Girl of My Dreams (28 page)

“Never show the panic you feel,” Nils told me as he waited for the next setup and I waited for the actor to return his marked-up copy of the press release I'd brought, “or else chaos reigns. Make a decision even if it's the wrong one and the actors are confused and the DP smirks, damn him, but you go with that until you think of the right way to do the scene, which you won't necessarily know until you've shot it the wrong way. Actors can go dead unless the director sparks them. Just waiting for a lighting change actors have told me they're wasting their lives. I'll do my magic tricks, and the actors are like children, but if you do that too much they can become passive. They need you to stimulate them but not spoon-feed them.”

Straker, the surly DP, barked out his lighting and camera position orders, then changed them. Nils and I watched a carpenter—an ugly man with a disfigured eye—hammer a broken chair together, tear it apart, then hammer it whole again. He was enforcing a little slowdown of his own. He dared Nils with his one good eye to try to do anything about it. Nils shrugged. At last the brutes were blazing, blinding, and with the other lights combined to turn everything hot as a furnace. Makeup ran and had to be redaubed before every take. Between setups rumors blew a stiff breeze around the sound stage. Who was too drunk to get in front of the camera so the studio let it be known he had the flu. Who was pregnant without a ring on her finger. Who had joined the Communist Party. Who was a secret fairy. Who was going to take over What Picture when Who Else was fired off it. Who was skipping to Fox for a better contract.

Nils still hoped for a master before they broke for the day, but Straker was having his lights and camera moved in slow motion. The set had turned somnolent. When I asked him why everything was so slow, Nils mused that this was frustrating but the worst was yet to come. He leaned back in the canvas chair that said
MISS DEVEREAU
on it.

“You don't like your rushes?” I asked.

He stared at me for a moment, a conjurer deciding whether to let a novice in on one of his tricks. “No, the scenes look all right in the dailies. The temperamental April Devereau, who ran off this morning in tears, is now waiting patiently in her dressing room after Mossy sent her about a thousand orchids and a fully stocked aquarium for her kid. So you have a highball in your hand and watch the dailies at the end of the next day's work, and you're relieved. The star, in this case Devereau, hits her marks, it's all in focus God willing, the line stumbles actually look more spontaneous so you plan to use takes you'd thought contained mistakes. You're a magician again.”

Nils leaped up and jumped over a cable as he strode toward the set with its baronial furniture. He made a circuit as if he were the camera shooting the scene with all the actors in place. “Directing,” he continued, “can be better than sex. It can
be
sex. When it's going well, a director can feel like the guest of honor at an orgy. The actors give you something you didn't even know they had or that you were getting when you were shooting. Suddenly you're a genius. You realize everything you have ever learned from others has merely stood in your way, and your way is going swimmingly. You're tempted to call up that smart-ass writer and tell him the movie didn't get written on his typewriter after all, it's getting written in the camera. The set is a dictatorship yet it's also strangely egalitarian, a little family is created on the set, and you're the good father the others never had. The collaboration is alive, but now the producer and the writer are gone and what happens is between the director and the actors, the director and the cameraman. Soon it will be between the director and his cutter. And it's so personal, the director brags to himself, it's so
me
.”

“What's it like having that much control?”

“Only a fool calls it control, and there are plenty of fools. It's more like warfare, every shot a tactic to seduce the audience. You build your shots around the campaign of seduction you're waging, but it's still warfare.”

“Who's the enemy?”

“God. Dullness. God can be very dull in his stillness and majesty. He doesn't like anyone else to be the creator but himself. He thinks he's the only artist, and the rest of us are impostors. His creations are always nobler than ours, but we stave him off and once in a while we do what he meant to do but hasn't actually gotten around to doing yet. On rare occasions he might even help us. In the film of Queen Victoria, if we get to make it, I need to show her at her coronation ball not only as the young dazzler she was that night but as messenger of an age. You think I don't need God for that?”

