Max (48 page)

Max slept late the following morning, and when he had shaved and dressed and glanced in the room next door, he discovered that Gertrude had left. But she had taken pains to put the bed together neatly. He went downstairs. The studio was already alive and working, and his secretary was at her desk in the reception room of the cottage.

‘Did you –' he began.

‘Yes, Mr Britsky. She came down about fifteen minutes ago. She said she wanted to look around outside.'

‘She comes back, tell her I'm in the commissary, having breakfast. Tell her to go into the VIP room and ask for my table.'

He stepped out into the hard, brilliant California sunshine. This was his domain, his world, his creation, this vast cluster of buildings, stage shops, castles of papier-mâche, desert hovels and suburban streets, cranes, cameras, and generators. And on the streets of this great enclosure called the Max Britsky Studio, hundreds of men and women -Indians, cowboys, gamblers, exotic dancers out of the Arabian nights, British hussars, grips, carpenters, cameramen, electricians, writers, directors – and standing entranced, bewildered, a small blond girl named Gertrude Meyerson.

Gently, Max tapped her arm. ‘Come on, kid, I'll buy you some breakfast and then we'll find you a job.'

[
T E N
]

 

The day started with a writer. He was a young writer, twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, a graduate of Syracuse University – Syracuse, out of Max's frame of reference, vaguely indicative of the ancient world, of the chariot racetrack on the back lot. Max asked him where the college was, and he replied that it was in upstate New York. The writer had an air of poorly concealed superiority, the patience one exercises in conversation with the ignorant, the uneducated, the culturally deficient; but Max was familiar with the attitude and did not resent it. The writer, whose name was Dudley Langham, had published a novel and two short stories in the
Atlantic
, and he had also done a skit for one of Ziegfeld's reviews. He had come to Los Angeles because he felt, as he told Max, that the film was the art form with the greatest potential, and Fulton Hazig, Max's studio editor, had taken him on with a salary of two hundred a week. ‘He's pretty snotty and wet behind the ears,' Hazig told Max, ‘but at least he can write his own name and spell it correctly – which, considering the level of writing we get out here, is something.'

Max had read his first scenario and asked to talk to the man, a long-legged gangling man, heavy glasses, tweeds.

‘Personally,' Max said to him, ‘I write my own name, but not so good, so I don't try to pretend to be a critic. Everybody else is a critic, so I figure the society can operate without me joining it. For criticism, I hired Mr Hazig. That's his business.'

‘But I want very much to know what you think about it.'

‘Ah-hah, that's criticism. I say it stinks, that's criticism. I say it's wonderful, also criticism. All I can say is I like it or I don't like it. I don't like it. I'll tell you why. For me, a movie should do one of two things. Either the hero, which can be either a man or a woman, is somebody you like so much, you're ready to die if he dies and bleed when he bleeds, or it should be somebody you hate so much you'd like to kill him yourself, you could only get into the screen. This here' – tapping Langham's scenario – ‘this don't do it to me. I don't love and I don't hate. You come right down to it, I'd rather play the Victrola.'

‘Aren't you applying your own subjective judgments, Mr Britsky? You pose a very simplistic approach to literature.'

That took nerve, Max admitted to himself. Mayer or Zukor would have booted Langham right out of the room. ‘Only it ain't literature,' Max said, not unkindly. People like Langham always loused up Max's grammer. In spite of himself, he couldn't control it. It was his defense. ‘Maybe it ain't even drama, the way it's done in the theatre. You see, boychik, movies are something else, stories told in pictures. Think about that – stories told in pictures. Try it again.'

He handed Langham the script, opened the door to his office, and ushered the young man out before Langham could think of an appropriate retort. Then he called Hazig and shouted at him, ‘Don't send me no more of your goddamn geniuses with their scripts!'

‘Langham?'

‘That's the shithead's name. Yes.'

‘He's got something, Max, and you have a gift for putting your finger on it.'

Max softened.

‘Did you talk to him?'

‘I talked to him.'

‘Did you tell him what was wrong? I tried, but I couldn't get through to him.'

‘I told him,' Max said.

‘Thanks.'

Max put down the phone, grinning and shaking his head. Fulton Hazig handled him with great skill, and Max appreciated anyone who handled him with great skill. Out in the reception room, Sam Snyder was waiting for him. At least Sam didn't have to handle him. They let each other know exactly what was on their minds, and now Sam said to him, ‘I don't want you to blow up at Mike Benson. He's a brilliant engineer, and he's been working sixteen hours a day on this.'

‘I don't blow at him,' Max snorted. ‘If I get pissed off, it's because this should have been done twenty years ago, right at the beginning. If Edison cared one stinking bit for art instead of his goddamn machines all his life, he would have done it.'

‘Max, you're too damn high strung. You lose your temper at the drop of a hat. You never were that way.' Snyder never lost his temper. Through the years he had become heavier, his belly larger, his tangled hair snow white. Now he bought his dark sweet beer by the case from a brewery in Seattle. Alongside of him, Max seemed to contract, to become smaller and skinnier, regardless of how much beer he consumed.

‘You're right,' Max said.

They started off down the studio street toward the Sound Shop. The Sound Shop was a laboratory of sorts that Max had set up five years ago in an attempt to conquer his pet hate, the dialogue card. As the years passed, his distaste for the device of breaking a film again and again with dialogue cards and for the lip motion that produced no sound had increased, finally reaching a point where he decided that if
he
didn't solve the problem, no one would. Whereupon he built a sound laboratory on the studio ground and staffed it with a research staff of sound engineers. At this point, early in 1927, they were very close to success, almost at the point of embarking on a feature film to be developed with dialogue cards replaced by the actor's speech. The screenplay – for it had to be a play rather than a scenario – had been written. A number of actors who could actually act had been hired, and one of the large stages on the lot had been soundproofed.

