Jack and Susan in 1913 (8 page)

They rose to the third floor and emerged into a large low room that was quite reminiscent of a factory, with a strong odor of chemicals. Men in long dirty white aprons ran about in a general air of barely controlled frenzy. One of these men stopped long enough to stare at them in a way that plainly asked their business. “We're here to see Mr. Collamore,” said Mr. Beaumont.

The man stuck out an upraised thumb, which signified
up
. Susan and Mr. Beaumont got back into the elevator.

“Shall we try four?” Susan suggested.

On the fourth floor was clearly the business end of the operation, for here telephones were ringing—five of them on a single desk, behind which sat a sullen young boy. Susan was certain it was he who had been so rude to her the previous day. Messenger boys in blue uniforms waited about, apparently for canisters of film to be taken out to the various theaters, while several harried-looking young women clattered away at typewriters. Two fat men stood in one corner in close conversation, punctuating their exchange with lighted cigars. Obviously they were the most important people in the room, since they were the only ones not working.

“Mr. Collamore,” said Jack to the boy at the telephone desk.

He wordlessly held up a hand with all his fingers splayed. Fifth floor.

The fifth floor was at the top of the building, and there skylights were set at a height of over thirty feet. As a result, the space was filled with intense sunlight. The room was, in its way, as active as the floors below, but here there was a difference. Susan was acquainted with the back-stage area of a legitimate theater, so she was not surprised to see bits of scenery about: drawing-room interiors, stone walls, great bushes in tiny pots, corners of city buildings, doorways of rustic cottages, and flats and canvases representing a seashore, a majestic mountain chain, a field of growing cotton.

The sense of being in a factory was enhanced, not lessened, by her perception of how moving pictures were made here. The only thing that looked the same to her as in the legitimate theater were the actors going through their scenes—but in what a peculiar fashion!

In one corner was a couple spooning in a rowboat set in a tin tub of water hardly larger than the boat itself, and the passing scenery unrolled behind them on a painted canvas. Only ten feet away a desperate struggle ensued in what looked like an opium den, with a dissolute woman defending her lover against the police, the latter having just broken through a pasteboard door with axes and shotguns. And ten feet away on the other side a quadrille was being performed, in old-fashioned costumes, to the tune of “Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow-Wow” played on an accordion just out of camera range by a very young girl with a shriveled leg.

In front of each of these varied scenes were the strange moving-picture cameras. They looked rather like big boxes with a tube at the front and a handle at the side. Behind each camera hunched a young man, earnestly turning the crank and watching the action through some sort of viewer. Susan recognized the man filming the opium den scene as Hosmer Collamore, and after a moment she picked out Ida Conquest as the lady in the yellow panniers and powdered wig at the center of the quadrille.

Besides the cameraman, each scene had a kind of stage director, shouting directions at the players, and a musician, to set the mood of the piece. Above the music and the shouted commands of the directors and the improvised dialogue of the players, was the hissing of the massive arc lamps that supplemented the daylight coming through the glass roof. In another portion of the room, carpenters built more sets and painters worked on various canvases. Everything was noise and confusion. It was a wonder to Susan that the actors could concentrate at all, or convey with any conviction the sense that they were trapped in an opium den deep beneath a city street.

“Miss Nethersole,” called out the director to the wanton lady in the opium den, “please, when you faint, will you simply fall to the floor? Do not fall on to the couch, even though it is softer. I want you on the floor. Mr. Westermeade, please do not step on Miss Nethersole's head as you are murdering Mr. Perks. Mr. Perks, please die quickly today, we've not yet gone into three reels. So would you mind—oh, no—stop the action.”

He'd been interrupted by Hosmer, who'd suddenly stopped turning the crank on his camera. Something appeared to have gone wrong with the instrument. The director threw up his hands and turned away with a sigh of disgust.

Miss Nethersole got up off the floor and lay down on the divan, while Mr. Perks—one of the policemen—sat at the end and tickled her bare feet. Mr. Westermeade, the dissolute lady's dissolute lover, took out a harmonica and softly played an old Stephen Foster melody. The other actors wandered off toward a table laden with plates of food and an urn of coffee.

