Another Thing to Fall

Synopsis:

The California dream weavers have invaded Charm City with their cameras, their stars, and their controversy. . . .

When private investigator Tess Monaghan literally runs into the crew of the fledgling TV series
Mann of Steel
while sculling, she expects sharp words and evil looks,
not
an assignment. But the company has been plagued by a series of disturbing incidents since its arrival on location in Baltimore: bad press, union threats, and small, costly on-set “accidents” that have wreaked havoc with its shooting schedule. As a result, Mann’s creator, Flip Tumulty, the son of a Hollywood legend, is worried for the safety of his young female lead, Selene Waites, and asks Tess to serve as her bodyguard/babysitter. Tumulty’s concern may be well founded. Not long ago a Baltimore man was discovered dead in his own home, surrounded by photos of the beautiful, difficult superstar-in-the-making.

In the past, Tess has had enough trouble guarding her own body. Keeping a spoiled movie princess under wraps may be more than she can handle — even with the help of Tess’s icily unflappable friend Whitney — since Selene is not as naive as everyone seems to think, and far more devious than she initially appears to be. This is not Tess’s world. And these are not her kind of people, with their vanities, their self-serving agendas and invented personas, and their remarkably skewed visions of reality — from the series’ aging, shallow, former pretty-boy leading man to its resentful, always-on-the-make cowriter to the officious young assistant who may be too hungry for her own good.

But the fish-out-of-water P.I. is abruptly pulled back in by an occurrence she’s all too familiar with — murder. Suddenly the wall of secrets around
Mann of Steel
is in danger of toppling, leaving shattered dreams, careers, and lives scattered among the ruins — a catastrophe that threatens the people Tess cares about . . . and the city she loves.

’Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, Another thing to fall.
— Measure for Measure

There she was.

Smaller than he expected. Younger, too. But the primary shock was that she was human, a person just like him. Well, not
just
like him — there was the thirty-plus age difference to start — but flesh and blood, standing on a street in Baltimore, occupying the same latitude and longitude, breathing the same air. Look at her, sipping one of those enormous coffee drinks that all the young people seemed to carry now, as if the entire generation had been weaned too early and never recovered from the shock of it. He imagined a world of twenty-somethings, their mouths puckering around nothingness, lost without something to suck. Figuratively, not literally. Unlike most people, even allegedly educated ones, he used those words with absolute precision and prided himself on the fact, as he prided himself on all his usage, even in the sentences he formed in his head, the endless sentences, the commentary that never stopped, the running voice-over of his life. Which was funny, as he disdained voice-over in film, where it almost never worked.

Yet even as the vision of a suckling nation took shape in his head, he knew it wasn’t his exclusively, that it had been influenced by something he had seen. Who? What? A small part of his brain wouldn’t rest until he pinned down this fleeting memory. He was as punctilious about the origins of his ideas as he was about the correctness of his speech.

He liked young people, usually, thrived in their company, and they seemed to like him, too.
Crabbed age and youth cannot live together
— whoever wrote that line couldn’t have been more wrong. The young people he invited into his home, his life, had given him sustenance, enough so that he didn’t mind tolerating the inevitable rumors.
Baltimore bachelor… lives by himself in that old house near the park… up to strange things with all that camera equipment. People swear he’s on the up-and-up, but who can tell?
But those things were said by the neighbors who didn’t know him. When he selected the children, he got to know their parents first, went around to the houses, showed them what he did, explained his methods, provided personal references. It got so where parents were calling
him,
begging for a slot for little Johnny or Jill. Gently, tactfully, he would explain that his wasn’t just another after-school program, open to any child. It was up to him, and him alone, who would be admitted.

Now that he had this one in his viewfinder — would he have chosen her, glimpsed her potential when she was eight or nine? Possibly, maybe. It was hard to know. Faces coarsened so much after adolescence. Personalities, more so. This one — she was probably sweet, once upon a time. Affection starved, the kind who crawled into your lap and cupped your cheeks with her baby-fat palms. Patted your face and stroked your hair and stared straight into your eyes with no sense of boundaries, much less the concept of personal space. He loved children when they were unself-conscious, but that phase was so swift, so fleeting, and he was left with the paradox of trying to teach them to be as they once were, to return to a time when they didn’t understand the concept of embarrassment, much less worry about what others thought. But it was the eternal struggle — once you realize you’re in Eden, you have to leave. He watched the teenage years approach with more anguish than any parent, knowing it marked the end.

The lens was a powerful one, purchased years ago. He was no Luddite — there was much new technology on which he doted, and even more for which he yearned — but he could not sacrifice his old Pentax for a digital camera. Besides, the kind of SLR system he would need was out of reach. The Canon he had priced online was $2,500 at discount, and that was for the body alone. No, he would stick with his battered Pentax for now. Come to think of it — how old was this camera? It must be twenty-five, thirty years ago that he had taken the plunge at Cooper’s Camera Mart. A memory tickled his nose — what was that wonderful aroma that camera stores once had? Film, it must have been film, or the developing products, all outmoded now. Consider it — in his lifetime, just a little over a half century, he had gone from shooting photos with a Kodak automatic, the kind with a detachable wand of flashbulbs, to shooting movies that he could watch instantly at home, and if anyone thought that was inferior to trying to load an eel-slippery roll of film onto a reel, then they had his sympathy. No, he had no complaints about what technology had wrought. Technology was wonderful. If he had had more technology at his disposal, even fifteen years ago, then things might be very different now.

