2. TITLE CARD: THE ELECTRIC HOTEL, starring MADAME SABINE MONTROSE
3. TITLE CARD: A consumptive widow and her two children are forced to fend for themselves in their country hotel … But Rosalind, the widow, possesses a dark secret …
DISSOLVE TO:
4. CROSS-SECTION OF HOTEL--ATTIC (NIGHT)
The rooms in profile, as if the facade has been sliced away. In the attic, the WIDOW is dressing for the evening, standing in front of a full-length mirror in a long black décolleté gown. Her hair is long and dark, framing a pale and sensual face. The attic appears to be her makeshift bedroom: a large four-poster bed stands behind her. Suddenly stricken, she coughs into a white handkerchief, one hand at her throat.
5. INSERT CLOSE VIEW: A tiny island of blood on the handkerchief.
6. CROSS-SECTION OF HOTEL--CHILDREN’S BEDROOM
The attic dims and a bedroom lamp comes up a floor below. The widow’s CHILDREN stand before a dollhouse. The BOY wears a tattered dressing gown, a wooden sword tucked into his cinched belt. The GIRL is wearing her nightgown and placing a cloth doll inside one of the miniature rooms.
The bedroom is disheveled--breakfast dishes, piles of clothes, two small unmade beds.
But as we peer into the dollhouse, we see figures and furniture moving under their own volition. The children watch this miniature life intently.
7. CROSS-SECTION OF HOTEL--DESCENDING
The widow in her long dress, descending the stairs. Each room is briefly lit up as she zigzags through the stairwell, down three levels. She passes hotel rooms with numbers on the doors. There are mounted deer and bear heads looking out, antique clocks and paintings. In one painting, we see the dead husband looking back from death, his cheeks ablaze.
She arrives at the front door, drapes a cloak around her shoulders, and steps out into the night with the lantern. The tiger rises on its haunches, tame as a spaniel, and they walk down the front stairs together.
8. EXTERIOR, THE PALISADES (NIGHT)
The camera floats in midair. The widow and the tiger saunter toward the edge of the cliffs, high above the darkening river below. A gaslit Manhattan glimmers from the other shore. Her hair is loose and her face is peaceful as she watches the view in the moonlight. The tiger blinks into the wind. For a second, it looks as if she might jump …
9. EXTERIOR FACADE OF HOTEL, CHILDREN’S BEDROOM WINDOW (NIGHT)
The boy and the girl are pressed to the windowpane, looking out into the night at their mother.
10. EXTERIOR, THE PALISADES (NIGHT)
A dirigible floats into view, descending from the upper drafts. It hovers above the cliffs for a moment before a rope ladder is lowered. In her gown, the widow carefully climbs up, one foot and hand at a time. The tiger watches, roars once, then sits, sphinxlike, as the airship rises into the night sky …
* * *
In the early months of 1910, Hal Bender pitched the opening sequence of The Electric Hotel to potential investors, claiming it would become the most captivating and expensive stretch of celluloid in the history of moving pictures. He handed around the first two pages of the photoplay and told them that he wasn’t just competing with Edison, Fox, and Biograph anymore, but with the medium itself, with the limits of emulsified light.
* * *
He met with bankers, factory owners, stockbrokers, real-estate speculators. He prepared charts that mapped out return on investment and a wall poster featuring a solid blue profit line soaring into an upward bend. He sometimes brought along a Manhattan ophthalmologist who attested to the fact that, contrary to popular belief, a motion picture running more than twenty minutes would not damage the moviegoer’s retinas.
* * *
These were men who made their money investing in apartment buildings and foreign currencies, who stored deeds of trust in bank vaults, so he was surprised by how little they cared for the economics of filmmaking. High risk seemed to be part of the equation; in their minds, investing in a film was equivalent to gambling on the weather, on the movement of clouds. In return for a smattering of projected profits, they were willing to sink a few thousand apiece into an hour-long feature, shot mostly at night, with risqué themes, so long as it featured Sabine Montrose under exclusive contract. Hal showed them the rooftop bathtub scene as a teaser, presented it matter-of-factly and then watched their faces flush in the half light. Magnified against a white wall, floating on a current of cigar and pipe smoke, she bathed and sang in her glasshouse bower, Manhattan marbled and glinting through the walls behind her. Then, as a clincher, Hal passed around a full-page ad he intended to run in The Moving Picture World.
