Passing Through the Flame (64 page)

And all at once, this was just another fuck film, and Gentry was just another greasy fuck-film stud. Paul and she were the real sexual connection on the set, and she knew she could take his direction all day, could do anything she had to with Gentry’s body and make it look good.

Gentry’s body pressed against hers, and his tongue slid slowly into her mouth, and he even moaned a little. Velva knew in some dim corner of her mind that Gentry was tasting Paul in the fantasy he was into, but what went on in his disgusting excuse for a mind didn’t bother her, it didn’t matter. As far as she was concerned, Rick Gentry was just meat. Just another spaced-out stud in another fuck film session. Some of those guys had been faggots too.

Paul watched the kiss go on, watched Velva move down to nibble at Gentry’s neck as the script required, felt ectoplasmic lips at his own throat. Gentry, following the script, rolled over on top of her, her mouth under his, her body moving under his rotating pelvis—and Paul had a ghastly phantom-limb sensation of being under Gentry, of a man’s body grinding against his intimate parts.

And he knew full well that that was what Gentry intended him to feel, that that was what Gentry himself was fantasizing at this very moment. I’m being raped, he realized. In a very real way. I’m being raped by both of them. They’re competing with each other to see who does it better.

But I’m not just standing here like a victim; I’m holding up my end of the game. I’m letting them do it, maybe I’m even encouraging it, and I’m getting my footage. You could even call this take good.

He let it go on a little longer, making sure he had plenty of coverage, because there was no way he was going to get a take this good again. No way he could stand to shoot it over, even if he could make this work again.
Especially
if he could make this work again.

It seemed a century until he felt able to say “Cut!”

The camera stopped, and quiet descended on the set like a lead curtain. Rick Gentry and Velva rolled away from each other, panting. They both looked straight at him.

Velva’s eyes were hot and friendly, the way he remembered them from their weeks together. She was that rare item, a really friendly fuck, and at this moment he had to admit she looked pretty good to him, even though that had been her calculated intention. Because it was a friendly kind of calculation.

But Paul saw nothing on Gentry’s face but wicked triumph and trebly twisted lust.

The crew broke the heavy silence with too-loud babbling and a lot of abrupt moving around, more than was really necessary, as if sound and motion would dissolve the memory of what they had witnessed, rid them of their embarrassment.

“That’s a take,” Paul called out. “Velva, Rick, take a break. Harry, set up the lighting for the morning-after scene.” His knees felt weak, his heart was pounding, and his body was clammy with sweat.

Maybe the crew has the right idea, he thought. Maybe we can forget how we got that footage just by changing the set and getting ready to shoot something else. All that exists now is some footage of Rick and Velva making love, good footage, what we need. If we ignore how we got it, maybe it didn’t really happen that way. All that will last is what’s on the film.

He staggered away from the set in the general direction of the john, into a corridor between stacks of old flats, pulling his bag of almonds and apricots out of his pocket on the fly. Emmett Francis managed to follow him while still seeming to move at his usual unruffled pace.

“Quiet a take you got there, Paul,” he said slowly, causing Paul to stop, turn, and look into his calm, even face. And breathe deeply. And remember that that was the basic truth of the matter. And slow down his energy output and rest.

“It did have something, didn’t it, Emmett?”

“Oh, yeah, it sure did have something. Seems like you got a bear by the tail. Seems like maybe you got a couple of ‘em.”

“As long as
they
don’t grab my tail, it’s all right.”

“Well, it’s one way of gettin’ a movie made when the casting director’s thrown you some curves,” Emmett said. “Seen it work a number of times. But you better watch out, if you ask me. I reckon it wouldn’t be any great hardship on you to satisfy your leading lady’s expectations. But now, that Rick Gentry, he’s a bird of a different feather.”

“Emmett, believe me, I’m not going to give Rick Gentry any chances to corner me,” Paul said, putting some apricots and almonds into his mouth, working the tenseness out of his jaws on the crunchy nuts and the tacky dried fruit.

“A wise notion, Paul, a wise notion. I tell you, I don’t envy you your job here, seems to me they almost want you to fail. But I do want to tell you I admire the way you’ve been handling it, I admire your talent. And I admire your nerve. I got t’go check on those grips.”

