The View from the Cheap Seats (18 page)

“It's oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened.”

F
ilms deliver their pleasures in different ways. Many films give you everything they have to offer the first time you see them, leaving you nothing for another viewing. Some deliver what they have grudgingly on first viewing, only to reveal their magic on subsequent occasions, when things become increasingly satisfying. Very few films are dreams, configuring and reconfiguring themselves in your mind on waking. These films, I think, you make yourself, afterwards, somewhere in the shadows in the back of your head.
The Bride of Frankenstein
is one of those dream-films. It exists in the culture as a unique thing, magical and odd: a lurching story sequence as ungainly and as beautiful as the monster itself, that culminates in a couple of minutes of film that have seared themselves onto the undermind of the world.

It's a lot of people's favorite horror film. Dammit, it's
my
favorite horror film. And yet . . .

My daughter Maddy loves the idea of
The Bride of Frankenstein:
she's ten. Last year, captivated by the little statue of Elsa Lanchester in frightwig that stands, facing a statue of Groucho Marx, on a window ledge halfway up the stairs, she decided to be the Monster's Bride for Hallowe'en. I had to find her imagery of Karloff and his bride-to-be, e-mail her photos of them. Several weeks ago, finding myself in sole charge of Maddy and her friend Gala Avary, I made them hot chocolate and we watched
The Bride of Frankenstein
.

They enjoyed it, wriggling and squealing in all the right places. But once it was done, the girls had an identical reaction. “Is it over?” asked one. “That was weird,” said the other, flatly. They were as unsatisfied as an audience could be.

I felt vaguely guilty—I knew they would have enjoyed
House
—or is it
Ghost
?—
of Frankenstein,
the one with Karloff as a mad scientist, and John Carradine's Dracula, not to mention a Lon Chaney Jr. wolfman—so much more. It's a romp, after all. It may not be scary, but it feels like a horror film, and it would have delivered everything two ten-year-olds needed to be satisfying.

The Bride of Frankenstein
doesn't romp. It's oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head. I've seen it I do not know how many times since I was a boy, and I'm almost pleased to say that I still can't quite tell you the plot. Or rather, I can tell you the plot as it goes along. And then, when it's done, the film begins to scum over in my mind, to reconfigure like a dream does once you've wakened, and it all becomes much harder to explain.

The film begins with Mary Shelley, Elsa Lanchester, all sly smiles and period cleavage, talking to an intensely dull Byron and Shelley, introducing us to a sequel to the original Frankenstein story. And then it's moments after the first film,
Frankenstein,
and the story starts again. The monster survived. The status quo has been restored.

Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) is getting married to the wimpy Elizabeth (Valerie Hobson). (The wimpy Elizabeth is the real bride of Frankenstein, and is, I suspect, given the film's title, one of the main factors responsible for the confusion in the popular mind between the scientist and his monster.)

Ernest Thesiger's Dr. Pretorius, a far madder scientist than our Henry, strides into Henry Frankenstein's life, like a man bringing a bottle of absinthe to a reformed addict. Dr. Pretorius,
waspish, camp, unforgettable, trolls in from a world much more dangerous than Henry's. He's sharp and funny, steals scenes, and has a marvelous sequence with bottled homunculi—lovers, a king, a priest. This has something to do with his own alchemical researches into creating life, and, I find myself thinking whenever I watch it, nothing at all to do with the film at hand. It sits in the mind like a dream, inexplicable, a moment of movie magic. I find myself fancying director James Whale as Pretorius here, the homunculi his actors, ready to lust or lecture or die as he desires.

Henry Frankenstein himself is feverish, and strangely absent from the film that bears his name, emotionally and truly. The alcoholism (and perhaps the tuberculosis) that would soon enough carry off Colin Clive is already muting his vitality. All the monsters have more life in them than Henry Frankenstein does now, and watching the film I imagine that they will live longer, once the action is over.

Karloff plays the Monster. His face is part of the strange experience of the film: we have seen many people since Karloff who have portrayed Frankenstein's Monster, but none of them were the real thing: they looked too brutish, or too comical—Herman Munsters in waiting. Karloff is something else: sensitive, hurting, a former brute now learning language and longing and love. There is little in the monster to be frightened of.

Instead we pity him, sympathize with him, care about him.

(The sequence with the blind hermit is subject to slippage in my mind with its parody in
Young Frankenstein
. I worry, when I see the blind man in
Bride,
that he will pour hot soup on the monster, or set light to him, and am always relieved when they survive the meal unscathed. Instead, unable to see the monster, the hermit is the only one who is able to look at the monster without prejudice.)

James Whale, directing the film with elegance and panache,
builds lovely catacombs. There is a terrible beauty in each perfectly composed shot, just as there is wit and poetry in William Hurlbut's script.

