Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (7 page)

So the rest of the group often reacted to these two expensively dressed young women through the contrast between them. Jill knew that she was popular and influential at Cathy's expense, something she felt rather bad about. This was exactly the sort of thing that a member was supposed to bring up during the group sessions, but so far she hadn't and Cathy hadn't either. Jill had long since noticed that what she and Cathy had in common was much more important than their physical differences. Neither one wanted to be the focus of any of the group's discussion.

Asking for Cathy got Jill through the studio's switchboard; a brief mention of her interest in
Weary Hearts
got her through Cathy's secretary; her name got her through Cathy's assistant and to Cathy herself.

"Jill, this is a surprise." Cathy's voice sounded wary.

Jill could understand that. If someone in the group were to call her, she would be uneasy; even Horton the Elephant might pause before climbing a second tree. "I know," she responded, trying to keep her voice light.
This is no big deal; don't worry.
"I need to ask you a professional favor."

"Yes?"

"I have some questions about the making of
Weary Hearts.
I wanted to prowl around a bit and I wondered if you could open a few doors for me."

"What kind of questions?"

That was an entirely legitimate response. Cathy would be crazy to open doors when she was unclear about Jill's mission. But her question put Jill in a bind.

One of the rules of group was honesty. You were not supposed to lie. Jill obeyed that rule faithfully. She didn't tell the whole truth—not even close—but she told nothing but the truth.

Had anyone else asked her, she would have told one of the assorted half-truths that she had told Ken and Lynette, John Ransome, and the people on Cass's production staff. But she found it suddenly hard to lie to Cathy, even over the phone.

No wonder some groups had a "no outside contact" rule. The rules of the group, its honesty and constant self-scrutiny, were too difficult to sustain in normal human contact.

"It's complicated, but basically a member of the Ringling family has raised some questions about what was in the first rough cut. I can tell you the whole story if you want."

"No, that's all right," Cathy said so quickly that Jill felt like she understood the position she had inadvertently put Jill in. "What do you need me to do?"

"I want to see if there's any footage surviving from the film and I'd like to look at the production files."

"That shouldn't be any problem. Remind me what year the picture was made."

Jill did, and as if they were two ordinary acquaintances, they set a time for Jill to come to the studio the next afternoon.

Cathy's office was a study in feminine power. The glass slab she used as a desk was sparklingly clean and imposingly empty; it bore only a long, low almond-colored phone and a single file folder. The lacquered credenza behind the desk had a dramatic, almost spiky, arrangement of Peruvian lilies, statice, and viburnum in a marble pedestaled bowl. There was not a family picture anywhere. What clearly marked it as a woman's office were not the flowers, but the color of the walls and the chairs; they were a cool, clear lavender-blue, almost the color of delphiniums.

Cathy's secretary had escorted Jill into the office. Cathy herself was standing behind her desk, her fingertips pressed against its glass surface. Jill had always found her tightly wrapped intensity a little jarring in therapy; she seemed to radiate an unhappiness that she refused to talk about. But here, in her own gleaming office, the intensity seemed appropriate; it came across as energy, purpose, ambition.

"It was nice of you to fit me into your schedule," Jill said. "But first, I want to tell you, I adore this color."

"Do you?"

"Yes. It's feminine without being girlish. It's—" Jill stopped herself from saying "It's great." She didn't want to sound like she was waltzing in here to give Cathy's office the
Good Housekeeping
Seal of Approval. She knew Cathy wouldn't take well to that. "I really do like it."

Cathy waved Jill to a chair and sat down herself. The chair behind her desk had the high back of an executive's but she must have had it custom made in a smaller size. She was not dwarfed by it. Even the black leather sling chairs they sat in during group made her look tinier than she was. In a normal man's executive chair, she would have seemed like a child playing at Daddy's desk.

Jill was grateful that nothing in her life required her to be so image-conscious. When you had several hundred million dollars, you had several hundred million dollars, and it didn't matter what kind of chair you sat in.

Cathy opened the folder on her desk and handed a sheet of paper to Jill. "I asked someone to check the card file on
Weary Hearts.
This is the footage that's in the nitrate vault."

Jill had not expected Cathy to have this information in hand. She took the sheet. It was a computer printout listing by vault number and shelf space the location of every can of nitrate film with
Weary Hearts
material. There were the master positives, a few prints of the complete movie, some copies of the trailers, which were the previews of the movie shown as "Coming Attractions," and a copy of the French version of the credits. As expected, there were no outtakes, no footage marked as trims or cuts, not even a reel labeled "Miscellaneous." For such material to have been stored for fifty years would have been unusual in the extreme.

"I didn't go down to the vaults," Cathy said. "So I have no idea if any of the film is still good."

Another reason why it was unlikely for any of the movie's excess footage to have survived was that prior to the early 1950s, all film was printed on nitrocellulose-based stock, which was highly flammable and chemically unstable. Nearly half of all movies made before 1950 no longer existed in any viewable form, their nitrate film having first turned to a thick, smelly goo and then a fine brown powder. The film manufactured during the forties was particularly unstable, due to chemical shortages caused by the war. Movies such as
Weary Hearts
were seen only because they had been transferred to the safety film now used universally.

"I didn't expect you to," Jill assured her. "I'm impressed that the card file is on computer. My experience with card files is that they are just that, tattered file cards full of lies about what's where."

"The files for the other vaults are pretty inaccurate." Cathy admitted. "But apparently about ten years ago—I just learned all this this morning—after the original camera negative to
Citizen Kane
burned, we turned over all our original nitrate negatives to the Library of Congress. So some outside archivists went through all the nitrate vaults to see what we had, and they organized it. The stuff might all blow tomorrow, but at least it would be burnt in alphabetical order."