He turned and walked back toward the set, leaving Paul pleased, and touched, and redetermined not to let anything stop him from making
Sunset City
something he wouldn’t be ashamed to claim credit for.

Until the shooting was over, nothing mattered more than the film.

The blood-thrumming guttural clatter of the helicopter blades sent a sensual thrill through Paul Conrad as he looked down from the bubble canopy, eager to see what Jango Beck had wrought in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Below were rolling dry-green hills, sparsely dotted with clumps of trees, sere and shadeless in the hot September sun. The helicopter passed north across the two-lane road that led back into the San Fernando Valley and the Ventura Freeway. Tomorrow morning, no doubt, it would be one long nightmare traffic jam. Fencing that had run along the north side of the road had been torn down, and the huge roped-off parking area was already dotted with tiny toy cars and vans. By tomorrow afternoon, it would be a brilliant sheet of multicolored metal. Paul made a mental note to get some good helicopter footage of the parking lot.

“Tremendous traffic snarl tomorrow,” Paul shouted at Jango Beck, who was scrunched between him and the pilot in the crowded three-place helicopter.

“Gonna one-way the road. Easy access to the parking lot. Highway patrol to direct traffic. Mucho grease!” Beck grinned at him like a kid showing off his new set of trains, knowing he had the biggest layout on the block.

A dirt track bisected the parking area, winding deeper into the Sunset Ridge Ranch, and the helicopter passed over a barbed-wire perimeter as it veered over the west wing of the parking lot. Inside the perimeter, Paul could make out rows of tents, a couple of dozen cars, and two fairly large helicopters. Must be the security force compound, he thought. Looks awful ominous....

“Climb for altitude,” Beck shouted at the pilot. “Want to give you the big picture.”

The pitch of the rotor sounded stuttered and changed to another note, and the helicopter climbed steeply at about a seventy-degree angle as it continued northwest at reduced forward speed, giving Paul a breathtaking flash of its three-dimensional mobility, of what a fantastic camera platform of the helicopter Beck had fitted out for the film was going to make. What a filmmaker’s wet dream it was to have a helicopter at your unlimited disposal for four days. And a set like this to play around with!

Looking down again, Paul saw that they were over a system of wide roped-off radial paths converging on a theoretical point over the next ridgeline. A ring road formed the southern boundary of the radial network, a parallel arc with the ridgeline to the north, creating an area like a half-doughnut cut up into slices.

Both sides of the radial roads were lined with tents, stands, lean-tos, rides, and all the minor appurtenances of carnival midways. The arc of road around the southern rim of this vast area was much wider than the radial arteries, and both sides were choked with a phantasmagorical wonderland of tents, rude geodesic domes, shacks, tepees, flash and clutter; a riot of reds, chartreuses, day-glo orange, candy stripes, metallic glitter, arabesques and speed-freak swirlings—a picture postcard of Middle Earth as conceived by Marshall McLuhan on acid. There were larger domes and surrealistic weirdly shaped major structures clustered around the intersections of the ring road and the radial arteries like gas stations around the main drag intersections of some San Fernando Valley of the twenty-fifth century.

“What is all that?” Paul shouted at Beck.

“People’s World’s Fair,” Beck shouted back. “Industrial exhibits plus free space for freaks.” He beamed at Paul. “Great place to shoot, right?”

“Right!” Paul shouted back. My God, what a set this is! What a movie I can shoot here! With a helicopter and the camera units and equipment Beck’s providing for me to play Cecil B. DeMille with. To hell with the shit I’ve got in the can! If I can’t make a great film with this setup, I don’t deserve another chance.

The helicopter passed over great campgrounds between the radial paths. Mobile toilets and water tanks were set up in profusion at regular intervals and hundreds of campsites were already pitched, tiny flesh-colored figures sunning themselves around their gear.

The pilot brought the helicopter down on the deck as it began to climb the slope of the northern ridge, and as they crested the long curving ridgeline, the north slope fell away into a huge, gently sloped natural amphitheater, as if an enormous crater had been partially filled and softened by aeons of time’s silt into a mere suggestion of itself, this central meadow in the midst of low rolling hills.