The other two scenes, on either side, went on uninterrupted.

“Who are you?” the stage director suddenly demanded of Susan and Mr. Beaumont, whom he'd nearly wandered into.

“We are friends of Mr. Collamore,” said Mr. Beaumont, “and he asked us to visit him today.”

“Well, there he is, having just ruined that entire act, so that the whole thing will have to be done over. Props!” the stage director called out suddenly, “get us a new door and reload those pistols.”

Susan and Mr. Beaumont went over to Hosmer, who had pulled open the side of the camera, exposing the film inside.

“I lost it,” he said with a grimace.

“Let me see,” said Mr. Beaumont, peering into the workings of the camera. “Do you know what happened?”

“The film slipped from the sprockets and jammed,” said Hosmer dismally. “This is the second time this week. The first time it was during the filming of a burning building down on Houston Street. No props man to set
that
one up again.”

Mr. Beaumont turned the camera on its side so that light from above spilled into the interior. “Hosmer,” he asked, “do you happen to have an old camera like this one around? One with the same parts?”

Hosmer glanced at Susan and said, “You see, Suss, I told you he was a tinkerer.” With that Hosmer hurried away toward the other side of the enormous room.

“Suss?” Mr. Beaumont inquired with raised brows.

“No,” she replied, “Susan, Susan, Susan. Never Suss.”

“I promise I will never call you Suss if you will call me Jack,” said Mr. Beaumont. He turned away, toward the rowboat scene, but not before Susan caught yet another blush mounting his cheeks. The reddening skin actually seemed to turn his beard darker.

After a few minutes, Hosmer returned, carrying two battered cameras, one over each shoulder. “Trust men,” he explained mysteriously, putting the cameras down.

“Trust men?” echoed Jack, tugging at the side plate of one of the beat-up cameras.

“The Trust men are hooligans hired by the Patents Trust—the nine companies who control all the motion picture patents. They try to break up independent operations like ours, because they feel we're infringing on 'em. Come in at night, expose our film, smash our cameras, tear our canvas.” Hosmer shook his head ruefully. “I got hit on the head once, and they're promising to do more soon. This is their work, these cameras.”

“Why don't you just go to work for a company with patents instead, then?” asked Jack simply. He'd borrowed a screwdriver from a passing workman and was prying loose a geared wheel on the inside of the camera.

“Because they're boring stick-in-the-muds,” said Hosmer. “They're still going to be doing one-reelers in 1933. Lord, Tom Edison is still filming on a rooftop over in New Jersey, and when it rains everybody has to run inside. The Patents are like a velocipede with dented wheels, and the independents are like a big red sixty-horsepower automobile.”

This last sounded to Susan very much like something that Hosmer had heard or read somewhere rather than something he came up with on the spur of the moment.

“Also,” Hosmer admitted after a moment, “the independents pay better. They pay the players better, and they pay their cameramen better, and pretty soon—”

“Pretty soon what?” asked Jack, handing back the first camera. “This one's no good,” he added parenthetically, and took the second one and began work on that.

“Pretty soon,” said Hosmer, “the independents are going to be on top, and the Trust will be coming to us for help and advice. I think it's probably happening already.”

By this time, the quadrille was finished and the actors were told to take a break while the setting was being altered. Ida Conquest, after spending some moments talking with the director, wandered over to the little group gathered about the broken cameras.

Ida pulled her wig off and beat it against the side of her massive costume. White powder billowed into the air and a fair amount of it was deposited on Susan's skirt.

“Lord, Suss,” she said, “is that you? On two feet?”

Jack Beaumont glanced up over the top of the camera at Ida briefly, but then he went back to his business.

Susan was surprised that she felt a little inward murmur of relief at Jack's apparent indifference to Ida's considerable physical charms. Conquest wasn't that girl's name so much as it was the way she lived her life.

“Yes,” said Susan to Ida, “I'm fascinated by this entire business. I watched you, Ida, and it seemed to me you were quite splendid.”

“It's a wonderful part,” Ida admitted. “One I've been aching for ever since I was tapped for the
Follies
.”