The contrast between what Nils was telling me and what I could see was stark. The crew was moving listlessly around the set, actors were slumped in their canvas chairs doing crossword puzzles or complaining to each other. “And today?” I asked.

“Today is bat crap,” Nils said, sighing, his entire frame sagging. “But I think it will hold your attention if we can show how tense things are between the prodigal son and his parents at this big family get-together where they want him to pledge his obedience and he wants to declare his independence by running off with, God help us, Devereau, who's too old for the part, but that we can handle. Dialogue is the least of it here—it's all in looks and shrugs and a camera that notices a napkin being twisted by the mother, a look the father shoots at his son, a note the son keeps folding and unfolding beneath the table, concern for the son on the features of the maiden aunt.”

“You'll get all that this afternoon?”

“No. We'll get the master, and that will tell me what I need in the two-shots, the close-ups, if Straker doesn't make everything too unbearable. You want so bad for it to be good, not to have endless takes. Even at an orgy you can get tired of repetition.”

“You edit the film and you feel better,” I offered.

“Hardly. That's when Hell hits. You see a rough cut, just you and the cutter. It's ghastly. The minister resists temptation in too many scenes and you're sick of him. The girl is sexy where you don't want her to be, yet she's a lump where you want her to be a morsel. No mirth where there's supposed to be a laugh, no fear in a horror scene. Nothing works. Even the villain—juiciest part of the script—isn't believable. You wonder where you can get some of the hemlock Socrates drank. There are those pills you bite down on. Self-immolation is good, you're shrieking in agony as the flames eat you just before you lose consciousness, and that agony is joy compared to what you feel now. Plus you know you'll never work again. Just impale yourself on the Moviola and have done with it.

“The cutter tells you to hold off, she hasn't been editing pictures fifteen years for nothing, in the silents cutting was a real art, how about you go away till Wednesday and she'll show you some stuff, maybe she'll want you to reshoot a scene or two and this time give her a little coverage, maybe there won't be too much egg on your face.

“So you stumble away, embarrassed, humiliated. You've let your underling, your cutter, who probably makes about a tenth of your salary, throw you off your own picture. You steer clear of the studio, go to Santa Anita, the beach, take your kid to the mountains. Wasting time, waiting for the hangman.”

“You've hated your films that much?” I asked. “And yourself?”

“Much more. But then you come back and have a look at the cutter's new cut. Moves better, not so bad, she has minimized places where the picture drags and motivation is unclear, cut the talky exposition, punched up the good action you do have, the dramatic moments you haven't quite ruined. Maybe you're not dead yet. You jump over your producer's head and ask Mossy's permission to reshoot to make the villain more treacherous, the main actors are still on the lot, the sets you need luckily haven't been struck yet because they're being reused.

“You tell Mossy you're on the verge of something fantastic, never been done, you just need three more days' shooting. He says ‘pipe down with the bullshit, I already know you're in trouble, my spies are everywhere as you should know, frankly I sneaked a look at the last third of the picture last night, it's my studio don't look so injured, and it is my considered opinion'—he says to you as you recontemplate suicide only this time it's murder-suicide because you're taking Mossy with you—‘that you may not be in as bad a fix as you think. Reshoot two days, tell Straker to get his ass in gear or he's at Republic doing Westerns next month, and while you're at it reshoot your star with her father and dress her differently, the audience won't know how to react if she's showing cleavage in that scene, we want brains and the audience doesn't think the two can ever be found together, so put her glasses back on while you're disguising her bazooms.'

“As it turns out,” Nils concluded, “Mossy is just a little bit right, even if not the way he thinks he is, you get a couple of ideas of your own, and you're not dead yet and don't have to kill him, and that's how pictures get made.”

