Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (21 page)
Read Dream Factories and Radio Pictures Online
Authors: Howard Waldrop
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Essays & Correspondence, #Essays, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Anthologies, #short stories, #Anthologies & Short Stories, #TV; Movie; Video Game Adaptations
They won’t die easy, but I envision a stack of them ringing my body, my bones, the car: some scorched and blackened, some shot all away, some with mandibles still working long after I’m dead.
I open the twenty-kilo bag of sugar and shake it onto the wind. It sifts into a pile a few feet away. The scent should carry right to them.
I took basic at Fort Ord. There was a tunnel we had to double-time through to get to the range. In cadence. Weird shadows on the wall as we ran. No matter how tired I was, I thought of the soldiers going into the storm drains after the giant ants in a movie I’d seen when I was six. They started here, near the first A-blast. They had to be here. The sugar would bring them.
A sound floats back up the wind like the keening of an off-angle buzz saw. Ah. They’re coming. They’ll be here soon, first one, then many. Maybe the whole nest will turn out. They’ll rise from behind that dune, or maybe that one.
* * *
Closer now, still not in sight.
It’s all over for man, but there are still some things left. Like choices, there’s still that. A choice of personal monsters.
Closer now, and more sounds. Maybe ten or twenty of them, maybe more.
End of movie soon. No chance to be James Arness and get the girl. But plenty of time to be the best James Whitmore ever. No kids to throw to safety. But a Thompson and a carbine. And Molotov cocktails.
Aha. An antenna waves in the middle distance. And—
Bigger than I thought. Take your head right off.
Eat leaden death, Hymenopterae! The Thompson blasts to life.
Screams of confusion. A flash of 100 octane and glass. High keening like an off-angle buzz saw.
I laugh. Formic acid. Cordite.
Hell of a life.
Dream Factories: The Future
T
WO SORTS OF STABS AT WHAT MIGHT BE,
and both look back to an earlier era of the movies as a starting point.
History is not a straight-line thing. As Gardner Dozois once said: SF-type guys and ladies looked around in the 1910s and said, “By 1980, we will have
night baseball!
” They were right, just wrong about the date.
People have predicted revolutions in technology before; they were approximately right; their dates were too pessimistic AND by the time their predictions came true, so had
lots
of others. No straight-line thinking ever turns out just like it was planned.
To very widely paraphrase Asimov in an early essay: First-order thinking, 1880: Tom Oakheart looks around, tinkers, invents the horseless carriage. Second-order thinking, 1880: Tom Oakheart invents horseless carriage, he and Teddy use it to race to the sawmill
faster
than a
horse
could carry them, to rescue Pearl from Oil Can Harry. Third-order thinking, 1880: Tom Oakheart, Pearl, and Teddy are caught in a traffic jam in his horseless carriage, on the way to a drive-in movie (where Oil Can Harry is going to rob the concession stand). (The thinking is Asimov’s; the examples are from my W/S u-plotter.)
Lots of people predicted
movies in your house
. TV (radio pictures) fulfilled part of that need (selling
you
oats when Mr. Ed wasn’t); then (and there
should
have been video discs before tape, but everyone was waiting for a stylus-less system; by the time they got that, tape had stolen the march) videotape in your home, two formats locked in a Texas-style barbed-wire death match; laserdiscs; DVD; etc. (I’ll buy the new stuff when they can guarantee it’s the
only
system I’ll
ever
need.) Home video recapitulates the ontogeny of recorded music: cylinders to shellac 78s to 45s to 33 ⅓rd albums to eight-track to cassette to compact disc to DAT to DVD and audio chips.
Here (he said) in the early 21st Century: All the people who predicted movies in your house ignored
all
the other stuff that would be grab-assing for your time and your increasingly limited attention: video games, computers and computer games, palm pilots, cell phones, walkmans, watchmen, VR glasses and gloves, paintball for gods’ sakes, rock climbing, inline skates, snowboards, fly fishing, and beds and breakfasts, the whole thing.
Now movies may or may not go digital. (The idea of film or music or
anything
using up brainpower when there are perfectly good mechanical means of producing
exactly
the same results, seems to be multiplying entities retrogradely. It uses less power, you say. I say: You’re forgetting the power that was used to make the chip
in the first place
, which is why Silicon Valley’s running out of water and steam.)
There’s a future for the movies (on the way to videotape and TV): What it is neither you nor I nor anyone else knows. That movies will still be made (and most get worse and worse, pretested, safe, delivering their dull shocks as regular as clockwork, by people who make them to as narrow a formula as any
ever
devised, including me and Sennett) is certain. That some great stuff will be made, and slip through, by plan or accident, like it always has, is probable, too.
