Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (3 page)

"So what was the problem with the rough cut?" she asked. "Was it still that McClay did a terrible job?"

"No, just the opposite. It wasn't bad. It was too good. The studio executives, the producer, all said it was too challenging, too innovative, that it just wasn't commercial enough."

So the studio killed the film because it was too good? Jill couldn't believe that.

Things didn't get suppressed because they were too good. The very literary, arty films might get scant distribution, non-existent promotion, but if they were truly fine, the films did get made. That something was too good was the excuse of people who had written boring screenplays. Agents had a whole vocabulary to avoid alienating new writers. "Too literate" meant a screenplay was too pretentious. "Too well-written" meant it had no plot. "Too intellectual" meant that the characters were uninteresting.

If the rough cut really had been a masterpiece, the studio most likely would have let it go through. They hadn't spent much money; why not take the gamble?

Moreover, if the script really had been something important, her father would have fought to preserve it. Jill was sure of that. He had started his professional life as a professor of English at the University of Virginia. Throughout his life he retained a professor's commitment to history and to the integrity of art.

The memory of his face again filled her mind: his thick silver hair, the narrow aristocratic features. He had had primary custody of her since she had been five, and even after she had moved into her own home, they saw each other regularly, spoke on the phone almost daily. She knew him far, far better than most women knew their fathers. He wouldn't be on the wrong side in a battle like that.

But that was apparently exactly what this Doug Ringling was saying. Not only had Cass edited the final version, he had done so much work on the new script that he had shared the screenplay credit with Bix. John Ransome had been praising Cass for having universalized this routine war movie... but if Doug's story was true, Cass had commercialized a masterpiece.

But Doug's story wasn't true. It couldn't be. If the studio executives had gone to a screening of a rough cut to find that an unauthorized script had been shot, they would have fired everyone on the spot. From the producer Miles Smith-son on down, everyone involved would have been on the street.

Suddenly Jill could stand it no longer. She was not going to listen anymore. This was a preposterous story, a fiction nurtured by a family who had lost a son. To have a son captured in the war, escape, and then only a few years later be killed in a plane crash along with his brother's wife must have meant grief beyond even hers. Of course, the family would have found it comforting to believe that Bix had written a masterpiece. Jill could understand that, she could forgive it, but she wasn't going to believe it.

She looked at Doug Ringling. It now seemed so odd to have someone who looked like Phillip Wayland sitting behind a big bowl of tulips. Here was a face that promised everything in gallantry and dash on top of an open-necked Oxford cloth shirt, khaki slacks, and a lightweight navy blazer. It was incongruous. No, it was more than that, it was creepy. She wished he hadn't come.

It was easier to speak if she didn't look at him, if she didn't have to think about how much he looked like Phillip. There was a little pattern woven into the oyster damask covering the sofa. She focused on the spot where the pattern disappeared beneath the shoulder of his navy blazer. "If you're asking me if I think this is possible, I don't think it is." She stood up, and he had no choice but to do likewise. She shifted her gaze to the watercolor landscape hanging on the wall directly behind him. "The studios simply had too much control then."

"Well, if you think of anything," he said as he pulled a card out of the side pocket of his blazer, "here's my number."

Jill took the card and walked him to the door, saying good-bye awkwardly. This had seemed so sweet and funny at first, a figure appearing out of the mists of her adolescent dreams. But he had turned out to be a real man with a ridiculous story. Cass would have never done what Doug was accusing him of.

She looked down at the card he had given her. There were two phone numbers, one for day, one for home; they were handwritten on a yellow file card. Who was this Doug Ringling that he didn't carry preprinted business cards?

She moved to the little Queen Anne lady's desk that was along one wall of the tiny foyer. The florist who had brought the tulips into the living room had designed a richly scented bouquet of white auratum lilies and the pale green flowers of a tobacco plant. Its fragrance carried well, giving the air of the foyer a fresher charm than potpourri ever can. But standing close to the bouquet, Jill found its spicy perfume of nutmeg and vanilla a little overpowering.

Why had he come?

As a girl she had managed to block out the fact that other people watched the movie, that others might have felt as strongly about it as she did. She had cherished a myth of exclusivity, enabled by the fact that she usually watched the movie alone in the screening room of her father's big house. The movie was hers; Phillip was hers. When the camera pulled in for a tight close-up, those deep blue eyes were looking at her.

And now Doug Ringling had the nerve to take those same eyes, that same soft lower lip, everything, and parade the whole package around for the world to see.

Perhaps it wasn't fair to blame him for wanting to take his face with him when he went places, but he had alternatives, hadn't he? He could have locked himself into an iron mask as Richard Chamberlain had done in that movie, hiding the key in some place known only to her. Surely that's what any sensitive and gracious man would have done.

Why had he come? To tell her that her father had been a studio hack?
Here, Cass, when you've got a free moment, would you trash this movie? It's great, but we need better box office.
No one would believe that, not for a moment. She pulled open the little desk's single drawer and dropped the card inside. Why was she saving it? His story was so ludicrous. She couldn't imagine that she would ever want to see him again.

Doug Ringling could accept things. That was one thing he knew for sure about himself, that he could look reality in the eye and offer to buy it a beer. You had to be that way, he had always said, when you spent four years hearing that you were one of the finest defensive players in the history of A.C.C. basketball, perhaps in the whole N.C.A.A., and hearing, with the very next breath, that you didn't have a prayer for a pro career.

From eighth grade on Doug had known that however well he played in college, that was going to be it. He could play defense well enough for anyone, but he couldn't shoot up to pro standards. He had always known that. He accepted it.

When the cards had been dealt, Doug had gotten a good hand. He was tall and quick, he was smart, and he looked exactly like his handsome uncle Bix. But the card that gave a fellow the ability to get a round ball through a round hoop had been dealt to someone else.

