Screenplay

by MacDonald Harris

  He didn’t answer. Perhaps he hadn’t heard, or hadn’t really been talking to me. Continuing on down Fairfax, he turned right on Pico. Then, after only a few blocks, he turned left once more on La Cienega. This far south it was not the fashionable part of La Cienega, the restaurant row above Wilshire, but a rather tawdry neighborhood that had been a suburban shopping district back in the Twenties and had now fallen into decadence, like so many things in this part of the city—a little enclave of squalor with Beverly Hills on one side of it and Culver City on the other. We passed a vacuum cleaner shop, a shabby motel, an auto-body shop run by Chicanos who played transistor radios full blast as they worked, a vacant lot, and a camp used-clothing store called The Second Time Around. A little farther on, just beyond Pickford, we came to the Alhambra Theater.

  This place was more or less familiar to me. I had even gone to movies there, in a brief period several years before when it had shown classics. After that it had declined to the level of old Godzilla films and Mexican movies with titles like La Otra Mujer and Pasiones de Sangre. Finally it had gone out of business completely and was now boarded up and covered with dust. It was an old stucco building in fake Spanish style, with the eaves at the side covered with red tiles—even though the rear roof beyond was only tar paper—and a curved stucco archway leading to the ticket window. A couple of yellowed movie posters still remained in the frames with their broken glass, and the walls were covered with the usual graffiti found on all abandoned buildings.

  There didn’t seem to be any way to get in at the front. The doors beyond the ticket office had sheets of plywood nailed over them. While I was looking at this I found that Nesselrode had disappeared. I followed around to the side of the building on the alley and found that in some way he had opened the employees’ door and disappeared in through it; perhaps he had a key. I followed in after him. The inside of the building was as dusty as the outside; evidently no one had used it for some time. But to my surprise I saw there was an illuminated light bulb hanging from the ceiling overhead on a long and rather frayed wire. It was a tiny old-fashioned bulb with a yellow filament glowing in it, and it cast the light that a candle might into the gloomy and shadowy spaces of the theater. At first, coming in from the dazzle of the sun outside, I could see almost nothing. There was a musty, mousy closed-space odor in the inside of the place. But as my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw that the interior of the theater was almost intact, if rather dirty. The seats were still in place, gray with dust, and there were even a few candy-wrappers and cigarette packages strewn around on the floor from the last performance, which had probably been several years before. In keeping with the spurious Spanish decor there were heavy beams overhead with brown paint slapped on them, and faded red-velvet hangings along the walls. At the front, on the stage, the curtain was open and the screen was visible, grayish in the dim light. To the rear, where the block-shaped projection booth intruded into the otherwise perfectly rectangular interior, there were two small windows like eyes, so dusty I could see nothing through them, although I had the impression that a light of some kind might be on in the projection booth too.

  Nesselrode snuffled. He reached into the pockets of his coat as though searching for something and then took his hands out again. He gave no sign that he was aware I was with him. He looked not at me but at the screen.

  “Why have we come here?”

  “This is a good theater. It shows the best pictures. I could name you a dozen.”

  The present tense again. It gave me a slightly creepy sensation, as though I too were being drawn into this hallucination of his distorted and shaky old man’s memory.

  “It did once. Now there’s nothing here.”

  “You have to go through to get there. It’s necessary.”

  He said nothing more in explanation of this rather cryptic remark. From the outside the sounds of the city were still faintly audible: the swish of passing traffic, a tinny radio running somewhere, a child yelling, a distant police siren. Yet everything was muffled and deadened; it was as though only the inside of the theater was real and the outside sounds had been created synthetically by some electrical device. They were like the unconvincing sounds of animals, screeching apes and squawking macaws, that are played on a loudspeaker while you are going through a badly organized Jungle Trip in an amusement park. Perhaps, I thought, they were artificial and came from somewhere behind the screen rather than through the walls from outside.