So enjoy these stories; one pretty speculative; one rather elegiac (if I must say so, and I must).
Introduction: French Scenes
A
LREADY, SINCE THIS WAS WRITTEN
(1986) there have been some amazing technical advances in film.
If I were in the stunt persons’ union, I’d be running scared (this is barely touched on in the story). I envision that guild, ten years from now, as just another featherbed outfit, like locomotive firemen;
there
, maybe, in some advisory capacity or other, with no members
ever
jumping off a burning building
or
crashing a car, or doing anything, except pushing a few buttons, or nodding their heads yes or no. (That their families will sleep lots better is just an added union benefit.)
The story was cutting-edge, in its way, when it was written. Some of it even now has been surpassed; there are lots more technical wonders to come. (That many computer-generated images are in ads, TV, and film where they’re
not needed
is just one of those byproducts of technology—they
can
do it, so they
do
—“Oooh. Neat!”)
No more junkets to the Barbados for supermodels, no more small-town location shooting, no more delays due to weather or the fargin’ sun being in the wrong place for the shot. No more
waiting
, an astounding idea in filmmaking—more than half the time shooting a movie is
nothing happening
. Call it up—hey! Presto! (Sort of like Méliès in reverse, isn’t it?) There you are in Faulkner’s bedroom at Rowan Oak with the plot outline of
A Fable
written across three walls; there you are
Gump-like
being slapped by Patton; there you are whenever and wherever you want to be, wherever and whenever you want to shoot.
Such is the future: maybe. What I wanted to say here is that anytime new stuff comes along, it’s almost like a geologic discontinuity, a Cretaceous/Cenozoic divide. There’s movies before
A Trip to the Moon
(1902) and after;
Birth of A Nation
(1915);
The Jazz Singer
(1927);
Gone with the Wind
and
The Wizard of Oz
(both 1939, the year they got Technicolor right);
Citizen Kane
(1941);
Bwana Devil
(1952) and
The Robe
(1953) for 3-D and Cinemascope; movies before
Hiroshima
,
Mon Amour
and
The 400 Blows
(both 1959), and after.
All these films were important, either technically, or narratively in terms of film grammar; movies could no longer be made like they had been before them, or if so, only at the filmmaker’s peril. Whatever one felt about them, they couldn’t be ignored,
Birth of A Nation
is about editing,
not
its politics (Tom Oakheart = the KKK).
The Jazz Singer
stopped movies cold for about three years (the whole grammar of film was there by 1925; confronted with sound and a stationary microphone, the movies
forgot
everything they’d learned in the first thirty-two years of filmmaking. Don’t take
my
word for it, go see Murnau’s
Sunrise
[also 1927]. Movies didn’t
move
and tell stories like that again until about 1932 . . .).
Citizen Kane
is just, well,
Citizen Kane
. Nothing had ever looked that way before or told a story like that.
Bwana Devil
and
The Robe
(
art
they’re not) in their fight against the One-Eyed Living-Room Monster taught directors you couldn’t 1.) ignore the depth of field, front to back, of what the camera sees; 2.) ignore the left and right sides of the screen, which all but the best filmmakers had
always
done. The movie screen went from being a sheet on the wall to being a moving box in the air.
The Frenchies reshuffled the ol’ narrative deck as effectively as Griffith and Welles had done, in an even more with-it way. Why show a guy getting out of bed, cleaning up, going downtown, standing on a corner with a newspaper till the armored car pulls up at the bank, then show him folding his newspaper, walking across the street, and, five minutes into the movie, an insert shot of him reaching into his pocket, pulling out a gun on the security guard?
Blip
guy in bed
blip
guy brushes teeth
blip
corner with newspaper
blip
dead guard on ground, scattered moneybags, newspaper lying in street
blip
Jean-Louis Tritingnant driving an Alfa Romeo on the road above Monaco, forty-nine seconds into film!
The pace of life and perception was changing;
they
saw it first. (It’s accelerated even more, here forty years on, but now people are just
quicker
to be dumber.)
They
knew
we
knew how movies worked, there in the audience. They just showed us the good stuff; we filled in the boring parts. (Except for Godard, who reversed the process, but which still shows he knew what he was doing. . . .)
So—this story looks forward, to the wonders that might come, at the same time it’s looking back at the last time somebody shook the place up.