Jill was surprised that the records for the vaults had been so recently updated. "This is pretty impressive for a studio that can't even keep track of its scripts."

"Oh, don't think the studio did this," Cathy assured her. "You have your father to thank."

"My father?"

"The studio never would have paid to have this catalogued. The Library of Congress and the American Film Institute wanted them to, but no one around here was that generous-minded. So your father did some quick fund-raising among his friends, and they set up a little fund that paid for the archivists to find out what we had."

Jill hadn't known this, but it was not out of character. Cass had been one of the few history-minded people in Hollywood. This was exactly the sort of thing that would have interested him.

But still, this was all getting curiouser and curiouser. Anyone wanting to help preserve Hollywood's legacy had a choice of any number of truly urgent projects. Given that the studio had taken steps to preserve the original camera negatives, it would have seemed that Cass and his friends might have spent their money to better effect.

Perhaps he, too, had been looking for
Weary Hearts
footage.

Whatever his motives had been, he had hired these archivists and they would have been good ones—film scholars deeply grateful for the chance to catalogue a studio's collection of miscellanea before it deteriorated. If they said there was no miscellaneous footage from
Weary Hearts,
then Jill was willing to accept that.

Cathy went on. "I also called to see what we had on safety stock, and there's only copies of the complete film and some foreign language trailers."

"That's what I would have guessed."

"Here's something that may surprise you then." Cathy leaned back in her chair. Other people tended to deliver dramatic news by coming forward, moving closer. Not Cathy. Jill had noticed that during one of the group's protracted discussions of body language. "There's next to nothing in the script library and all the production files are missing."

"What?" Jill had known about the script library, but the production files? This was where she had expected to find the budgets, the footage counts, all the material that would prove what script had been shot. "Have all the files from that era been destroyed?"

"No, we have more storage space than the other studios, so we've held onto the production files. But there's nothing there from
Weary Hearts."

"Nothing? Isn't that odd?"

"Yes. But sometime in the fifties someone was interested in the rights—"

Jill knew who that was.

"—and my guess is the files were pulled then, and they didn't get put back. Or they could have been misfiled any time in the last forty years."

Jill nodded and Cathy went on. "Legal does a better job of keeping track of itself. Its
Weary Hearts
files are right where they belong. You're welcome to go look at them." She handed Jill a card with a name and phone extension. "They're expecting you."

Jill took the card. "Cathy... thank you. I wasn't expecting you to do all this. Didn't it take you hours?" Jill knew the premium Cathy placed on time.

"Actually, no. I was assuming it would, but just last week some guy was through with the same set of questions."

Some guy? Jill drew back. "He wasn't named Doug Ringling, was he?"

"I don't know," Cathy confessed. "Apparently whoever it was used to be some hotshot college basketball player, and I wasn't interested in getting involved in an endless discussion about college basketball. The clerk in Legal—"

She broke off, embarrassed. One of her issues in group was her tendency to write off other people too quickly, assuming that they could have no value to her.

Jill wasn't going to respond. This wasn't group; Cathy was entitled to some emotional privacy. Anyway, Jill's own reactions weren't anything she wanted scrutinized.

For the past few days she felt as if she had been rediscovering a trail her father had laid years before. Optioning those rights, paying to have the nitrate vaults catalogued, all that was curious, important because he had done it. Her quest felt urgent, a secret journey into a mysterious land whose dark map only she could ever read.

This was what she felt. But the reality was that she was following a trail made by a former hotshot college basketball player with a face that should have been locked in an iron mask.

"What about stock footage?" she asked Cathy. Surely that was something Doug wouldn't have known to ask about.

In only one case was unused or excess footage saved for more than six months. That was when the studio thought that some other production might be able to use it. Shooting crowd scenes and location exteriors was expensive. If a shot of such scenes did not show any of the principal actors, it might be used in a later movie. So, after a film was completed, the unused footage was sent over to the stock footage department, which examined it, saving anything that might be of use. Stock footage material incorporated into a film made after 1952 would have been printed up on safety film.

"I didn't think about that," Cathy said. "Let me check."

She picked up the receiver of her almond phone with one hand, unclipping her disc-shaped earring with the other. She said a few words, then waited while the call was placed. When the connection was made, she identified herself and asked if a friend of hers could come over and look at any footage they had from
Weary Hearts.
She listened for a moment, then covered the mouthpiece with her hand. Her nails were beautifully manicured, lacquered with a rich burgundy.

"They don't have anything," she said. "Not even a catalogue entry."

"What?"

"Nothing, zero, nada. The out-takes must not have been sent over."

"Are they sure?"

"Oh, yes." Cathy's half-smile was gentle, amused. "Our hotshot basketball player was over there last week."

Jill made a face while Cathy thanked the person on the other end of the phone. As Cathy clipped her earring back in place, Jill spoke. "Isn't that odd? Wouldn't you think the battle scenes and the rides of Mosby's Rangers"—this was all material supposedly deleted from the first script— "would be worth saving?" If it had been filmed in the first place.

"I suppose. You may know more about this than I do. Maybe it just fell through the cracks. Remember, this wasn't Warner Brothers."

That was true. Warner Brothers was the studio that made the trains run on time. Everything was put on paper. People at Warner Brothers clocked in, took regularly scheduled coffee breaks, and generally kept track of themselves.

But this studio had had more in common with Universal. Time and again films went into production without budgets, continuity scripts, or even complete casts. Worried about their next projects, producers had no choice but to leave directors alone. The dislike of paperwork, the disregard for routine, and the resulting chaos allowed for the spontaneous creativity that marked the best of the studio's films. Those conditions also permitted some large-scale disasters.

And what about large-scale deception? Jill still couldn't imagine how a director could dupe a studio about what script he was filming, but an atmosphere of total confusion would be a good first step.