Of course, it's hard to care a twopenny fig for either Henry or Elizabeth, and I suspect that Whale knew that: from being the tragic focus of the first movie, Henry Frankenstein now becomes the film's Zeppo, a bland lover in a cast of shambling zanies. It's one reason why the film feels so subversive, and so deeply surreal. In
Bride of Frankenstein,
all is prelude to the unwrapping of Elsa Lanchester, the revelation of the true Bride, the one that the movie's really named after. She is revealed; she hisses, screeches, is terrified, is wonderful, and once we have seen her there is nothing left for us. As Karloff's monster realizes that she, too, fears him, he slips from joyful hope to despair with a look, and moves over to pull the now traditional blow-up-the-lab switch.

But Elsa and Karloff are the perfect couple, too vivid, too alive to have died in the final explosion. Even as Henry and Elizabeth fade from the imagination, the monster and his mate live on forever, icons of the perverse, in our dreams.

This essay originally appeared in the collection
Cinema Macabre
, edited by Mark Morris, 2005.

S
omewhere in North London, as I type this, Dave McKean is hard at work on
MirrorMask
. He's sighing and frowning and working extremely long hours, just as he has for the last eighteen months, compositing shots and solving problems. Dave designed and directed and composed every shot in
MirrorMask
. The finished film has to be delivered at the end of this month. If there's one thing he doesn't have time for, it's writing introductions.

So this is the story of
MirrorMask
according to me.

It was the summer of 2001. The phone rang. It was Lisa Henson, and she wanted to know whether I thought Dave McKean would be interested in making a fantasy film for them—something in a similar vein to
Labyrinth
. Although, she said,
Labyrinth
had cost the Jim Henson Company about forty million to make twenty years earlier, and, while the funding for a new film existed, there wasn't very much of it: only four million dollars, which is a lot of money if you come across an abandoned suitcase full of cash in a hollow tree somewhere, but won't get you very far in the world of fantasy filmmaking. She had seen Dave's small films and loved them. Did I think that Dave would be interested? I said I didn't know.

Obviously, said Lisa, she couldn't afford to pay me for writing a script. Maybe I could help a writer come up with the story . . . ?
I told her that if Dave said yes to directing it, I was writing the script, and that was all there was to it.

Dave said yes.

I had half an idea, and I wrote it down and sent it to Dave. A girl from a traveling theater, who found herself kidnapped into some kind of fairyland by a fairy queen. An unreliable Puck-like guide. A girl forced to become or to pretend to become a fairy princess, while a real fairy princess was forced to try and pretend to be human.

Meanwhile, Dave had had a dream, and on waking decided it might be the basis for a good film: a mother in the real world who is extremely ill, a world of masks, a girl who had to wake the sleeping white queen, a white queen and a dark queen, a balance that was shifting and breaking. He sent me an e-mail, describing the dream, and his idea for a film, and several other ideas he had had for the feel of what he wanted to convey.

I wondered whether we could combine the two ideas.

In February of 2002, the Jim Henson Company sent me to England for two weeks. To save money, and because we both thought it an excellent idea, Dave and I stayed in the Henson family house in Hampstead. It hadn't been decorated since Jim Henson died, and everywhere we were surrounded by his world. In a cupboard in the lounge we found a video of an early edit of
Labyrinth,
over three hours long with the voices of the puppeteers doing their characters rather than the actors, and we watched it in the evening over a few nights, to help put us into the mood. Dave had a pile of art books with him, books on surrealism and sculpture, books filled with imagery that he thought might come into play in the story.

Dave McKean and I had worked together very happily for about sixteen years at that point. It had always been easy. This wasn't.

Mostly it wasn't, because Dave and I wrote, we discovered, in
completely different ways. He plans it all out, and writes every idea down on little cards, needs it to all be done before the first word of script is written; whereas I'll talk about it to the point where I'm ready to start writing, and then I start writing and find out the rest of it as I go along. These methods of working are not entirely compatible. That was half of the problem. The other half of the problem was that Dave knew what he could and couldn't do, in order to make a film with the money that we had, and I didn't.

“I want to do a scene in Helena's school,” I'd say.

“Can't do it,” Dave would explain. “Too expensive. We'd need the class, and a teacher and kids as extras,” and then, seeing my face fall, he'd add, “but we can make the world crumple up like a piece of paper, if you want. That won't cost us anything.”

Still, Dave's certainties were reassuring. It's often easier to make art if you know what your boundaries are. In the case of
MirrorMask,
I wrote down in the basement kitchen, where it was warm (right now I'm writing this in the kitchen of a borrowed house, which goes to demonstrate consistency, I think), while Dave mostly worked several floors up, where there was light and a grand piano.

Our touchstone was something Terry Gilliam had once said about his wonderful film
Time Bandits
. He said he wanted to make a film intelligent enough for children, but with enough action in it for adults. And so did we.

I started writing.

Dave would suggest things that would, he hoped, be easy and relatively cheap to make in the world of computer animation—twining shadow-tentacles or formless black bird-shapes.