A SELLING CYCLONE
Every State Right Buyer in the Business Is Eager to Secure
The Marvel and Miracle of Photoplays
MADAME SABINE
MONTROSE
in the Emotional Masterpiece
“THE ELECTRIC HOTEL”
A Multi-Reel Dark Melodrama
A Glorious Record of Genius
Sabine Montrose in “The Electric Hotel” is better than U.S. Government Bonds. Prospective purchasers must hurry, for much is sold and all remaining territory is in negotiation. What a very Goddess of the Theater is Montrose! Empress-queen of the Stage Play and the Photoplay, her picture “The Electric Hotel” will break all records for popularity with State Right Investors. We are flooded with enquiries. Deluged with checks. Telegrams rain in upon us. Buyers throng our offices. Selling surely—Selling fast—Selling enthusiastically—It’s a selling riot!
Bender & Ballard Productions, Fort Lee, New Jersey
Be it known to all and forgotten by no one that these pictures are copyrighted and that all infringements will be relentlessly prosecuted to the full extent of the law. There is but one Montrose “Electric Hotel” in the world of photoplays. Our attorneys are House, Grossman & Vorhaus, New York, and Albert Mayer, Paris and London.
* * *
With the lights back on, and while the potential investors passed around the broadsheet advertisement, Hal walked among them, looking into their faces. It was not all that different from enticing a peeper into a show at the novelty parlor in Brooklyn during his teens. He leaned back on his heels and pushed his voice up from his stomach, a trick his father had taught him to convey confidence.
—Be a part of moviemaking history, gentlemen, while making a handsome return. This is not something Edison can offer you—a seat at the table. His new trust prevents any of you from entering into the motion picture business. And if you happen to own a movie house in Toledo or Schenectady, he will rent you a film, but you could never be part of making your own. But timing is everything and we’re almost fully funded …
This got a steady round of head-nodding in the clubhouse or private dining room where he delivered his pitch. Each time, when he packed up the projector and charts and went out into the street he patted a handful of signed checks in his breast pocket.
* * *
What Hal didn’t tell the investors was that the first few pages of the photoplay were the only ones written, that Lester Summers had not yet signed on to the film, and that he intended to violate the Edison Motion Picture Trust by illegally importing uncut French celluloid and perforating it in the studio’s New Jersey laboratory.
SCENARIO WRITERS!
If your scenarios do not sell find out why. The author of “Technique of the Photoplay,” Winthrop Major, will give your manuscript personal criticism and revision for a fee of only $2.
* * *
The first scriptwriter they hired—fired after only a week—was a former vaudeville critic who advertised in the celluloid trades. Winthrop Major arrived at the studio wearing a beaver-felt hat and driving moccasins, stepping down from his motorcar with a meerschaum pipe clenched between gapped teeth. Claude showed him to one of the actors’ bunkhouses, where he insisted that, as per the addendum to his retainer agreement, private accommodations were to be provided. He was put up in a top-floor bedroom in the main house, where
his pacing, adenoidal muttering, and midnight tapping on his typewriter wore Hal’s nerves ragged. At breakfast one morning, as Winthrop repacked his pipe, Hal asked him how the photoplay was coming along and whether a scene could be worked in that featured the widow playing with her pet tiger.
—To show she has some special connection with the world of beasts, Hal said.
—Remember, as per my advertisement, two dollars per simple question, Mr. Bender. And I believe that’s a five-dollar question.
He smiled into his breakfast plate, chuffed.
—I’m not kidding, said Hal.
Winthrop looked up, struck a match, lit his pipe. There was a slight shunting noise in the back of his throat as he drew air through the burning plug. His words came out on the first ribbons of smoke.
