Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (6 page)

She had a very large circle of friends. Those she had grown up with were, like her herself, the children of important and powerful film-industry figures. Others were people she met through them—young writers, actors, and producers, all determined to become important and powerful film-industry figures in their own right.

So it was an interesting, animated group. It was not the sanest. There were some pretty high-strung characters; someone was always in some crisis or another. And when there was a crisis, people called Jill.

She was good at calming everyone down. Earlier in the spring an actress on location in Kenya had been about to walk off the set. Jill knew both her and the director. With the production blasting through its budget, the director asked Jill to come out to Kenya and talk to Alexandra. Jill did. She knew a lot about psychology, having done considerable reading on the subject since her father's death, and with her eye for structure, she was able to see that on this particular set the lines of communication were structured ail wrong. People who should have been colleagues had slipped into parent-child roles. Jill would have never dreamed of offering a diagnosis of other people's emotional blind spots, but she said enough that the movie got made.

She was good at getting things done. Many of the girls she had gone to school with were now in the young-Hollywood-wives set and were active in charity work. Jill sat on the boards of several small foundations. She was of greater service when people attempted things beyond their skills. Last night she had gotten a call from some friends who were organizing a big outdoor AIDS rally and fund-raiser. They had never done anything like this before, and they were desperately behind schedule.

Jill had helped such friends often enough before that she had all the skills and contacts of a professional fund-raiser or event coordinator. She spent six determined hours on the phone, arranging for permits, contracting for security forces and portable toilets, browbeating sign painters and musicians, accomplishing more than her friends had in weeks.

She spent another hour reading drafts of the minutes from the meetings of two boards she was on. Then her attention was free for
Weary Hearts.
With the same organized thoroughness that she usually brought to other people's projects, she made a list.

She called John Ransome, the author of the article that had apparently sparked Doug Ringling's search. Ransome might well have heard hints and rumors about the rough cut, none of which he could substantiate well enough to print.

But he hadn't. He was friendly and forthcoming; no freelance journalist specializing in film would want to alienate the daughter of an important director. But the only surprise he had for Jill was that Doug Ringling had called him before visiting her.

She wasn't entirely sure how she felt about that. "What did you think about his story?"

"His story?"

Ransome sounded bewildered. Jill realized that she had spoken rashly. "Why did he say he called?"

"He said that he was a nephew of the two brothers, and he was curious about the script for the April shoot. A
Roots
sort of thing. It sounded like normal family curiosity to me."

So Doug hadn't told Ransome about the secret script. Jill wondered why.

She looked at the list of questions she had jotted down before making this call. "Your article said that the Studio has lost the script shot in April." Studios tended to do things like that. "Did you look for any of the footage from the rough cut?"

"I checked the card files," he answered. "There wasn't a thing, but I didn't expect there to be."

"What about the paperwork—the budgets, the schedules, and the contracts, all that?" Jill asked. Without the script or any of the actual footage, the best evidence of whether the approved script or some secret one had been filmed might be in the paperwork. Certainly the documents would all have to superficially conform to what would have been generated by the approved script. Much of it might have even been fake; dummy schedules and dummy budgets created to fool whoever needed to be fooled. But some of it had to be real. If Oliver McClay had filmed the cavalry battles that were mentioned in the treatment but not used in the final movie, then somewhere there were invoices for renting all those horses. If no one paid for horses who can die on command, then the scenes wouldn't have been filmed. "Did you go through any of that material?"

"Lord, no." John Ransome was unapologetic. "What a bore that would be. This was a pay-by-the-word article, not my life's work."

Jill agreed with this, too. Looking at the paperwork would be boring, but it was a chore she was prepared to undertake. She was also planning on duplicating his examination of the studio's card files. Those files were supposed to list the location of each reel of stored film, giving both the vault and shelf numbers, but those files were never accurate. Ransome's quick check easily could have missed something.