Several times during that week, Dave would go off and do a first draft of a scene on his own, to show me what he meant, and I'd fold that in—the first drafts of the Giants Orbiting sequence, the Monkeybirds and the scene looking for the dome in the
Dreamlands were all Dave's, for example, as was the Librarian's Origin of the World speech, which Dave wrote long before we started writing the film. I'd tidy them up, and noodle with the dialogue. He for his part would look over my shoulder at the dialogue I was writing on the screen and point out whenever I was starting to sound like Terry Jones writing
Labyrinth,
and then I would try to make it sound a bit more like me writing
MirrorMask
.

Henson's had mentioned they thought there should be goblins in it somewhere, owing to their having already sold the film we were making to Sony under the working title of “Curse of the Goblin Kingdom,” so every now and again I would insert the word
goblin
in front of a character's name—“Goblin Librarian” for example, while the character who doesn't have much of a name in the current script apart from “Small Hairy” was called “Dark Goblin” in that first draft. Dave took a jaundiced view of this practice. “They'll want to see goblins,” he'd warn me. “And there won't be any goblins. It'll lead to trouble.” I thought we'd probably be all right.

Neither of us was sure whether or not we were really making a film until the day Terry Gilliam came round to the house for a cup of tea. He looked at the sheet of paper we had covered with lines and scribbles to tell ourselves the shape of the film. “
That,
” he said, “looks like a movie.”

Ah,
we thought. Maybe it did, at that.

The unreliable juggler character was called “Puck” in the first draft, and we knew we needed a better name for him. It was the second week in February, and we were surrounded by posters and signs telling us it was nearly Valentine's Day, so we called him Valentine. It was a slightly more flamboyant name, and he suddenly seemed, to both of us, a slightly more flamboyant character.

We sent the script off to Henson's, and we waited, nervously.
They had comments, of course, extremely sensible ones—they wanted more ending and more beginning.

Dave sent us pictures of characters and moods and places, to try to show the kind of things that he meant: how the White City would feel, what Valentine would be like, all that.

The strange thing about looking at those pictures now, for me, is that they make complete sense. I can see exactly what Dave meant and why he sent them. At the time they came in I looked at them and wondered how they could possibly relate to the script we'd written.

Dave knew, though. Dave always knows.

Now, my theory about films is that it's probably safer to assume that they won't happen. That way, when, as you expected, they don't happen, you won't find yourself with six months' free time you have to fill. So while we did another draft of the script, and while Dave sat down and carefully storyboarded the entire film (the same storyboards you'll see in this book), and while Henson's seemed quite certain that it really was going to happen, it seemed easier to assume that at some point someone would wake up and see reason, and that it would never happen. Nobody ever saw reason.

What you're waiting for, in the world of filmmaking, is a “Green Light.” It's like traffic lights—the Green Light means it's a go. Everything's happening. You're making your film.

“Do we have a Green Light on
MirrorMask
?” I'd ask. Nobody ever seemed quite sure.

And then it was May 2003, and I was in Paris, at the end of a European signing tour. Dave phoned and said, “We're having a read-through of
MirrorMask
.” I got on the train to London and found myself sitting in a small room at Henson's London offices, where a bunch of actors sat around a table, and read. I was introduced to Gina McKee and Stephanie Leonidas. Brian Henson read many of the small odd creatures (I was particu
larly impressed with his reading of the Chicken). I scribbled on the script some more, cutting bits, adding lines, and feeling pleased whenever something that I'd hoped was a joke actually got a laugh from the people around the table.

After the reading Dave and I asked Lisa Henson if we actually, finally, honestly and truly had a Green Light for the film. She tried to explain that this film wouldn't work like that, and no we didn't, but it would happen, so not to worry. We worried anyway.

And then, more or less to our surprise, Dave started shooting.

I wasn't there for most of it. I thought it wouldn't happen, and, by the time I realized it was actually happening, could only be there for a week.

A film crew is quickly bonded, through adversity and madness, into something between a family and a team of soldiers in a foxhole under fire. There's never enough time before the light goes, never enough time to retake that last shot, never enough money to throw at the problems and make them go away, the trumpet player in the circus band still hasn't arrived and tomorrow's shots in the hospital won't be what Dave's planning because the fish tank he's planning to shoot through will leak, and then the tiger barb fish will start eating the neon tetras . . .

Because I wasn't there, I will never understand why the cast and crew T-shirts that Dave made have “Smell my lime” on them. Dave's explained it to me, but I think you really had to be there.

They shot the film in six weeks—two weeks on location, the rest of the time in front of a blue screen. They finished in July 2003. And then Dave started making the film. When he began there were fifteen animators, and Max. Now, fifteen months later, there's just Dave and Max.

I'm writing this in October 2004, and Dave says he's nearly finished, and I believe him. I've seen most of the film cut to
gether, and am continually delighted by how far it is from what I'd imagined it was going to be, just as I'm delighted when actors who performed in front of a blue screen suddenly get to see what they were really doing all along.

I've now had eighteen years of being astonished by Dave, and you'd think I'd be used to it by now, but I'm not. I don't think I ever will be.

This was the introduction to
MirrorMask: The Illustrated Film Script of the Motion Picture
, and was written in 2004.