  Nesselrode still did nothing; he seemed not so much indecisive as deliberate and patient, like a man who was shortly to do something difficult that he was still planning out—a brilliant play at billiards, or a feat of acrobatics. Then he took my hand.

  This was so unexpected that I scarcely had time to resist. It was a dry fleshless hand, feeling in my own like little more than some dry bones enclosed in leathery skin. It gripped me not tightly but firmly, in the way that a lover holds the hand of another. My original suspicions about him, when he had first told me, “I can get you into pictures,” were revived. But if he was a fairy he was a very old fairy, and his predilections no longer took any physical form. He had taken my hand only to lead me to the front of the theater and up the worn and rickety steps to the stage. Why he didn’t simply tell me to follow him I didn’t, at that time, understand.

  There was a forestage in front of the screen about five or six feet wide, curving gently as it extended out into the darkened theater. In front of us was the screen, much larger and higher than it had seemed from the back of the theater. I looked at it with some curiosity. It still seemed more gray than white, perhaps because of the dim illumination. I had imagined that such screens were made of canvas or some other heavy material coated with a white iridescent chemical substance, probably because I was thinking of the collapsible amateur screens used for home movies. But the large rectangle with rounded corners standing vertically before us was not white; it gave the impression that it was a light gray in color, slightly translucent, and made of something that gave it a faint glassy sheen; it resembled unexposed but developed photographic film. Through it I thought I could catch a glimpse of shapes on the stage behind—a stepladder, perhaps, and a couple of crates piled carelessly one on top of the other.

  Perhaps it was not really the projection screen at all but only some kind of plastic drop or dust screen that was used to separate the stage from the rest of the theater. Nesselrode, still holding my hand and glancing at me sideways with his bulging and faintly glittering eyes, advanced a step or two forward. I followed him. Then we went on and passed through the Screen.

  The sensation was difficult to describe. It was as though we had slipped through a film that clung lightly to our shoulders and legs and then sprang free with a slight elasticity, tremoring like disturbed water after we had passed through it and then gradually resuming its smooth and unfeatured surface. The substance gave the impression that it was faintly cool, also that it had an odor like old celluloid or collodion, an aroma that clung to us for some time after we had passed through it. I turned to look back at this odd integument which seemed so solid and yet which we had passed through so easily, but Nesselrode led me on by the hand. We stopped in the middle of the stage. The outlines I had glimpsed through the Screen were clearly visible now: a stepladder as I had thought, some piled-up crates, a tool box, a stack of lumber turned gray with age and covered with dust like everything else in the theater.

  All these objects were in various shades of gray or black. The color seemed to have disappeared from everything. Perhaps this effect was connected in some way with the gray light that filtered through the Screen from the dimly lighted theater behind us. Everything had a flat, slightly unreal look. It was preternaturally quiet. I had the sensation too as though my body were lighter than usual, invulnerable, capable of unusual motions or previously impossible acrobatic feats. I held up my hand and looked at it. It was as pale and papery as Nesselrode’s face.

  I became aware that Nesselrode was no longer holding
my hand, although I hadn’t noticed the moment when he released it. He was exactly as before; the odd light on the stage only enhanced his grimy grayness and the impression of fragility, of unreality, that he gave even under ordinary conditions in normal light. He turned and gave me a long serious glance, frowning slightly. Then he sniffed, twitched his nose, and went off without a word to the rear of the stage and down some steps that were almost invisible in the semidarkness. I followed him.

  These steps—which I descended solely out of faith, since I could see almost nothing—went down to some kind of storeroom or corridor at the rear of the theater. Beyond this I could see a rectangular outline of light around a door, like a line of white fire drawn with a pen. He went up to this door, fumbled with another key—this time I could hear the scratchy grate of a lock turning—and opened it. A glare of overpowering blank-white sunlight poured into my face.