Look up, look up, look up,
he urged the image he had captured, and just like that, as if his wish were her command, she lifted her eyes from the paper in front of her, stopped sipping her drink, and stared into the distance. Such an open, innocent face, so guileless and genuine. So everything she wasn’t.

Her mouth, free from the straw, puckered in lonely dismay, and he knew in that instant the image that had been tantalizing him —
The Simpsons,
the episode that had managed to parody
The Great Escape
and
The Birds
with just a few deft strokes. He had watched it with his young friends, pointing out the Hitchcock cameo, then screening the real movies for them so they could understand the larger context. (It was the only reason he agreed to watch the cartoon with them, in order to explain all its cinematic allusions.) They had loved both movies, although the explicit horror of killer birds had seemed to affect them far more than the true story behind the men who had escaped from Stalag Luft III, only to be executed upon their capture. He was ten years old when the movie came out — he saw it at the Hippodrome — and World War II, an experience shared by his father and uncles, loomed large in his imagination. Now he found himself surrounded by young people who thought Vietnam was ancient history. They had reeled when they learned he was old enough to have been in the draft. This one — she, too, considered him old, and therefore a person she was free to ignore. She probably didn’t even remember the Persian Gulf War. She might not know there was a war going on even now, given how insular she was. Insular and insolent.

He watched the rosebud of her mouth return to the straw and decided that the image that had been teasing him, literally and figuratively, was Lolita. The movie version, of course. No heart-shaped sunglasses, but she didn’t need them, did she?
You’ll be the death of me,
he lamented, clicking the shutter.
You’ll be the death of me.

Literally and figuratively.

Fall came early to Mount Vernon this October — much to the neighborhood’s disgust. According to Mandy Stewart, vice president of the Mount Vernon Neighborhood Association, workers for
Mann of Steel
stripped leaves from the trees in order to create the late-autumn atmosphere required for the miniseries, which is being produced by Philip “Flip” Tumulty Jr.

“They just came through in late September and ripped the leaves from the trees, then put up a few fake brown ones in their place,” Stewart told the
Beacon-Light.
“They stole our fall out from under us! And they’ve made parking a nightmare.”

Steelworkers are equally peeved with
Mann of Steel,
which they say has shown a marked indifference to portraying the industry with accuracy. “These guys couldn’t find Sparrows Point on a map,” said Peter Bellamy of Local 9477. “They’re just using us for cheap laughs.”

He said retired steelworkers are considering informational pickets at the series’ various locations around the city, but he disavowed any connection to the series of mishaps that have befallen the production, as detailed previously by the
Beacon-Light.

The Maryland Film Commission and the city’s film liaison both said they had received no complaints, insisting the production had been an exemplary, polite presence in the city. Tumulty, through his assistant, refused repeated requests for comment.

Tumulty is the son of the Baltimore filmmaker Philip Tumulty Sr., who first attracted attention with lovingly detailed movies about Baltimore’s Highlandtown neighborhood in the 1960s and early 1970s, such as
Pit Beef
and
The Last Pagoda.
But he turned his attention to more conventional — and far more lucrative — Hollywood blockbusters, including
The Beast, Piano Man,
and
Gunsmoke,
the last a reworking of the long-running television show. The younger Tumulty, after a much-heralded independent film, written with childhood friend Ben Marcus, has worked exclusively in television.

His latest project,
Mann of Steel,
has extended the city’s long run with Hollywood, which has been an almost constant presence in Baltimore over the last fifteen years. However, although this series centers on Bethlehem Steel and nineteenth-century Baltimore belle Betsy Patterson, Maryland almost lost the production to Philadelphia, which has more architecture dating from the early 1800s. Special tax incentives helped to lure the show to Maryland.

Unlike previous productions,
Mann of Steel
has had a rocky relationship with the city from the start. Complaints from neighbors and steelworkers are only part of the problems they have faced. There have been a series of small fires set near some of the locations and rumors of bad behavior by up-and-coming actress Selene Waites, 20, who keeps popping up in local bars.

“We are grateful to Baltimore and Maryland for all they’ve done to make this film possible,” said co–executive producer Charlotte MacKenzie when asked for comment. “We just wish others were grateful for the $25 million we’re spending, half of which will go directly into the local economy.”

Community activist Stewart is not about to be mollified: “The economic benefits of film production are wildly exaggerated, based on the stars’ salaries, which may or may not be taxed by local authorities,” she said. “The bottom line is that
Mann of Steel
is a pain in the butt.”

— THE BEACON-LIGHT,
OCT
.
15

The headphones were a mistake. She realized this only in hindsight, but then — what other vision is available to a person heading backward into the world?

True, they were good old-fashioned headphones, which didn’t seal tightly to the ear, not
earbuds
, which she loathed on principle, the principle being that she was thirty-four going on seventy. Furthermore, she had dialed down the volume on her Sony Walkman — yes, a Sony Walkman, sturdy and battered and taxicab yellow, not a sleek little iPod in a more modern or electric shade. Still, for all her precautions, she could hear very little. And even Tess Monaghan would admit that it’s important to be attuned to the world when one is charging into it backward, gliding along the middle branch of the Patapsco in a scull and passing through channels that are seldom without traffic, even in the predawn hours.