A number of searches for film footage had been undertaken in recent years. In the best-known cases, the missing footage had been trimmed out of a finished film because the movie was too long. Exhibitors wanted to be able to run two shows a night so
A Star Is Born, Lawrence of Arabia,
and
Lost Horizon,
among others, had been cut after their premieres. These cuts had been made by someone with economic rather than artistic goals. The result was often a choppy film with inexplicable references to scenes that had been dropped. It was hardly surprising that people who loved movies wanted to restore these mutilated films to their original full-length splendor. Their passion—their obsession—was something Jill had always sympathized with.

Sometimes rumors grew up around scenes that had been filmed, but not used in the final film. For years people had whispered that the "Jitter Bugs" number had been cut from
The Wizard of Oz
because that old vaudeville ham, Bert Lahr, playing the Cowardly Lion, had been so marvelously funny that no one watching it would have ever looked at Judy Garland. What fan of vaudeville would not want to see that footage?

What John Wayne fan wouldn't want to see the half-hour taken out of
The Alamo?
And who wouldn't want to see the "masterpiece" version of
Weary Hearts?

But such desires were rarely gratified. Jill knew that Ronald Haver had spent a month looking through the Warner Brothers vaults searching for the twenty-seven minutes from
A Star Is Born.
He found a complete sound track, but he had not been able to find very much of the film. In the end he had to remount the production using the long sound track, filling in the missing visuals with stills and even some new photographs.

The restorers of the full-length
Lawrence of Arabia
had the opposite result. After hunting through four hundred pounds of unlabeled footage, they had found the film, but not the sound track. The edited scenes did not correspond to the script so the restorers had hired a hearing-impaired couple to lip-read the footage and had the now-aging actors rerecord the lines. Then a sound engineer remixed their voices to restore them to youth.

But as incomplete as these searches had been, at least those people had been looking for material cut from finished movies. Finding raw footage was even more unlikely. The "Triumphal Return" sequence from
The Wizard of Oz,
during which Dorothy had the others return to Oz with the witch's broomstick, had been cut early in the editing process. None of that footage survived. The "Jitter Bugs" number had been cut after the first preview. Although it had taken five weeks and eighty thousand 1938 dollars to film, all that has ever been found was the sound track and a home movie taken by the composer. At least that was enough to show Bert Lahr had not stolen the scene from Judy Garland.

Jill knew that the chances of anything surviving from the rough cut of
Weary Hearts
were even more remote.

Since television started buying feature films, some producers saved a little more footage in case the movie had to be recut for length or moral concerns. Then, for the few years when the "Bleepers and Bloopers" shows were popular on television, footage that showed major stars making embarrassing mistakes was saved. But, for the most part, the pounds and pounds of film left over from a production were junked.

For any excess footage to have survived for the forty years since
Weary Hearts
had been made would have been extraordinary indeed.

Nonetheless, Jill was going to look. She had to.

CHAPTER 3

A visit to the studio was in order. Jill flipped though her reconstructed Rolodex, trying to think of someone she knew who worked there. She knew any number of people working on pictures the studio was financing, but she didn't seem to know
anyone
on the payroll. She had last year. She probably would again next year. But at the moment, she didn't. Except Cathy Cromartie.

Well, why not? The rule was, that if you met someone outside of group, you had to tell the group about it. That was all.

So
Jill
called Directory Assistance and got the number of the studio's main switchboard in order to call a fellow member of her psychotherapy group.

She had not been lying when she told Doug that she was a reasonably well-adjusted person. She believed that. And part of being well adjusted was
having
the sense to
realize
that when your mother was the sort who couldn't take a Children's Chewable Tylenol without getting addicted to it, that when you had been in the legal custody of a father who, however adoring, had been away on
location
for weeks at a time, then you might have a few problems.

These few problems had started getting the better of Jill during the first year after her father's death. Her grief had caused something in her psychological navigational system to tilt. Behavior previously unremarkable had become extreme, and finally her friend Susannah Donovan, no stranger to psychotherapy, had put a label on it: "extreme caretaker-ism."

Of all her qualities, Jill had always most valued her loyalty. She was an excellent friend. Most of the projects she spent her time on resulted from pleas from her large circle of friends.