  It was a moment before my eyes adjusted to this. The air was lucid and glassy and seemed to shimmer slightly. The bright sunlight that filled it seemed to come from every direction, and no sun could be located. Everything was strongly outlined, with sharp edges and almost painfully bright surfaces. We were standing in a vacant lot behind the theater. But there hadn’t been a vacant lot before, I remembered; there was an alley and then the backs of the houses on the next street. Nesselrode stood patiently while I oriented myself and took measure of my surroundings. I was still in the city where I had been born, the only city I had ever known. But it was transformed.

  The boulevard, which I could see around the corner of the theater, had shrunk to a narrow two-lane street. The air over it was cluttered with telephone and electrical wires on wooden poles. The secondhand clothing store was still there, with a sign saying, “Mona’s Knits and Fine Imports.” I recognized other landmarks, but everything seemed smaller and the buildings were raw and new. The Alhambra Theater looked as though it had been put up yesterday. The fresh stucco glared in the sunlight, and the fake tiles along the eaves gleamed between the strips of white mortar. We walked around to the front. The ticket office was closed, of course, at this time of day, but the posters in their glass frames announced a picture with Vanessa Nesser and Roland Lightfoot.

  “An excellent theater,” muttered Nesselrode, looking not at the theater but off down the street. “All the best pictures are shown here.”

  The very air was transformed. The yellowish haze characteristic of the city I had known was gone; in its place was a glassy and absolutely transparent atmosphere as clear as the finest gin. I could see all the way to the Santa Monica Hills and even the distant Sierra Madres above Pasadena, with Mount Wilson bulging up in the middle of them. We started down the sidewalk, continuing in the direction we had come a half an hour or so before, toward Culver City. For a few blocks there were food markets with bright enameled signs, furniture stores, and shops and restaurants in odd architectures, one of them the shape of a Dutch windmill. Once this shopping district was behind us the city itself seemed only half built. The streets were paved and curbs laid, and there were even concrete street lamps installed, but sometimes for several blocks there were no houses, only vacant lots with weeds sprouting waist-high. On one lot there was a huge sign the size of a billboard that blared, “Land Opportunity! Buy Now for Investment! Last Half Acres on West Side $50.” A little farther along somebody had built a house. It was in the same fake-Spanish architecture as the Alhambra Theater, with tiles along the eaves and a tiny stucco archway at the side. A small palm about two feet high had been planted in the front yard. It was surrounded on all sides by vacant lots.

  * * *

  I had some fair idea where we were, although everything was transformed and slightly disorienting—simpler, more clearly outlined, lacking in detail, crude and raw. There were no colors; everything was in black and white. From the hills to the south I knew we were not far from Culver City. We crossed a few more streets and then turned right on what I recognized as Washington Boulevard. It was a broad and pretentious affair, even though it seemed only half finished. There were two lanes of asphalt, and in the middle were some streetcar tracks with a trolley wire suspended over them on a line of black poles. Beyond the pavement on the other side was a stretch of dirt, then a wooden fence, then the open fields. A black Ford flivver came along toward us on the other side of the street, shimmering in the glare. I turned to look at it. It went by with a steady clatter from its innards and disappeared in the distance, the spare tire at the back gradually shrinking until the whole thing dwindled into a bobbing dot on the asphalt, warped and distorted by the heat.

  “You haven’t seen a car before?” asked Nesselrode with heavy sarcasm. “Come on. We haven’t got all day. I got business.”

  I turned to follow him and we went on. Ahead to the left, in the near distance, was a chain-link fence, and inside it was a lot containing what appeared to be a number of hastily erected galvanized-iron buildings, with an occasional smaller stucco one with a tiled roof.

