Kino (25 page)

Mina bit her lip. She wondered if
Pirates
ever stood a chance at all. There must have been a moment when everything still hung in the balance, when things still might have worked out. She knew better than to wish for a different ending to the story. She reminded herself that she already knew how it ended.

“It was disastrous, and I should have seen it coming. I was a fool. Instead of betting a few million on a decent adventure movie, I staked my career on Kino's masterpiece. Within days, Klaus was manic. He'd gone off schedule and off script, rewriting scenes in the middle of the night, presenting his actors with new dialogue each morning. I don't think he slept at all. He was improvising again. There was a new drug making the rounds, something a friend of Cary Grant's had brought down in a little vial. It wasn't like the opium we used to smoke, cushy and cheerful. It was acid, and it made everything more real rather than less. Everybody got high on it. The actors were afraid of their own shadows, hiding behind the set, jumping in the surf naked, dancing all night, banging on drums and drinking tequila. We all felt like we were teetering on the edge of revelation. Kino got rid of his hand-crafted prosthetic leg and strapped on a crude prop peg leg.”

Mina couldn't help but laugh at the image. She thought of her own burst of anarchy at her wedding reception, but this was on an entirely different scale. Marty furrowed his brow, and she caught herself. “Please,” she said, suppressing another chuckle. “Go on.”

Marty hesitated. None of this was funny to him. “People stayed in costume at all times, and even the crew started wearing pirate outfits. The camera always seemed to be on, and we wasted a shameful amount of stock. The budget ballooned, and still, I didn't see what I had to do. 'Trust me, Marty,‘ Kino would say to me, 'trust me! It's all going to come together in the editing room!‘ And I wanted to believe him so much, I let the madness go on. Kino was gripped by a vision, and he would not compromise. 'Only at play are we open to our full potential!‘ he would shout. ‘Art is pleasure! If it's not fun, why bother?' I'm lucky nobody died. He even wrote a part for himself and he acted in a few scenes–the ghost of Grapefruit Silko. It was ludicrous.”

Marty had talked himself into a state, and Mina squirmed on her stool. It wasn't her fault that her grandfather had been out of control, but somehow she felt complicit. She knew that if she had been there, she wouldn't have stopped Kino either.

“He came into my room one night, woke me from a deep sleep, and told me he changed the title of the movie. Now he wanted to call it
Twenty-Twelve, Or The Hair-Raising Adventures of Captain Darius Silko, Heir of Mulberry Island and Leader of His Legendary Crew of Anti-Corporate Pirates of the Gaia II and Their Friends and Protectors, the Noble Mayan Nation of Xunantanich and Their Spiritual Descendents.
”

Marty paused, waiting for a response. “That'd be hard to fit on a poster,” Mina said. Marty nodded, satisfied.

“Maybe he could get away with that shit at Ufa,” he said, “but it was career suicide in Hollywood. He dressed up crew members in white robes and gave them roles. He was banging Katz's girlfriend. I didn't wake up until I realized he was preparing to torch the entire set on the last day of shooting. The pirate wedding was supposed to be the film's happy ending, but Kino wanted mayhem instead: a riot, a battle, and a fire that would destroy the buildings. Now, a shoot like that wants to be carefully planned, but Kino just wanted to keep the cameras rolling and see what was going to happen.”

“He had a thing for fire.”

“I don't care. Lives were at stake. There was no excuse for this. I might've been able to ignore the orgies, the improvised whims, the wasted stock, but when I saw the crew dousing the set in gasoline, something in me snapped. I was done fronting for Kino. I tried talking sense into him but there was no arguing with him. He threatened to have ‘the shamans' take care of me. He'd completely lost touch with reality. The whole thing was ridiculous, and yes, I called the front office and let them know that the production had gone off the rails.”

Mina couldn't contain her disappointment. “You ratted him out!” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Schnark stirred and shook his head.

Marty held her gaze. “I betrayed him, yes. I had given him this opportunity, and then I took it away. Kino had his assistants lock me into a trailer while he set fire to the set. The crew torched everything and Kino filmed his grand finale. It was a miracle no one got hurt. A few hours later, Katz himself arrived by water plane. He found a stoned debauch on the beach, his set destroyed, and his producer locked up. He stopped the production immediately, ordered everybody back to L.A., and demanded to see dailies.”