In its place had come a card labeled "Personality." He was witty, he was articulate. He could lead other men, he could inspire. It was this personality that had made him such a success as a coach of college teams. He had long ago accepted that this had been the trade-off, to play or to coach. Had he been able to stack the deck God had been dealing from, he wouldn't have changed the order of the cards.

So it had taken him about twenty seconds to accept the fact that Jill Casler did not believe him. It was even more than that; she was uncomfortable, even hostile. That was too bad, he thought as he fastened the seatbelt in his rented car and pulled out of the Holmby Court's elaborately landscaped parking lot. It would have been nice to have her help. But it didn't feel like a major setback, and it certainly wasn't going to stop him. He believed there had been a secret script shot in April, and he was going to find out what was in it. You didn't get to be a head coach at a Division I college by letting other people write the rules.

Declaring a story ludicrous, not worth considering for one instant, was one thing. It was another to forget it. Jill found that she wasted most of the afternoon thinking about Doug's tale. The more she thought, the more insulted she grew on her father's behalf. Doug hadn't accused Cass outright of anything—he had hardly mentioned Cass's name— but she could only infer one thing from what he had said: If the rough cut had been splendid, a true work of art, Cass would have been masterminding the destruction of something fine. She wished Doug had been more direct. She wished he had openly accused Cass. Then she could have defended him.

By evening the concierge had gotten a copy of the
Weary Hearts
video for her. The bellboy who brought it over offered to help her with the VCR, but Jill had learned at age eight how to use an editing machine. A VCR was nothing.

The bungalow's video equipment was housed in a long, low cherry credenza. Jill slipped the tape in and sat cross-legged on the floor. She pulled one of the small coral-colored pillows on her lap and leaned back against the love seat, watching the screen. The notice from the FBI about video piracy flashed on. Then the well-remembered music rose and the credits began, those familiar names—Miles Smithson, Oliver McClay, Bix Ringling, Charles Ringling, Alicia Burchell—rolled across the sweeping pictures of the Shenandoah Valley, the white clouds, the willows at the river's edge, the woodland hills.

Jill hugged the pillow. She usually loved these credits, the beautiful landscapes with the overture's promise of the bittersweet joys to come. The music always lured her into the movie's magic, enticing her into its world. At least, it always had before. Now, as the rich bass line swelled and the percussion section took up the stern tattoo of horses' hooves, she found herself thinking not about the thundering herd, but about Woody Allen.

He could do it. He could create a dummy script to dupe his money people, then film some other script altogether. He worked in secrecy, barring the press from his sets; he didn't always show the complete script even to the actors.

But Woody Allen had his own production company. He wrote, directed, and starred in his own movies. The studio with which his company had a contract let him work in such secrecy because he always brought his movies in on time and under budget. Then the movies made money. That was the source of his independence. No one else had that kind of control, even today. Certainly no one in 1948 had had it. Back then everyone was an employee of the studio. The studio system was designed to keep track of everything that happened.

Jill looked back at the screen. Booth had already ridden off to join Turner Ashby and the Black Horse Troop. The Yankees had not come yet, but Mary Deas was growing drawn and worried, and Phillip—

Was Doug really taller than Phillip? Yes, of course he was. Jill could see that. And his cheekbones were a shade broader, his jaw just a bit different. Phillip was saddling his horse. Jill peered at his hands, trying to remember Doug's hands.

This was no way to watch the movie. She wasn't involved in the story. She didn't care about the characters. All that interested her about Phillip was his resemblance to Doug.

If he's ruined this movie for me...

She fastforwarded to the depot scene, the one Doug had claimed would prove that the studio's script had not been the one filmed. Jill watched it for a moment and instantly felt vindicated. It proved nothing. Doug Ringling did not know nearly enough about how movies were made.

It is routine for an editor to splice together footage from a number of different takes. Viewers never know to what extent a scene has been pieced together unless a mistake is made. When Judy Garland first meets the Scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz,
her braids are long. As the two characters talk, her braids suddenly become short. They switch back and forth between short and long throughout the scene. Retakes and pick-up shots of the scene were made several months after the initial filming, and the continuity girl had not noted how long the braids had been first time around.

In
Weary Hearts
the costly exteriors of the burning depot were all night scenes. They showed little of the landscape, whether in April or August. Only Phillip's postdawn ride back to Briar Ridge showed the trees and fields that Doug claimed dated the filming to August. But the two halves of the episode could have easily been filmed months apart. Doug's "evidence" meant nothing.

Jill hit the reverse button to rewind the tape. There was not one thing to support his story. And so, she told herself for the second time this day, that was the end of that.

CHAPTER 2

Of course, it wasn't. AH night Jill repeatedly woke up to the most pointless thoughts.
The director, the continuity girl, and the cameraman would have to know, but if the sets, costumes, and characters' names were the same, would the designer or the sound men need to know?
She kept trying to figure out how someone who wasn't Woody Allen could have done it.

Or why they would have done it. Miles Smithson, the producer of the movie, hadn't had his own production company with a contract to provide the studio with so many movies in so much time. He was an employee of the studio. His office was on the lot; he reported to the executives who could have fired him in an instant.

Everyone involved in a deception such as this would have been risking their careers hourly. No other studio would have hired anyone who had been fired for this kind of duplicity. What could have been in that secret script to make it worth taking such risks? Doug said it was magnificent, but would that have been enough to bind the "little group" into a conspiracy that could have ruined their professional futures?

Assuming, of course, that there had been a conspiracy in the first place. Jill didn't believe so... although, for a person who didn't believe, she certainly couldn't keep it out of her mind. At four a.m. she sat up, switched on the bedside lamp, and admitted that she was obsessing.