  It was only about another ten minutes’ walk. We crossed the boulevard on the diagonal, since there was almost no traffic. I had fallen a little behind, and Nesselrode turned around impatiently with a motion of his hand. We entered through the open gate just as an elegant Packard limousine swept out, piloted by a chauffeur in uniform, with a young woman in a silk print dress and a picture hat in the rear. There was a guard at the gate, but he was half asleep with his chair propped against the wall and paid no attention to us. I followed Nesselrode up the concrete main street of the lot. The sun bothered me. It wasn’t the heat; in fact now that I analyzed my sensations I realized that there was no physical sensation of heat, only this white and transparent glare that seemed to penetrate everything, even my own body, leaving no room for any private shadow or secret inside. I crossed over to the side of the street and followed along in the shade of a building. Nesselrode turned around to see what I was doing, made a curious grimace of contempt, a twitch of the nose as if to say, “What’s the matter with you young people any more, can’t stand a little sun,” and went on.

  In any case we were soon out of the sun. He continued on down the street in his jerky way, glancing back now and then to see if I was following, and presently turned into one of the large barn like galvanized-iron buildings. I followed him. Inside there was a vast emptiness, like a train station or a deserted warehouse. In various corners of this space, odd and incomplete little simulacra of the outside world had been flimsily constructed with canvas, boards, and papier-maché—a railroad coach with the side missing and the seats gaping like teeth, a part of a theater including the balcony and a corner of the stage, and a big-city tenement flat with its rooms separated by cardboard partitions. There was nobody immediately in sight, but at the far end of the building there were lights and activity. I could hear voices in a low subdued tone. Standing out sharply at the rather dimly lit end of the building were a half-dozen or so rectangles that glowed with a white light almost as intense as the sun outside. These, as we came closer, proved to be reflector screens on wheels, turned at various angles to catch the white glare of the klieg lights overhead. In the middle of the lighted area a bearded man in a stovepipe hat was standing on a platform decorated with bunting. Beside him sat another man in a chair, looking at his own notes for a speech. Arranged in chairs before them were a dozen or so men in frock coats and a pair of women in white skirts down to their ankles. Outside the circle of light, behind the camera and the reflector screens, were a number of other figures that I could make out only dimly. Supervising everything was an energetic man with a bull neck, wearing a white shirt, riding breeches, and puttees, and carrying a rattan crop which he slapped impatiently now and then against his leg. His hat might have been suitable for an African safari; it was a canvas affair with a broad brim turned down all around and a zebra-striped band.

  “Reiter, a brilliant man, a genius,” said Nesselrode.

  Reiter seemed to know Nesselrode well and only grunted to show recognition. He paid no attention t
o me.

  “Are you ready, Sid?” he yelled to the cameraman. He paced back and forth and slapped the rattan crop against his puttee.

  “I’m reloading.”

  “Well, hurry up. We’re paying scale to all these people standing around scratching their asses.”

  “A genius,” Nesselrode repeated. “He invented putting the camera on wheels. Now everybody does it. Reiter also invented the close-up.”

  I saw that in fact the camera was mounted on a rigid tripod like a frame for a teepee, fitted at the bottom with three large rubber-tired caster wheels.

  “Can the chatter. Quiet on the set, everybody,” yelled Reiter, still pacing restlessly back and forth like a tiger in a cage. He went back and looked into the viewfinder of the camera. “Fine. Fine. Don’t touch the lights.” He sprang back to the set and began prowling around the edges of it, swinging his rattan crop as he went. He never spoke except at the top of his voice. “Ready, everybody?” he yelled. “Camera! Action!”

  The cameraman, with his cap turned around backward, applied his own eye to the viewfinder. The camera began running with a light clucking sound. The man in the stovepipe hat raised his right arm and stretched it to the miniature crowd.

  “But, in a larger sense,” he said.

  Reiter ran around to the other side of the set. “Crowd!” he barked.

  The cameraman pushed his machine around to point at the crowd, who were listening intently.

  “Lincoln!” yelled Reiter.

  The camera swung back to the bearded man.

  “We cannot dedicate,” he rumbled in a ceremonious baritone. He lowered his right arm and stretched out the left.

  “We cannot consecrate.” He lowered the left arm and raised the right again.

  “We cannot hallow.” With a grave look, he lowered both arms and turned the hands toward the crowd with palms outward, as if to show he had nothing in them.