“Wow,” Mina said. “Busted.”

“Yes, wow. Kino was furious. ‘I had my film shut down before, and I will never allow it to happen again, you money-grubbing dilettantes! At least Goebbels had taste!' and so on. In the end, he had no choice but to relent. He realized that screening an unfinished answer print for Katz was his only chance to save his movie. He refused to talk to me, but I was there, two weeks later, when the top brass at Paramount gathered at Katz's mansion to screen the rough cut of
Twenty-Twelve.
Your grandfather was still wearing his goddamn peg leg.”

“Penny thought that Kino was at his best in the editing room,” Mina said. “She said that's where he worked his magic.”

“Maybe. But what he had cobbled together for Katz that day was a three-and-a-half-hour long disaster. The picture I had approved was a swashbuckling romance: sea battles and a grand love story and so on. I knew things had gone crazy in Mexico, but I had hoped he'd be able to salvage the footage. What he showed us was entirely different.”

“No good?” Mina asked. “None of it?”

“We expected missing scenes and rough editing, that would have been acceptable. But Kino had changed the story. In this version, the handsome pirate captain had turned into a villain. Silko kidnapped Bonnie and took her to his mist-shrouded hideout, and he showed a taste for retribution and violence that certainly wasn't in the original script. There was talk about ‘destabilizing the financial system,' and brand-new scenes about a below-deck conspiracy against Silko. Once the Gaia landed on the island, Bonnie was drawn into increasingly tangled pirate council politics, with long discussions about Silko's greed for power and treasure, and what was to be done to defend the constitution of Mulberry Island. It barely resembled the script Kino had handed me in the cab, and it didn't work. My heart sank deeper every time Katz shifted in his seat. It was ponderous and boring. And then it got weirder: on an excursion into the wilderness, Bonnie discovered that the Indians living on the island were descendants of a lost Mayan civilization. They were a tribe of shamans whose prophecies and drug-induced dreams took up a big part of the narrative.”

“And that's not what you signed on for,” Mina said.

“Damned tootin‘. As the movie went on, editing, storytelling, and direction got more and more haphazard. Kino's methods had gotten the better of him. Worst of all, there was no ending. The last half hour barely made sense, a jumbled mess of incoherent scenes intercut with shots from the fire and mayhem he shot that last day, along with scenes he seemed to have swiped from other movies, bits and pieces from assembled newsreels, loose ends he found around the editing room. He even put the Cuban Missile Crisis into the film.”

“No shit?” Mina said.

“Language,
Mädchen
,” Schnark said. It was the first time he'd spoken since they sat down.

Marty ignored them both. “From what I could gather, Silko's own men attempt to assassinate him during the pirate wedding and Mulberry Cove is burnt to the ground. There was an incomprehensible voice-over by one of the Mayans, and I have no idea what happened to his bride, Bonnie. She disappeared. It was a mess.”

Mina wished that she could have seen that movie. Maybe it was the effect of jumping into the pool, or the jetlag, or the lingering effect of the red pills and the coffee, but what Marty described did not sound like the disaster he was making it out to be. She didn't say anything though, and Marty went on.

“Katz was outraged. He stormed out of the screening room before the lights had come back on, cursing like a
Schiffschaukelbremser
. And that was the end of
my
career, too.”

“I am sorry,” Mina said. Somehow, she felt responsible. “So sorry.”

Marty sighed. “Katz took Kino off the picture and fired me. After that night, I never worked in movies again. Thirty years in the industry, over. They had some hack write a new script, reshot a few scenes, and went with the original title.
The Pirates of Mulberry Island
was released in the summer of 1963, and let me tell you, it was a piece of shit.”

“The beginning seemed pretty good,” Mina said.

“It was shit,” Marty repeated. “I'd given Kino a stellar opportunity, and he thanked me by ruining my career. He'd blown it for both of us. Now he'd truly lost everything–even hope.”

Mina remembered what Penny had told her about Kino's brains on the movie screen. She was surprised Kino had even gone to the premiere. That they had let him.

“What gets me,” Marty continued, “is that he must have known what was going to happen. I don't know why he ruined the movie the way he did, why he stopped caring about success. It wasn't the shotgun blast that killed him, it was the movie–and I gave him the movie. I despised myself.”

