developed it would appear that Jimmy Service had joined our company. “And what do you think his mood will be when he discovers that?” I asked.

“Who says he will?” Ranger replied, innocent-eyed.

Finally, on Wednesday afternoon the stars converged and we boarded the streetcar for Daisy Dell, where Sam was to meet us.

The boys had worked out when the light would best approximate the half of film that was already shot (four thirty) and planned to arrive early so we could find a spot as similar as possible to the beer garden. The stand of juniper that surrounded our shack would do.

While Sam peered through the viewfinder, Ranger marked the sandy ground with a carpenter's chalk line. “What's that for?” I asked him, as he snapped the string.

“That's the line we can't cross,” he replied, “or we'll disappear into the left side of the frame.” After winding up the string and putting the marker away, he coached Sylvie in how to plead with empty space, an idea she found difficult to grasp.

“Never mind,” Ranger said at last. “I'll stand in for the old man.” He hauled a rickety homemade stool from our props corner while Sam carefully fitted his cardboard mask over the left side of the lens, covering the half of film that was already exposed.

When he nodded, Ranger called, “Roll it!” Sam turned the crank, and Sylvie played to the hilt, wringing her hands and squinching up her eyes. Her vocabulary was limited: “Please come home, Papa. Please, please, please come home…” After about a minute, Sam reached around to close the shutter and cranked a few more turns while watching the counter. “Looks good.”

Ranger sat back with a heavy sigh, then jumped up and wrapped Sylvie in his arms.

“What about the ground?” I asked Sam, after he had stopped the film. “Will you have to tint out the floor too?”

He shook his head. “Won't show in a three-quarter shot. Camera's only got you from the knees up.”

Ranger called my name, and I trotted obediently out to perform my turn with “Papa.” He trusted I could do it without him standing proxy: “And you'd better keep a straight face while you're at it. Sylvie almost laughed a couple of times.”

“I did not!” she protested.

My pleading was more sedate, with good use made of a handkerchief twisted in my fingers and dabbed at my eyes. That take also seemed to go well, so Ranger was feeling confident when setting up for his confrontation scene. He rehearsed it a couple of times as Sam stood in for his father, self-consciously copying the actions he remembered.

When the shooting began, Ranger quickly worked up an air of indignation. In fact, it seemed to me he was overdoing it. But soon it didn't matter, for Sylvie found a half-grown kitten lurking among the trees and gave chase, and the feral feline led her diagonally right across the camera lens.

“
Cut
!
” Ranger yelled, followed by a few words I didn't even know.

Sylvie was devastated at her speedy fall from grace and tried to make it up to him by presenting the cat she'd managed to capture. But Kitty just scratched Ranger's face, and the situation was not improved until I had an idea.

“Why not shoot another scene in the house, where the youth comes to call, and Sylvie introduces him to the cat and it scratches him and… I tend to the cut on his face and we look at each other and…” My inspiration dried up at that point.

But Ranger calmed down enough to consider it. “What do you think, Sam?”

The cameraman, who had been taking some deep breaths to regain his composure after the shot was ruined, just tightened his lips and nodded shortly.

We shot two takes of the scene, and Ranger cheered up, even after getting a scratch on the other side of his face. No one seemed to notice that I had made my first original contribution to the picture—no one but me, that is—and I couldn't explain my inner glow on the way home.

A couple of days later Sam reported via telephone that the father-and-daughter scenes didn't look too bad, if something could be done to blend the backgrounds together. On Saturday afternoon Ranger disappeared until well after bedtime. Since he wasn't speaking to his father, he told Aunt Buzzy that he was helping a friend with a project. But I knew he was in the editing room at Vitagraph, hand-tinting frames with Sam until he was cross-eyed. I was the one who knocked on his bedroom door this time, after hearing him stumble down the hall.

“How does it look?” I asked.

“I have no idea.” He yawned, not otherwise moving from a sprawled position on his bed. “Couldn't see anything but dots. That's how we filled the space in between people and trees: lots 'n lots o' dots. Dots everywhere. But say, since you give a darn now and my brain is fried, help me figure out a way to save Sylvie's life.”

“Save her life? Is Sam still furious at her?”

“In the
picture
. Good night, Irene—hit that light on your way out, wouldja?”

• • •

Since our botched attempt at Santa Monica Beach, Ranger had given up the idea of rescuing Sylvie from drowning. Still, one of us had to be rescued from something. “What about a train?” he suggested the next morning. “Sylvie's playing on the tracks and doesn't see the locomotive thundering up, and I throw myself—”

“
No
,” I said. “A locomotive wouldn't allow for retakes. And neither would getting hit by one.”

Automobiles and other large moving objects had the same drawback, as did falling from great heights and plunging over waterfalls. Ranger came almost to his wit's end before hitting on a workable peril: “Sundance,” he told me a day later.

“Your horse? What about him?”

“That's how I'll rescue Sylvie.”

“Oh no,” I began. “You're not going to subject my little sister to…” But not quite sure to what Sylvie would be subject, I could not complete the sentence.

“See? You don't even know what I have in mind. You just know you're against it.”

“All right,” I conceded. “What do you have in mind?”

His eyes snapped with their usual combustiveness. “We can use the film Sam already shot of me on the horse. Here's how it goes: you and Sylvie are taking a walk in the pasture behind our house, and Sylvie's attacked by Bone.”

“Bone?” Sylvie was tighter with Ranger's dog than Ranger was himself. “He's her best friend!”