And no matter what technologies come, it’s still going to take somebody doing something new with it, or using it
just right
(for example, the use of the Steadicam: Kubrick’s
The Shining
vs. the Coen brothers’
Raising Arizona
.
Don’t
make
me
decide) to tell the story. Miracle technology is just another (
this time
Kubrick: the distal end of an antelope bone
blip
HAL) tool—once you see it and go “Oooh. Neat!” it damn well’d better
do
something. (
Star Wars
just sits there on the screen for the first while, until Harrison Ford puts the pedal to the metal and the
Falcon
goes into hyperdrive—the audience has
waited eighty-two years
for that two seconds; after that the spectators are merely a painted audience in a painted auditorium; they can be told
any
story.)
Come with me, then, on a two-way voyage. Janus-like, I wanted to look both ways at once.
French Scenes
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves . . .
—
Julius Caesar
act 1, sc. 2, ln. 1–2
T
HERE WAS A TIME, YOU READ,
when making movies took so many people. Actors, cameramen, technicians, screenwriters, costumers, editors, producers, and directors. I can believe it.
That was before computer animation, before the National Likeness Act, before the Noe’s Fludde of Marvels.
Back in that time they still used laboratories to make prints; sometimes there would be a year between the completion of a film and its release to theaters.
Back then they used
actual
pieces of film, with holes down the sides for the projector. I’ve even handled some of it; it is cold, heavy, and shiny.
Now there’s none of that. No doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs between the idea and substance. There’s only one person (with maybe a couple of hackers for the dogs’ work) who makes movies: the moviemaker.
There’s only one piece of equipment, the GAX-600.
There’s one true law: Clean your mainframe and have a full set of specs.
I have to keep that in mind, all the time.
* * *
Lois was yelling from the next room where she was working on her movie
Monster Without a Meaning
.
“We’ve got it!” she said, storming in. “The bottoms of Morris Ankrum’s feet!”
“Where?”
“Querytioup,” she said. It was an image-research place across the city run by a seventeen-year-old who must have seen every movie and TV show ever made. “It’s from an unlikely source,” said Lois, reading from the hard copy. “
Tennessee Johnson
. Ankrum played Jefferson Davis. There’s a scene where he steps on a platform to give a secession speech.
“Imagine, Morris Ankrum, alive and kicking, 360°, top and bottom. Top was easy—there’s an overhead shot in
Invaders from Mars
when the guys in the fuzzy suits stick the ruby hatpin-thing in his neck.”
“Is that your last holdup? I wish
this
thing were that goddamn easy,” I said.
“No. Legal,” she said.
Since the National Fair Likeness Act passed, you had to pay the person (or the estate) of anyone even remotely famous, anyone recognizable from a movie, anywhere. (In the early days after passage, some moviemakers tried to get around it by using parts of people. Say you wanted a prissy hotel clerk—you’d use Franklin Pangborn’s hair, Grady Sutton’s chin, Eric Blore’s eyes. Sounded great in theory but what they got looked like a walking police composite sketch; nobody liked them and they scared little kids. You might as well pay and make Rondo Hatton the bellboy.)
“What’s the problem now?” I asked.
“Ever tried to find the heirs of Olin Howlin’s estate?” Lois asked.
* * *
What I’m doing is called
This Guy Goes to Town
. . . It’s a
nouvelle vague
movie; it stars everybody in France in 1962.
You remember the French New Wave? A bunch of film critics who wrote for a magazine,
Cahiers du Cinema
? They
burned
to make films, lived, slept, ate films in the 1950s. Bad American movies even their directors had forgotten, B Westerns, German silent Expressionistic bores, French cliffhangers from 1916 starring the Kaiser as a gorilla, things like that. Anything they could find to show at midnight when everybody else had gone home, in theaters where one of their cousins worked as an usher.
Some of them got to make a few shorts in the mid-fifties. Suddenly studios and producers handed them cameras and money. Go out and make movies, they said: Talk is cheap.
Truffaut. Resnais. Godard. Rivette. Roehmer. Chris Marker. Alain Robbe-Grillet.
The Four Hundred Blows
.
Hiroshima
,
Mon Amour
.
Breathless
.
La Jetée
.
Trans-Europe Express
.
They blew moviemaking wide open.
And why I love them is that for the first time, underneath the surface of them, even the comedies, was a sense of tragedy; that we were all frail human beings and not celluloid heroes and heroines.
It took the French to remind us of that.
* * *
The main thing guys like Godard and Truffaut had going for them was that they didn’t understand English very well.