“Miss Conquest is playing Martha Washington,” said Hosmer.

“It's a historical episode,” said Ida complacently. “That was the wedding dance you saw. Next we're doing the scene where General Lafayette asks me to go back to France and be a countess and Mr. Washington comes in and I pretend the reason the general is on his knees is that he is showing me a picture of his little boys back home and then when Mr. Washington leaves I tell the general I can never go with him to France because number one, I am married, and number two, I have eighteen children of my own and couldn't leave them behind. I have this stemmy blue frock and wear flowing ribbons down my back.”

Susan and Jack exchanged repressed smiles.

“Miss Conquest appears very elegant and refined on celluloid,” said Hosmer. “Next week, we will all go to the theater and see her.”

“So soon?” said Susan.

“We shoot this week, and on Saturday and Sunday the film will be developed, printed, and put together in proper sequence. On Monday copies will be made, and on Tuesday they will be delivered to the New York theaters and will go by mail to every theater in the country where Cosmic pictures are shown. Next week, all of Kansas City will be talking of nothing but Miss Conquest, the new Cosmic star, in her role as the mother of our nation.”

“I don't doubt it for a moment,” said Susan, and in her heart she did rather believe it.

“Hosmer,” said Jack, holding up a narrow toothed wheel, “here was your problem. This crack here.” He twisted the wheel between his hands, and a tiny gap could be seen in the metal. “Once in a while, when your rhythm in turning the crank was off, the film dragged on this, the sprockets got out of alignment, and the whole business was gone. I've switched wheels, and from now on the thing ought to go right.”

Delighted, Hosmer thanked Mr. Beaumont profusely, then loaded the exposed film in the repaired camera and ran it quickly through without a hitch, proving that the job had been done properly. While doing this, Hosmer introduced Miss Conquest to Mr. Beaumont. Ida smiled a quick, cold smile. Cold and quick was all that was due, in her estimation, to a mere mechanic, friend of Mr. Collamore's or not.

The stage director returned, still not in a pleasant frame of mind. He said to Hosmer, “If you're quite finished with your friends, Colley—”

“My friend here fixed the camera, Mr. Fane. I'm sure it won't give us any more trouble.”

The director's expression instantly changed to one of surprise, and then it deepened into satisfaction. “Thank you,” he said politely to Jack. “I take it you are mechanically adept?”

“Yes,” replied Jack. “And in fact, if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to work on a couple of these smashed-up jobs and see what I can do with them.”

“By all means,” said Mr. Fane magnanimously. “By all means take away as much broken machinery as you please, Mr.—”

“Beaumont.”

“I'll bring them uptown this evening,” Hosmer offered.

“Yes,” said Mr. Fane blandly, already walking away. “Now Colley—”

Hosmer hurried after the man, and Jack looked about the Cosmic factory. “Have you seen enough?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Susan, and then added in a quiet voice, “did you ever hear such nonsense as that ‘historical episode'?”

“No,” he laughed, “I never did.”

“I could do better than that,” said Susan.

“Then give it a try,” said Jack. “I think Hosmer told me Mr. Fane pays twenty dollars apiece for his picture stories.”

A
S JACK TURNED and started to lead Susan back toward the elevator, she suddenly said, “Oh, just a moment, please. I'd like to have a look at this.” She was gazing in the direction of the spooners in the rowboat in the tin tub.

Susan recognized the actor—a great, funny fat man called Manfred Mixon. Susan had seen enough of the countless Cosmic productions to realize that this was yet another comic epic in which an impecunious Mixon wooed a spinster for her money. With only slight variations, that seemed to be the plot of every one of his improbable farces, and the endings were of two sorts: he was driven out of the woman's life ignominiously, or he ended up chained to her at a wedding ceremony, wondering if he really had got the better of the bargain.

“I could
certainly
write one of these,” Susan said, casually picking up the typewritten scenario that lay face up on the director's table. The cameraman, the director, the actors, and all the others were paying attention only to what was going on in the scene. Turning a little in order to use Jack as a shield, Susan folded the pages, slipped them into her wrist bag, then began hobbling slowly away toward the elevator.