Mina wasn't sure what to say. Marty had gotten Kino into
Pirates
, let him do as he pleased, and then betrayed him. How different would things have turned out if he hadn't called Katz down to Mexico on the last day of shooting?

Marty was waiting for her to say something, but when she didn't, he made a grimace and went on. “I spent a lot of time replaying Kino's final film in my head–not the botched
Pirates
, but
Twenty-Twelve
, the rough cut he screened for us. I know now that he'd done the only thing he could have. Back behind a camera for the first time in twenty years, he tried to pack everything into this one film, all of his disappointed hopes, his accumulated grief, his wildest ambitions. He turned it into something we weren't ready for, using every trick he had learned, from the expressionists, from the Nazi masters of propaganda, from the commercials, from decades of obsessive viewing.
Twenty-Twelve
contained bits and pieces from earlier stories, scenes pilfered from his other movies, and a strange private mythology. It was reality-warping and prophetic.”

“Tell her about the assassination,” Schnark said.

Marty gave a sigh. “You want to bring that up?”

“Tell the girl the whole story. That's why we are here.”

“In one of the final scenes of the cut Kino screened for us that night, Silko and Bonnie are riding through Mulberry Cove in a horse-drawn carriage. The mutineers send a sharpshooter who tries to pick him off with a musket.” He paused. “Do you see?”

Mina shook her head no.

“This was months before Dallas, and it was shot from exactly the same angle as the Zapruder film.”

Now Mina understood. “Wait,” she said. “You're saying
Twenty-Twelve
predicted the Kennedy assassination? That's just crazy. Besides, in here–” she petted the journal “–he does talk about another murder, in the 1920 s, that happened the same way. Somebody was shot in a convertible. It's just a coincidence. Movies can't predict the future.”

“You're thinking of Walter Rathenau,” Marty said testily. He didn't like being contradicted. “He was killed point-blank from another car, and there was a hand grenade.”

Schnark leaned forward in his armchair. “Have you noticed anything since you watched
Tulpendiebe
?” he asked. “Moments of…overlap?”

“I haven't had a good night's sleep in I don't know how long,” Mina said. “I couldn't tell you what's real and what isn't if my life depended on it.”

“Maybe we can agree that movies can be mind-altering,” Schnark said, “and Kino was a visionary, one of the greats.”

Mina nodded.
Movies like drugs
–who had said that to her? She didn't know what to believe anymore. The Zapruder film? It was all getting more absurd and more intriguing by the minute. She wished Sam could have been there with her, just so she could hear how serious these men were. Dr. Hanno, Penny, they all agreed that there had been something extraordinary about Kino. Mina was surprised by how proud Schnark seemed. She wished she could watch
Tulpendiebe
again.

“Over the years,” Marty said, “I've seen snippets of
Twenty-Twelve
everywhere. Your grandfather's last movie anticipated Kubrick, Brakhage, Malick, Lynch. It was a new kind of movie, unfinished, but bigger and truer than anything I'd ever seen. For decades I sat on the suspicion that your grandfather had been on to something marvelous. Cinema promises infinite possibilities, but in reality, it's a factory product. A movie passes through so many hands, and there's so much money at stake, that when you're done you're barely able to remember why you wanted to make it in the first place. Kino tried to stuff something entirely new down our throats.
Twenty-Twelve
was a movie long before its time, and I've come to see its failure as an inconceivable loss.”

“I would have liked to see it.”

Schnark nodded. “You're not the only one,
Mädchen
. You're not the only one.”

Mina rubbed her face and took a deep breath. “Thank you for telling me all of this–it's a tragic story. But none of it explains what happened to me. Where did the print of
Tulpendiebe
in my apartment come from? Who stole it in Berlin? And why are these agents still after me, MPAA, Halliburton, or whatever they are?”

“Well,” Marty said, choosing his words with deliberation. “Within certain circles, Kino's work has taken on something of a reputation. There are people in powerful positions who have first-hand knowledge of the
Twenty-Twelve
rough cut, people who would be very curious to see it. Katz's nephew is running Paramount now. They know Kino's films would have changed everything. Unconsciously or not, Hollywood has mined your grandfather's final vision ever since. If
Twenty-Twelve
was released today, it might ruin an industry built on one or two ideas per movie, castrated versions of what's possible. Back then, it could have caused a revolution, mass hysteria, I don't know what.”