Like in
Riot in Cell Block 11
, when Neville Brand gets shot at by the prison guard with a Thompson, he yells:
“Look out, Monty! They got a chopper! Back inside!”
What the
Cahiers
people heard was:
“Steady,
mon frère!
Let us leave this place of wasted dreams.”
And they watched a
lot
of undubbed, unsubtitled films in those dingy theaters. They learned from them, but not necessarily what the films had to teach.
It’s like seeing D. W. Griffith’s 1916
Intolerance
and listening to an old Leonard Cohen album at the same time. What you’re seeing doesn’t get in the way of what you’re thinking. The words and images made for cultures half a century apart mesh in a way that makes for sleepless nights and new ideas.
And, of course, every one of the New Wave filmmakers was in love, one way or another, with Jeanne Moreau.
* * *
I’m playing Guy. Or my image is, anyway. For one thing, composition, sequencing, and specs on a real person take only about fifteen minutes’ easy work.
I stepped up on the sequencer platform. Johnny Rizzuli pushed in a standard scan program. The matrix analyzer, which is about the size of an old iron lung, flew around me on its yokes and gimbals like the runaway merry-go-round in
Strangers on a Train
. Then it flew over my head like the crop duster in
North by Northwest
.
After it stopped the platform moved back and forth. I was bathed in light like a sheet of paper on an old office copier.
Johnny gave me the thumbs-up.
I ran the imaging a day later. It’s always ugly the first time you watch yourself tie your shoelaces, roll your eyes, scratch your head, and belch. As close, as far away, from whatever angle in whatever lighting you want. And when you talk, you never sound like you think you do. I’m going to put a little more whine in my voice; just a quarter-turn on the old Nicholson knob.
The movie will be in English, of course, with subtitles. English subtitles.
* * *
(The screen starts to fade out.)
Director (voice off): Hold it. That’s not right.
Cameraman (off): What?
Director (also me, with a mustache and jodhpurs, walking on-screen): I don’t want a dissolve here. (He looks around.) Well?
Cameraman (off): You’ll have to call the Optical Effects man.
Director: Call him! (Puts hands on hips.)
Voices (off): Optical Effects! Optical Effects! Hey!
(Sounds of clanking and jangling. Man in coveralls ((Jean-Paul Belmondo)) walks on carrying a huge workbag marked Optical Effects. He has a hunk of bread in one hand.)
Belmondo: Yeah, Boss?
Director: I don’t want a dissolve here.
Belmondo (shrugs): Okay. (He takes out a stovepipe, walks toward the camera p.o.v., jams the end of the stovepipe over the lens. Camera shudders. The circular image on the screen irises in. Camera swings wildly, trying to get away. Screen irises to black. Sound of labored breathing, then asphyxiation.)
Director’s voice: No! It can’t breathe! I don’t want an iris, either!
Belmondo’s voice: Suit yourself, Boss. (Sound of tearing. Camera p.o.v. Belmondo pulls off stovepipe. Camera quits moving. Breathing returns to normal.)
Director: What kind of effects you have in there?
Belmondo: All kinds. I can do anything.
Director: Like what?
Belmondo: Hey, cameraman. Pan down to his feet. (Camera pans down onto shoes.) Hold still, Monsieur Le Director! (Sound of jet taking off.) There! Now pan up.
(Camera pans up. Director is standing where he was, back to us, but now his head is on backwards. He looks down his back.)
Director: Hey! Ow! Fix me!
Belmondo: Soon as I get this effect you want.
Director: Ow! Quick! Anything! Something from the old Fieullade serials!
Belmondo: How about this? (He reaches into the bag, brings out a Jacob’s Ladder, crackling and humming.)
Director: Great. Anything! Just fix my head!
(Belmondo sticks the Jacob’s Ladder into the camera’s p.o.v. Jagged lightning bolt wipe to the next scene of a roadway down which Guy ((me)) is walking.)
Belmondo (v.o.): We aim to please, Boss.
Director (v.o.): Great.
Now
could you fix my head?
Belmondo (v.o.): Hold still. (Three Stooges’ sound of nail being pried from a dry board.)
Director (v.o.): Thanks.
Belmondo (v.o.): Think nothing of it. (Sound of clanking bag being dragged away. Voice now in distance.) Anybody seen my wine?
(Guy ((me)) continues to walk down the road. Camera pans with him, stops as he continues offscreen left. Camera is focused on a road sign:)
Nevers 32 km
Alphaville 60 km
Marienbad 347 km
Hiroshima 14497 km
Guyville 2 km
* * *
To get my mind off the work on the movie, I went to one of the usual parties, with the usual types there, and on the many screens in the house were the usual undergrounds.
