Wake Up and Dream (5 page)

W
AKE UP AND DREAM—A BIOPIC OF LARS BECHMEIR SCREENPLAY BY DANIEL LAMOTTE

No credits. The first thing the audience see as they settle in the theater are lines of faces, young and old, pretty and ugly, just like their own, but right up there on the screen. Some are yawning, some expectant. Some are pretty, some ugly. It’s a typical scene. The CAMERA pans over more and more faces. The FIELD gives out nothing at first but a general sense of anticipation. It’s like the audience on the screen and those in the feelie theater are the same. Then, as an underlay, with the DANIEL LAMOTTE THEME riding with it on the SOUNDTRACK, comes a mixture of
awe
and
unease
. CAMERA fixes on a young boy’s face. He’s pale, scruffily dressed. His mouth and eyes are wide. Then, a drumroll. Applause. The flare of a nearby spotlight glints in his wide open eyes. And we switch CAMERA POV to the kid. Roll CREDITS.

The show begins.

Rags to riches. Poverty to fame. Europe to America. East to west. The story contained so many of the ingredients for a successful feelie that it was a wonder it hadn’t been made years before. Especially when you considered who it was about.

Lars Bechmeir had been born in Germany at the turn of the century to a family of traveling circus players. Alongside the strong men and bearded ladies and lion tamers, Bechmeir’s parents had performed a mind-reading act, and it was something they were surprisingly good at. So good that their only son was puzzled by how they often managed to make accurate guesses even when their usual system of signs and signals failed. Lars was a bright lad, and curious about the world. Perhaps he might even have shaken off his lowly upbringing and gotten to university, had the Great War not intervened.

Like all young and able German men, Lars Bechmeir was conscripted. Like most, he ended up in the version of hell that was the Western Front. The only uncommon thing about Lars Bechmeir’s war was that he survived. That, and that his terrible experiences made him think even more deeply about how people reacted to each other; how atmospheres of fear, aggression and occasional joy were so easily and quickly transmitted. How bouts of savagery, or mercy, or bravery, or fear, seemed to pass from soldier to soldier like some contagious disease.

What, Bechmeir wondered, if people communicated with each other not just through their commonly understood senses, but also by some other means? Of course, he knew the idea wasn’t original. He even knew how the many experiments which had attempted to prove communication between minds always failed. But Bechmeir wasn’t thinking about people sat behind screens and looking at cards in some bright laboratory.

What he had experienced and witnessed in the trenches, above all what he
felt
, led him to believe that this hidden sense was a primitive thing, dealing not in higher-brain abstractions like words or images or thoughts, but in the raw stuff of basic emotion.

We are, he decided, minutely touched by the cloaking aura of every person we meet. It explained the mass actions of mobs. It explained sudden feelings of attraction, repulsion or fear. It even explained the feeling of peacefulness so often found inside churches, and the homeliness of a happy house, and the sense of dread which clings to places where something terrible has happened. It might even explain why people imagined they saw ghosts.

Lars Bechmeir fled war-ravaged Europe and headed for America with the vision of a means by which people shared each other’s feelings. If we could reach into each other’s minds, he reasoned—if we could really feel what another person felt and understand their joy and suffering—there would surely never be war again. He lived a few years in Chicago, sweeping the floors at the university and occasionally having use of the library. Then, like millions of others, he went west. He labored, he begged, but he still worked obsessively on his idea, which by now was a wad of calculations and speculations stuffed into the back pocket of his only pair of dungarees. It was on this journey that he met his wife Betty, whose sharecropper parents had been thrown off their land.

In a barn in Minnesota, which Clark believed was now open daily for public tours, Bechmeir was finally able to capture on specially treated photographic paper those first famous images of his wife’s aura. Only a thumbprint smudge, a blur as if of faint gray wings flapping around a silhouetted body, but it bore out all that he had long theorized, even down to the essential weakness and changeability of the human aura. Now, at last, he had his proof. And, he reasoned, if this aura was essentially nothing more than a weak electromagnetic field which he called plasm, not only could this plasm be captured as an image, but, most likely, it could be recorded—and if it could be recorded, these recordings could be re-transmitted, and they could then be amplified, and edited. In one leap, Bechmeir had moved from the theory of a mild but little-credited extra sense to an idea which would revolutionize the world.