It was breathtaking from this angle, popping into sudden sight as you crested the ridge, and Paul decided that he would take at least one good long helicopter shot from just this angle tomorrow, late in the afternoon, when this great bowl would be jammed with wall-to-wall people.

The helicopter thrummed across the saucer toward the round stage tower at its center, and Paul saw that the entire area was covered with a gridwork of telephone poles set about thirty yards apart. Each pole supported horn-type speakers in omnidirectional sets of four and at the base of each was a water fountain and a portable toilet. Paul had never heard of a rock festival being laid out like this, with so many toilets and fountains, with so many speakers. It was lavishly thoughtful, a harbinger of good vibes.

The circular stage in the center of the amphitheater was raised thirty feet off the ground on a network of steel girders. Four spidery light towers hovered over the stage platform, and the bottom of the platform was a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree rim of monster speakers. There was a metal shack snugged into the framework supporting the stage, and a large circular area around the whole structure was crowded with vans, equipment, and smaller sheds. Around the perimeter of this area was a high chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire.

“All right, take us to the ranch house,” Beck shouted at the pilot. The helicopter circled over the stage once, giving Paul a staggering three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pan around the vast amphitheater from the point of view of the epicenter of this little universe, another shot any director would sell his soul for when this whole area was covered with hundreds of thousands of people.

Paul felt an oceanic excitement, an anticipation that was almost sexual. Everything it had taken to get him to this point in space and time had been more than worthwhile. No filmmaker could ask for more than he was being given to play with here. All the shit Beck had laid on him didn’t matter. He was going to make a film that would boggle the mind, and it didn’t much matter if his own mind got a little boggled in the process. Nothing mattered but the film. Nothing was going to be allowed to make him blow something like this,
nothing.

The copter circled off the southeast, over the lip of the saucer, down the other side of the ridge, then due south over more camping area and midway toward an old rambling ranch house surrounded by yet another perimeter of barbed-wire-topped chain-link fencing.

“Here we are,” Beck shouted. “Headquarters for the next four days.”

The helicopter flew over the perimeter and began settling down onto a chalked-out helipad behind the ranch house. Another helicopter was parked a score yards to the right, and Paul could make out the camera mounts installed inside the canopy. My very own helicopter, he thought dazedly, this is so unreal!

The copter touched down, the rotors dopplering to a whunk-whunk, and Beck led Paul out of it, the slowly rotating blades nearly touching his great bush of black hair as he scuttled under them in a walking crouch.

“Well, what do you think?” Beck said, grinning from ear to ear. “Isn’t this the wildest set you ever saw?”

Paul could only nod in agreement “How much did all this
cost?”

Beck threw up his arms in an expansive gesture. “Three, four, five million,” he said. “Who really knows? You can’t put something like this together worrying about money.” He laughed. “None of it is your money or my money anyway, so who cares? Play with your new toys and enjoy, enjoy!”

Paul shook his head at Beck, then laughed with him, one fellow artist to another, giving the finger to the cost accountants of the world.

“Come on into the house,” Beck said. “Sandy’s already there, and I want you to meet the combat photographers I hired for you.”

“Combat photographers?”

“Sure. I figured on a thing this large you should have six camera crews just to suck up all the wild footage there’s going to be everywhere. So I hired six news crews with combat coverage experience and another assistant director to help you move ‘em around. With an additional six sound film crews, I hope you won’t miss any good stuff.”

“I think I can manage with that,” Paul mumbled. As he turned to follow Beck into the house, his eyes chanced to look past the camera helicopter, across the cleared area, at the tall wire fence. From this angle, it looked like a shot of a concentration camp from the inside looking out.

He wondered what all the barbed wire he had seen today would look like tomorrow to all those outsiders looking in.

Sandra Bayne stood with her hands on the rough wood of the porch railing, looking out across the darkness through the wire fence at the structures of the People’s World’s Fair, a crazy-quilt jumble of opaque, shadowy shapes two hundred yards away. Beside her, Paul’s body was flesh against her hip and shoulder and a vibrating aura of tense excitement.