But in the year after Cass's death something had gone wrong. Helping people was exhausting her; she was turning into Horton the Elephant of Dr. Seuss's books. Like Horton, Jill would have sat on the top of a tree through rain and snow, hatching someone else's egg.

She had become unable to say "no." She tried to do everything anyone asked her, but still it seemed like no one was ever satisfied; no one ever thought she had done enough. If she spent eight hours serving dinners to the homeless, why not ten, why not twenty? If she gave ten thousand dollars to a drug abuse program, why not fifteen, why not a million? Everyone had his hand out, wanting her time and her money.

Both Susannah and her mother, the only ones seemingly aware of what was happening to her, had urged therapy. Primarily because she wanted to show them that she wasn't closed-minded, she had a session with a therapist who had immediately recommended she join a group.

It had begun disastrously. She was almost immediately sucked into the bewildering vortex of one member's troubles. This young man was a terrible procrastinator. After her second session, Jill had sat in a coffee shop with him and helped him fill out a job application form, virtually doing it herself. That simple favor—such was her definition of the act—had been an open door to unceasing demands. He wanted help balancing his checkbook. He needed to find new car insurance. He needed someone to call his boss and say he was sick.

Jill instead called the therapist to quit the group. "I don't need this. This is what I'm trying to get away from."

"Ah... but, Jill," came the irritating answer, "this is the point."

Indeed it was. Group therapy was not a gathering of seven
people
each waiting their turn to talk
about
their current life problems. The
group
focused on the group itself, on what happened
inside
that
room
during those ninety-minute sessions. The assumption was that a member would, given enough time, react to the
people
in the group as he reacted to the people in his "back-home" social sphere. The therapist and other group members would help him understand this behavior, and then, within the safe confines of the meeting room, he could try to alter it.

Jill
had to admit that how quickly she had turned herself into Horton the Elephant did confirm the first stage of the process. So she thought she ought to stay with it and explore the rest.

She had been in the group for more than a year now, and she could see the difference in herself. Had she lost her calendar during her Horton the Elephant stage, she would have been so agitated about disappointing the people who were expecting her to be certain places at certain times that she probably would have had herself hypnotized. Therapy had also helped her recover the warning system that alerted her to
people
who were snakes and users. Although she still was not great at saying no, she had learned to reframe the questions people asked her. "I certainly could do what you are asking, but my skills are organizational. Perhaps I can help you in that way instead."

She had joined the group on the same day as Cathy Cromartie, another woman also in her late twenties. At that first meeting the two newcomers had sat side by side. They never had again.
Jill
did not dislike Cathy, not at all, but the dynamics of the group had set up a polarity between them. The contrast had been too strong. Cathy was tiny, dark-haired, quivering with tension, a simmering kettle threatening to explode into a furious boil. Compared to her, Jill was a cool, long-stemmed lily.

The
group
met at one o'clock. Cathy, an associate vice-president in the studio's production department, came in her business clothes; she wore vibrant power colors and dramatic accessories. As small as she was, Cathy was an intimidating presence. She looked like someone with power. Jill, whose wealth could have given her considerable power if she had wanted it, dressed casually. She was never sloppy or ill-groomed; she might wear an open-necked Egyptian cotton shirt over an eight-gore twill riding skirt clenched at the waist with a wide leather belt, or cuffed silk trousers with a chunky handknit sweater. Her clothes were every bit as expensive as Cathy's; when you're five feet ten with size-six shoulders and hips, expensive clothes fit better. Otherwise the shirt cuffs stop about two inches before your arms do. But her clothes were so understated that their quality was apparent only in the details of construction: the wide, beautifully finished seams, the careful linings, and the fine sheen of the fabrics. Her sweaters had intricate handknit patterns, and her blouses had covered buttons. The pockets of her skirts were never economically set into the side seams. They were moved in a few inches and carefully bound and welted into a slit in the body of the skirt itself. With the pockets placed there, the wearer could tuck her hands and her keys into her pockets without adding eight inches to the silhouette of her hips.