Lars and Betty Bechmeir continued west. Inevitably, they reached LA. In a series of run-down rooming houses and abandoned garages, he worked on generating this newly discovered field artificially. At least in LA, there was a ready supply of electronic equipment which the rapid progress of recording technology had discarded, and he made much use of cannibalized parts and the borrowed know-how of technicians he met in bars. He could see many uses for his discovery, but he soon realized that the most rapid progress could be made in what was then called the movie industry.

But who would listen? Not the major players—not to a crank clutching a carpetbag with some weird idea about thought-waves. Which was what finally brought Lars Bechmeir to the top floor of the Taft Building for an appointment to see Howard Hughes. Hughes was a wealthy man and a movie producer, for sure, but he was already more famous for his eccentricities and his forays into aviation. For all his successes, Hughes was regarded as a loose cannon, but if you were looking for someone who would be fascinated by the idea of a device which could record the emanations of the mind, it would have been hard to find anyone better.

Even before the vacuum tubes of the frail and rudimentary device had been warmed up and wired together across his desk by the small, nervous guy with a German accent who’d shuffled into his office on worn out shoes, Hughes had been persuaded. When, after much further coaxing, a shimmering field of plasm stuttered from between two spikes of metal, and the everyday sounds of city traffic wafting in through the windows were briefly eclipsed by a strange but palpable sense of dread, he was fully convinced.

Bechmeir had already filed patents for his discovery, and, even then, he was determined that his device should be made available to the world as a whole. Still, he took Hughes’ backing to push on with developing a commercial prototype in the old schoolhouse down in Willowbrook where he was by then working, and which subsequently become a museum and home to the Bechmeir Trust. Rumors were soon rife about this strange new form of entertainment the Hughes Corporation was said to be developing, and then of the talkie—no, it would be called a feelie-movie—in which it would be premiered.

Reactions to the first showings of
Broken Looking Glass
at Grauman’s Chinese Theater were mixed. There were teething troubles. Reels broke. Valves overheated. There was a small fire. Many claimed to have been made nauseous by the strange, crackling aurora which spluttered before the screen. Others said they felt nothing at all. The Actors’ Guild and the other studios were hostile. A Catholic bishop condemned the whole enterprise for tampering with the very stuff of the human soul. Then, and in the tradition of most of Hughes’ movies, the story itself was no good.

But the press loved the whole thing. They loved Howard Hughes and they loved wacky ideas and they loved premieres. Above all, they loved Lars Bechmeir with his trim beard, owlish glasses, double-breasted safari jacket, trademark meerschaum pipe and soft German accent, and they loved his marvelous recordings played through a clever wire machine, conjuring up wraiths which puttered and danced like flames of marsh gas, reaching out their ghostly arms to touch minds with the raw stuff of human emotion. They loved handsome and prematurely-grayed Betty Bechmeir as well. The pair made a good couple—were photogenic in a down-home sort of way—and the press soon came to portray their life story as the best and latest version of the rags-to-riches American Dream. From that day forward, nothing was ever the same. Lars Bechmeir was soon up there with Thomas Edison. In most people’s eyes, in fact, he was above him, seeing as Edison kept all his money, whilst Bechmeir promised to channel the proceeds of his patents into a charitable trust.

By the mid 1930s, all the movie theaters in the country were re-equipping themselves with Bechmeir field generators, and the idea of the plain old talkies, which had seemed so revolutionary five years before, was old hat. After all, who would want to merely watch and listen to something played up on a screen when you could actually feel it as well? And if the other advances which Bechmeir had promised—in education, in the sciences, in the understanding of the deeper workings of the mind, and in improving mental health—had failed, or been slower in arriving, and even if poor old Howard Hughes himself had gone mad, people barely noticed, and they cared even less. They were too busy going to the feelies, or counting the blessings of this burgeoning new industry which had helped drag America out of the Great Depression.

Which was how, Clark reckoned, this story should have ended if it had been fiction. Lars and Betty Bechmeir might have given most of their money away to charity, but they were nevertheless seriously successful and authentically rich. And they lived in a fine house in LA; what else could anyone possibly want? Few major openings in and around the city—libraries, dams, new power stations, even first nights of the rapidly declining live theater, and, of course, premieres of feelies themselves—were complete without the Bechmeirs’ attendance.