At last the director's forces were arrayed for battle. He yelled, “Action!” and the camera moved smoothly on its tracks around the living room as the family argued about what was to become of their prodigal son. Though the actors barely saw him, Nils moved his hands as if he were conducting an orchestra. The take proceeded majestically as no fewer than five actors spoke, each one hitting his or her point, two of them interrupting each other to perfection. The camera came to rest on the son, whose eyes gave both his parents exactly the right degree of love and rebellion. “That's all I'm going to listen to from either of you,” he said. “Please try to remember whose life this is.” He sighed. The master shot was over, and though I knew he would make them do it again, Nils was pleased. Everyone was. He shot his arms out, and a pair of white lovebirds flew from each sleeve. The four birds circled the set and came to perch on Nils's shoulders as the cast and crew applauded. “Okay,” he said, “next we shoot
Secret Shikse Rituals
.”

The look on Dirk Straker's face said he didn't know who he hated more, his delighted crew or Nils Matheus Maynard with his dazzling legerdemain. I was left to wonder how long those birds would have waited patiently until Nils had a take he liked.

The actor playing the prodigal son handed me back the press release. “I'm from Butte, not Bozeman,” he said, “and my old man's a grocer not a high powered land speculator, whatever that is. Other than that, it's okay, I guess.”

Errand over. I was on my way off the sound stage when Nils summoned me. I walked obediently to his canvas chair with the block letters
MAGICIAN
on it. “Hey Jant, don't you like the take?”

“Everyone else has already told you. You don't need to ask me.”

“I need to make it unanimous,” he said.

“Thanks, it was great. If you do it again, maybe the father could look more stern.”

“Right, glad to hear it. Now cheer yourself, Owen. You're too upright, dogged, gray. You're already clean, innocent, aiming to please. Give yourself a break and Mossy will too. Cut loose. You've been wanted and found trying. That's enough.”

As I left the stage I didn't know whether to feel found out or complimented. Mossy had been having his own exertions far more complex than mine and of course having far more effect on an entire population. He was like the Russian landowners whose estates were measured not in hectares but in how many serfs they had, whom they described as souls. Counting extras, Mossy had twenty-two hundred souls in his domain that week in early 1934.

The child star Skip Teeter was in Mossy's office with his parents, a pair of drunks everyone wanted to kick off the lot. They'd come out from Kentucky with Skip to escape bill collectors and had their son cadging for dimes on La Brea when he was spotted by the statesmanlike Hurd Dawn, then the new head of scenic design at Jubilee. Hurd either wanted to pick the boy up or thought he'd be perfect as Becky Thatcher's brother in the first talkie version of
Tom Sawyer
that Jubilee was making. Skip soon became the adorable bucktoothed towheaded mischievous hero of a series of highly profitable B movies enjoyed by both parents and children. Skip and Company. Skip's parents had been told by an executive at a rival studio that Jubilee was getting a bargain on Skip's services for a mere three thousand dollars a week.

When Skip forgot a line that morning, Pa Teeter had hit him right there on the set. He hit his son hard enough to raise a lump on his forehead. “You smeared his makeup, you idiot!” Ma Teeter had yelled. The director had the parents thrown off the set while the script girl applied ice to Skip's forehead. After three years, Skip was becoming somewhat ungainly, almost adolescent at twelve. He was bowlegged, his ears were growing outwards, and he had developed several moles on his cheeks that makeup turned into bumps rather than camouflaging. One of his shoulders slumped down awkwardly.

Mossy knew Pa Teeter was talking to another studio. “Three thousand dollars a week is a good deal of money for a twelve year old,” Mossy said to the Teeter family.

“It sure is, Mr. Zangwill,” Skip said, “but my old man is a selfish—”

“Shut your face, young fella,” said his father, “or I'll shut it for you good.”

“Now, now,” said Mossy, “I understand you've hit the boy today. That's not how we treat people at Jubilee.”

“You're making millions off our son,” said Skip's mother, “and we been told Skip could get five thousand a week at Fox or Warners, maybe more.”

“Hell, I could produce his pictures myself,” said Pa Teeter. Skip rolled his eyes.

“We have a contract with Skip signed by both of you,” Mossy said calmly. “It's not in anyone's best interests if Skip gets a reputation for walking out on agreements.”