—The photoplay is a blueprint and a scale model. It requires an architect’s eye to achieve its intentions. I do not believe for one second that a consumptive widow would be playing fetch with a Bengal tiger. In fact, I recommend cutting the preposterous animal altogether.
Claude sat marmalade-ing a piece of toast at the other end of the table.
—But audiences like dangerous animals in films. They have played quite well in previous reels, said Claude.
—Be that as it may, gentlemen, I cannot allow the logical construct to be disrupted by false effects.
Winthrop was fired by the end of the day. Even the horn on his motorcar had a pompous, adenoidal quality as he honked angrily driving out of the studio gates.
* * *
The second writer was a failed novelist who specialized in South Sea adventures. He lasted two weeks, but was let go after writing a long sequence that had the widow taking the airship to New Zealand, where she married a Maori chief and was honored as a goddess by the local savages. He spent three days on this muddle before showing the pages to Hal and Claude.
* * *
The third writer was a retired newspaper editor, the fourth a copywriter, the fifth a poet and amateur photographer named Nash Sully. Finally, they had found someone who thought in images and who needed the money badly enough that he was willing to take Hal and Claude’s unending prescriptive notes. Nash Sully brought their ideas back to them as polished visual gems, little motifs and suggestive lines of intertitle dialogue, lovely asides about the experiences of the camera, as if it were the probing eye of a sentient being instead of a crystal-ground lens. Camera pulls back into oblivion or Camera ghosts after the distraught widow. His final sequence—a mob descending on the hotel with burning torches, a dirigible going up in flames—was unlike anything ever filmed. Hal and Claude agreed to remove those final two pages from Sabine’s copy of the photoplay.
10
The Actress Prepares
Miss, I lik you so Please send me yur auto graf plus $10. I am 20 years old. I cant rite good. Bil says I can. I don’t beleive Bil Wilson. I wuz sik last winter. I hav got a Baby. Her name is Sabine Montrose Kane cauz I like your picturs. bil reads to me and I know about your life. Send me money and rite soon. Address Miss Abbie Kane mother of Sabine Montrose Kane, Union Missouri. Grandma saw you in St. Louis and was filled with wunder.
To “Sabine Montrose”
Dear Madame,
I trust I am not taking too much liberty in asking you to kindly name your favorite flower and why? My object in soliciting this favor is that I may write an article on the favorite flowers of prominent people. I have received answers from several noteworthy personages in politics and the arts.
Sincerely,
Beatrice Windermere
Vixen,
A man’s appetites can be exploited for the devil’s work, or the Lord’s. Seeing your feminine form in a bathtub on a rooftop galvanized my wrath some years back. Now I see you whoring in other moving pictures as a Comanche bride or woodsman’s lover. You turn the Holy Scriptures into ridicule. To think I once stood applauding for you during your Hamlet curtain call.
A Once Great Admirer
* * *
Sabine made the mistake of opening some of the correspondence she’d bundled across the Atlantic. Two weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin, she rode alone in a motorcar from the Hoboken docks to the studio, certain that the world was a hateful place. She’d spent the off-season performing in a naturalistic adaptation of the Zola novel Thérèse Raquin at the Odéon in Paris. Eight weeks of playing the lead—a nervous, feckless, adulterous woman who felt smothered by life’s demands—had left Sabine raked through with boredom and disappointment. Unhappiness loomed everywhere. Her days could be plundered by the bitterness of spoiled fruit or someone unpleasant entering a room, and she could never pinpoint how the initial displeasure, the bitter apple or the poseur, quickly attached itself to some greater existential sadness. Unhelpfully, Pavel told her she was experiencing toska, the Russian word for a spiritual malaise.
* * *
As she traveled along the road outside Fort Lee she suspected that Thérèse Raquin was responsible for her toska. She looked out her motorcar window, beyond the mud in the ditches, and noticed half a dozen filthy dun-brown cows ogling eternity from behind a split rail fence. She blinked back a tear, closed her eyes, and felt her thoughts turn apocalyptic. The newspapers were reporting that the planet was going to arc into the poisonous, gassy tail of Halley’s Comet later in the spring. Of course, she thought, now we will all choke in our beds. Opening her eyes again, she studied the upholstery of the motorcar to avoid the bovine misery out in the fields, but then she noticed the seat leather was cracked and brittle.