But then, Betty Bechmeir’s body was found one morning in May 1936 dangling by a rope from the Colorado Street Bridge out in Pasadena. Despite an exhaustive inquest, the true reason for her death was never explained. Soon after, Lars Bechmeir, previously a man in vigorous middle age, suffered what the papers first reported as a fall, then as a major stroke. The next time he was seen in public, his voice was slurred and he was in a wheelchair. It was no surprise when their palatial house in Beverly Hills was put up for sale and Lars Bechmeir vanished from the public eye. Sightings of him in the years since had become as common as sightings of Bigfoot in the press. Lars Bechmeir in some backwoods log cabin in Maine, or dining out in Paris. That, or reports that he was fully recovered and working on some magical new device, or had remarried, or had become a hopeless vegetable, or was dead.

Bechmeir’s tragedy and subsequent disappearance had elevated him from all-American hero to bona-fide myth. The problem, though, from the point of view of producing a feelie about his life—and presumably the reason why it had never yet been done—was how to deal with an event as shattering as Betty Bechmeir’s apparent suicide, and her husband’s subsequent illness and reclusiveness, yet still retain that allimportant happy ending.

And that, for all the neat tricks and fine writing in the script he was reading, was to Clark’s mind the cleverest thing about what Daniel Lamotte had achieved. Betty Bechmeir might have been seen as an all-year-round version of Mother Christmas, but the woman he portrays is far more complex and serious. She’s seen suffering, death and poverty in her life just as Lars Bechmeir has. And she feels things at least as deeply. That’s the very reason she buys into her husband’s vision so easily, and stands by him through thick and thin. It all fits with the success of those crude early experiments on recording auras which he conducted on her and then—and here was the really elegant part—with Betty’s unease, which even their triumphant success cannot remove. She’s
too
in tune with other people’s feelings. She cares too much, and has seen too much, for any kind of success to wash those feelings away.

So, when she drives off into the thunderstorm on that climactic night, it doesn’t feel like a cop-out or a let-down. You fully understand that, just as Christ submitted to crucifixion, Betty Bechmeir loves us all too much to carry on living. As he finished the treatment, Clark was blinking back tears. At least for the time he was reading it, he really did believe that Betty Bechmeir was actually
taking away
some of the world’s pain as she drove toward the Colorado Street Bridge.

N
EEDING SOME AIR
, he pulled on a sportcoat and took the dim-lit stairs down through the Doge’s Apartments past all the usual nightly sounds of arguments and murmuring radios, and headed north toward Albert Kinney Pier.

Quiet tonight. The dancehall closed. The Ferris wheel, stilled and its lights dead, was a huge black spiderweb cast across the starlessly hazy night. Wrappers fluttered about his feet. The sigh of the Pacific came and went through the gaps in the pier’s boarding.

He leaned on the railing. As he rolled himself a cigarette and blew plumes of smoke into the darkness, he ran through possible explanations for the strange role which April Lamotte was asking him to perform. The one in which she’d killed Daniel Lamotte and he was helping to provide her with some kind of alibi bothered him the most. But, for all that April Lamotte was plainly a woman who was capable of many things, he just couldn’t believe that she’d murdered her husband. If his intuition, long-honed in dealing with worried spouses, told him anything at all about April Lamotte, it was that she was genuinely trying to sort her and her husband’s lives out. But was she telling him everything? His intuition also told him that most definitely she was not.

A cold prickle—the sort of thing you paid for when you went to the feelies, or got for free when someone walked over your grave—passed across him. He looked back along the pier. There was no one about. But, for an odd moment,
something
did seem to be moving towards him from amid the dark and empty attractions. Not quite a figure—its shape wouldn’t stay that clear. He had it down as simply some kind of dust devil, although he’d never seen such a thing before out here in Venice. Nothing but a stir of warmed air and darkness, it picked up swirls of beachsand and scraps of litter as it moved toward him with an odd quality of purpose. Certainly not a figure. Or if it was a figure, it was a ragged blur of scraps and shadows, the shape not of one figure but of many, and it was running towards him as if from out of the end of some incredibly long tunnel, and it was bringing with it an odd and breathy hissing.