His bitterness worn fuzzy by time, Max had been persuaded by his colleagues to rehire Gerald Freedman, who during the past dozen years had directed a series of films hailed by the critics as artistic triumphs. Max had his own opinion of just how triumphant these films were, but he appreciated Freedman's reputation, and he succumbed to Barney Enfield's pleadings that this venture into talking pictures be encased with every publicity gimmick that could be bought or invented. Enfield, no longer a single, lone flack but chief of a public relations and advertising section of Britsky Productions that employed eighteen men and women, sensed the gigantic revolution in the whole world of entertainment that the talking pictures would produce, perhaps more so even than Max, and he insisted that when the first talking picture was made, it be launched with more fanfare than any opening in the history of film. Max agreed. Sometime in the past decade, this thing spawned out of the kinetoscopes and the nickelodeons had changed from a storefront entertainment for illiterate immigrants into an art form, generating a whole new order of critics; and Max sensed that the talking picture would complete the transition.

And now Max said to Sam Snyder, ‘You're right. I'm nervous as a cat, Sam, because I got to be first. It was my idea, and by now I put over a million dollars into it, and now every goddamn studio out here is trying to get in there with a talking picture device, only there ain't no device and what we got is not a device. That's what Freddy keeps telling me. We don't have a device and we can't patent it, so either we get in there first or we'll be entirely up shit creek.'

They were walking along the studio street toward the sound laboratory, part of the eddying population of what Max called his dream factory, Max as always in proper dark gray, white shirt and striped tie, and Sam Snyder in the blue jeans and work shirt he donned each morning on reaching the studio, a great ring of keys and a flashlight hanging from his belt, still with no real title, but nevertheless the man who operated the mechanisms of this vast enterprise, with its own security force, fire department, electric generating plant, water supply, garbage collection, plaster casting shop, carpentry shop, machine shop, auto pool, warehouse, garment factory, art studios, paint shops, and, of course, fake streets, castles, cities, suburbs, stages, and offices. And still, calm and unhurried as he said to Max, ‘Come off it. We are not up shit creek, and you know it. No one can beat us, Max. We got five hundred theatres wired for sound already. It will take at least a year for any other studio to catch up with us, so why don't you just relax and let it happen.'

‘You think we got it? I paid Mike Benson fifty grand to come in and make it work.'

‘It's money well spent. He's damn good. What about Jake Stein?'

‘What about him?'

‘They took him to the hospital yesterday. His wife says they can't operate. The cancer's too far gone. I think he's dying, Max.'

‘Yeah, poor bastard. I feel guilty as hell. I never liked him.'

‘We ought to go to the hospital.'

‘I hate hospitals. God Almighty, I hate hospitals.'

‘Yeah. Still, he's been with us a long time. What's to feel guilty about?'

‘I'll tell you what. All these years I never said two words to the man that wasn't business, never went to his house, and last week, when I heard he was sick, someone tells me he's still on the payroll for three hundred a week. Never asked for a raise, never asked for a nickel for himself, worked himself out like a goddamn slave – what the hell for? I don't ask for anything like that.'

Snyder shrugged. ‘We'll talk to his wife. See what she needs.'

They were at the sound laboratory now, a square, gray, windowless stucco building, much like the shooting stages that lined the studio streets, only smaller; and inside, out of the bright, eternal sunshine into the cavelike darkness of the entry, they stood blinking while Mike Benson greeted them. He was a pudgy, moon-faced, middle-aged man who, like so many other important sound experts, had gotten his early training with Edison. He had been waiting for them, and he shook hands eagerly.

‘This time.' He nodded. ‘This time, absolutely. We're set up. The others are here.'

The sound lab had a small viewing room, three rows of six seats. Freedman was there with his assistant director and the screenplay author, Eugene Cape, three Broadway hits and the best writing reputation in the legitimate theatre world, Fred Feldman, Bert Bellamy, Barney Enfield, Clifford Abel, who was designing the film, and Max's brother Ruby. Max and Snyder took their places in the last row. Ruby sat down next to Max, and said to him nervously, ‘What's this about Jake going to the hospital?'

‘So I'm told. I think he's dying.'

‘Dying? What the devil do you mean, dying?'

‘He has cancer and he's dying,' Max said flatly. ‘It happens. You want to talk about it, we'll talk later. Now I got to watch this.'

‘I don't understand this? Why didn't I know?'

‘You want to weep over Jake, I can understand,' Max said not unkindly. ‘Maybe somebody ought to cry over him. But not now.'

‘I just want to know what this is about him dying?'

‘Not now!' Max said with annoyance.

Ruby rose and stalked out of the room, saying as he left, ‘I got to call him, I mean the hospital.'

‘Since when is he that close to Jake?' Snyder wondered.

‘He's always been chummy with Jake,' Bert Bellamy said.

‘Shall we wait for him?' Benson asked Max.

‘No, go ahead.'

‘Whatever you say.' Benson rose and faced them. ‘There could be a hitch when we change records. I hope not, but it is just possible. It isn't that we don't understand the problem and how to overcome it. It's just that we had to build every component for the slow-turning mechanism, and some parts need further testing. So if we go out of sync, bear with us.'

‘No, sir,' Max said. ‘I've seen it out of sync fifty times. Like hell I'll bear with you.'

Benson sighed and nodded as he went into the control room. Snyder glanced at Max.