* * *
She looked at the grease-stained envelope from Union, Missouri, where Sabine Montrose Kane had been named by an illiterate mother hoping for $10. It all seemed impossible, these dispatches from life’s ragged edges. Her only consolation was being alone inside this noxious mood. After they’d arrived at the docks, she’d banished Pavel and Helena into a second motorcar with the suitcases and trunks.
* * *
The winter had been a particularly lonely time for her. Pavel and André Antoine, the director of the Odéon, were determined to take naturalism to its highest calling. Together, they coached her toward a style of acting that was unadorned and naked—small, contained gestures, no formalized speeches or exits, so that she sometimes felt like she wandered on and off the stage like a daydreaming child. They also sent her out to observe and study the archetypes of Paris, because Zola had insisted his novel, and therefore the play, was a study in temperament, not character. Zola drew his characters from ancient Greece, from Galen’s humors and types—the crippled aunt was choleric, Thérèse melancholic, her lover sanguine, and the duped husband phlegmatic. They were fated to their actions based on some dominance of bile, phlegm, or blood.
* * *
To prepare for her role, Sabine was sent out into the Paris streets in disguise, often at night, to locate the city’s melancholics. Her main character study was a barmaid at a Montmartre tavern, middle-aged and slumped in the shoulders, a sallow-faced woman of small exasperations, who polished the glasses with something that approached fanaticism. Every smudge or thumbprint was a personal affront to the barmaid and Sabine sometimes saw the woman’s eyes narrow when a paying customer took up a glass of Bordeaux or beer. She chatted and complained about life’s adversities, about the struggling shopgirl daughter and the flatulent husband who worked for the postal service, but all the while she stood transfixed by a developing whorl of thumb grease pressing into her polished glass. For a perfectionist melancholic, Sabine knew this was a miniature death of the soul.
* * *
Back at the theater, Antoine and Pavel were thrilled with her progress. She stopped acting with studied gestures and let her emotions surge through her. Her face and head and voice were left battered by the blunt force of Thérèse’s personality. Antoine was famous for his naturalistic staging and effects—the chickens pecking onstage, the crowd scenes with vagrants off the street, the drunken fights fueled by real absinthe—and he saw his actors as an
extension of life’s chaotic, naked rhythms. He asked Sabine to stop washing her hair so that she could sense her own body’s wild inclinations. By the end of her eight-week run, some of her matted hair had to be cut from the crown of her head.
* * *
Pavel, meanwhile, had developed his own fully fledged system that brought together smatterings of Stanislavski and Darwin and blended them with homeopathy, theosophy, anthropology, and yogic breathing exercises. He called his new approach the Emotive-Pneumatic Practice, inspired by the Hellenic idea that it was pneuma—a kind of spiritual breath—that coursed through human arteries instead of blood. By the spring of 1910, he’d delivered lectures on his occult science of the imagination and emotional intellect at academies of dramatic art in Paris, London, and St. Petersburg.
* * *
Publicly, he touted Sabine Montrose as his most famous protégé, but privately he suspected she only half believed in his methods. It was not uncommon for her to banish him to another hotel room or railcar when she grew tired of his pedagogy. En route to his temporary exile, he would tell her, Either we swim in the underground river or it drowns us.
* * *
At the entrance to the studio property, a uniformed security guard greeted the two motorcars and checked their names off a list. It was the studio’s new protection against Edison’s private detectives who went out looking for patent and copyright infringements. They drove down toward the main building and the cottage. It annoyed Sabine that Claude hadn’t bothered to meet the steamer, despite the fact that she’d telegraphed her itinerary. He’d sent a curt reply—Chaos and much excitement here. Please come directly. Bon voyage! Now she saw what he meant about chaos. The entire lot was in upheaval.
The Electric Hotel: A Novel Page 14