On one, Erich von Stroheim was doing Carmen Miranda’s dance from
The Gang’s All Here
in full banana regalia, a three-minute loop that drew your eyes from anywhere in line of sight.
On another, John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe tore up a bed in Room 12 of the Bates Motel.
In the living room, on the biggest screen, Laurel and Hardy were doing things with Wallace Beery and Clark Gable they had never thought of doing in real life. I watched for a moment. At one point a tired and puffy Hardy turned to a drunk and besmeared Laurel and said: “Why don’t you do something to
help
me?”
Enough, enough. I moved to another room. There was a TV there, too. Something seemed wrong—the screen too fuzzy, sound bad, acting unnatural. It took me a few seconds to realize that they had the set tuned to a local low-power TV station and were watching an old movie, King Vidor’s 1934
Our Daily Bread
. It was the story of a bunch of Depression-era idealistic have-nots making a working, dynamic, corny, and totally American commune out of a few acres of land by sheer dint of will.
I had seen it before. The
Cahiers du Cinema
people always wrote about it when they talked about what real Marxist movies should be like, back in those dim pre-
Four Hundred Blows
days when all they had were typewriters and theories.
The house smelled of butyl nitrate and uglier things. There were a dozen built-in aerosol dispensers placed strategically about the room. The air was a stale mix of vasopressins, pheromones, and endorphins which floated in a blue mist a couple of meters off the floors. A drunken jerk stood at one of the dispensers and punched its button repeatedly, like a laboratory animal wired to stimulate its pleasure center.
I said my goodbyes to the hostess, the host having gone upstairs to show some new arrivals “some really interesting stuff.”
I walked the ten blocks home to my place. My head slowly cleared on the way, the quiet buzzing left. After a while, all the parties run together into one big Jell-O-wiggly image of people watching movies, people talking about them.
* * *
The grocer (Pierre Brasseur) turns to Marie (Jeanne Moreau) and Guy (me).
“I assure you the brussels sprouts are very fine,” he says.
“They don’t look it to me,” says Marie.
“Look,” says Guy (me) stepping between them. “Why not artichokes?”
“This time of year?” asks the grocer.
“Who asked you?” says Marie to Guy (me). She plants her feet. “I want brussels sprouts, but not these vile disgusting things.”
“How dare you say that!” says the grocer. “Leave my shop. I won’t have my vegetables insulted.”
“Easy, mac,” I (Guy) say.
“Who asked you?” he says and reaches behind the counter for a baseball bat.
“Don’t threaten him,” says Marie.
“Nobody’s threatening me,” Guy (I) say to her.
“He is,” says Marie. “He’s going to hit you!”
“No, I’m not,” says the grocer to Marie. “I’m going to hit
you
. Get out of my shop. I didn’t fight in the
maquis
to have some chi-chi tramp disparage me.”
“Easy, mac,” Guy (I) say to him.
“And
now
, I
am
going to hit you!” says the grocer.
“I’ll take these brussels sprouts after all,” says Marie, running her hand through her hair.
“Very good. How much?”
“Half a kilo,” she says. She turns to me (Guy). “Perhaps we can make it to the bakery before it closes.”
“Is shopping here always like this?” I (Guy) ask.
“I wouldn’t know,” she says. “I just got off the bus.”
* * *
It was the perfect ending for the scene. I liked it a lot. It was much better than what I had programmed.
Because from the time Marie decided to take the sprouts, none of the scene was as I had written it.
* * *
“You look tired,” said Lois, leaning against my office doorjamb, arms crossed like Bacall in
To Have and Have Not
.
“I am tired. I haven’t been sleeping.”
“I take a couple of dexadryl a day,” she said. “I’m in this last push on the movie, so I’m making it a point to get at least two hours’ sleep a night.”
“Uh, Lois . . .” I said. “Have you ever programmed a scene one way and had it come out another?”
“That’s what that little red reset button is for,” she said. She looked at me with her gray-blue eyes.
“Then it’s happened to you?”
“Sure.”
“Did you let the scene play all the way through?”
“Of course not. As soon as anything deviated from the program, I’d kill it and start over.”
“Wouldn’t you be interested in letting them go and see what happens?”
“And have a mess on my hands? That was what was wrong with the old way of making movies. I treat it as a glitch, start again, and get it
right
.” She tilted her head. “Why do you ask?”