“I can fix that. Anyway, I'm riding my horse not far away and hear your bloodcurdling screams and ride to the rescue, leaping over obstacles—we've already got that on film, remember—and snatch her from the vicious creature's foaming jaws.”

“Can we use the part where you fall off?”

“Ha-ha. Say what you will, it's surefire, with no public places and perfectly safe.”

“But I thought you weren't allowed to ride yet.”

He rolled his eyes. “When did
that
ever stop Michelangelo?”

Surprisingly, Sylvie was the one with objections. She would have cheerfully posed in front of a roaring locomotive or floated to the edge of Thunder Falls—“But Bone's my friend! I don't want to make him mad at me.”

“You won't,” Ranger assured her. “The way I'm going to make him
act
mad is with catnip. The smell drives him crazy. We'll put some in your pocket—better make sure it's an old dress—and he'll be all over you. Mad with joy, really, but if you scream and act scared it'll look like he's mauling you.”

Of course, once he explained, Sylvie thought it sounded like fun.

Meanwhile, I had been thinking. “So if we use the film we already have, then the shots we need are of Sylvie and me walking, and one of Bone spotting us, and one of you galloping toward us. And one of you hearing the screams, just before cutting back to us. And Bone attacking Sylvie while I call for help and wring my hands. And if this is the first time we meet, we'll need—”

Ranger laughed, holding up a hand. “Don't tell me. I'm just the director. Why don't you write it all down—and make a copy for Sam, okay?”

So I became a scenario writer. It was easy: I just wrote the shots in order with what was to happen in each one and made an extra copy for Ranger to deliver to Sam. More days went by before all the necessary elements lined up again, but we didn't have to travel far this time—just to the back lot behind the hacienda.

We would have to work fast to get all our shots in before eleven, when the light would be too glaring, so Sam was already set up by the time the rest of us arrived. Ranger was wearing the old Boy Scout uniform (that was already tight on him) and leading Sundance. Sylvie was in charge of Bone, and I came last, toting necessary props and supplies in a knapsack. These included a pistol, a riding crop, a plug of catnip, and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

Sam greeted us with, “Better hurry. Dad's only working 'til noon today.”

“Couldn't you say you needed the camera for cleanup shots?” I asked.

“If I don't say, he can't refuse.”

“Let's get cracking,” Ranger said. “What's your angle for the first shot, Sam?”

The setup was amazingly short—due, I say in all modesty, to the scenarios I had written out. We would do the scenes with Sylvie, me, and Bone first, then the two of us expressing our gratitude to Ranger, then Ranger solemnly pulling a revolver and shooting the mad dog.

That was not in the scenario I wrote, but Ranger put it in over Sylvie's objection, after assuring her over and over that the gun would be loaded with blanks and wouldn't be pointed at Bone anyway. I wasn't too comfy with a gun either, especially a real one. It belonged to Titus Bell, who had taught Ranger to use it. At least Ranger said so. At any rate, he insisted we needed it for realism.

The hydrogen peroxide was for making Bone's mouth foam like a real mad dog's. The first dose made him choke because he had the bad sense to swallow most of it. What remained fizzed over his jaws and dripped convincingly, even though he looked a little too happy while “attacking.” Ranger was right about the catnip though. Bone charged with such abandon that Sylvie was truly alarmed, and her cries for help sounded so real that I thought it a shame pictures couldn't be made with sound.

Next, with Bone safely tied to a stake in the ground some yards away, Ranger modestly accepted our thanks. He also insisted that I make eyes at him, since this was supposed to be our first meeting. I wasn't sure I knew how to “make eyes,” so I narrowed them and looked sideways at him, as though inconspicuously checking his shirt for gravy stains, while Ranger grandly took no notice.

When it came time to shoot the dog, Sylvie cringed and covered her eyes while I turned half away with one hand lifted—very theatrical. Standing between us, Ranger raised and steadied the revolver with both hands. Aimed directly at the camera, the pistol roared.

“Cripes!” Sam jumped as though he'd been hit, though the crank never stopped turning. “Good thing you warned me.”

“Cut,” Ranger said and waited until Sam closed the lens cover before asking, “How'd it look?”

“Perfect. Flashed like a cannon.”

Sylvie and I were trembling, the retort still ringing in our ears. “Sam, you didn't even stop!” she exclaimed in wonder.

“The camera
never
stops,” he said solemnly.

He next turned his lens on Bone to establish what Ranger was shooting at. Newly dosed with hydrogen peroxide, the dog was supposed to look fierce but he mostly looked curious.

Then it was Sundance's turn. Since we already had film of the thrilling ride to our rescue, all the horse had to do was gallop to the spot and slow his pace while Ranger reached down with his riding crop. Sylvie was to grab the crop and use it for leverage while Ranger got a better grip on her with his other hand before sweeping her away to safety. Since we were short on time and everybody, including the horse, seemed clear on their part, Ranger proposed to do it without rehearsal. He swung into the saddle, folded his glasses into his pocket, and trotted away to a spot well behind the camera.

Rescues are easier said than done, it's safe to say. On the first take, Sylvie missed the riding crop altogether, and the second time she grabbed it but almost pulled Ranger out of the saddle when he didn't anticipate her weight. (She is small but dense.) The third attempt failed when her foot missed the stirrup and Sundance galloped away with a little girl hanging onto the pommel, legs dangling and bloomers showing. In a real rescue no one would mind about bloomers, but on film it would look silly.

“Are you sure you don't need some rehearsal?” I asked.

“I've only got fifteen minutes,” Sam called.