“Do your grizzled mentor a favor and forget I said anything. The idea’s demented. I should check out that room.”
“Why don’t you ask her opinion? Over dinner, and wear something that doesn’t look like you borrowed it from Sister Agnes in the Universal wardrobe department.”
“Agnes needs to cool off before I go back there. You dropped that make-believe monocle so many times she couldn’t see through the scratches.” He shook his leonine head. “If anyone from UCLA sees me dating a student, I’ll be out on my pension. It’s marriage or nothing.”
“You’re an ornament of the university. No one forces ornaments into early retirement.”
“Just between you and me, it’s not that early. Very well, I’ll ask her to dinner. Where do young people like to eat these days? Not one of those ghastly nightclubs, I hope.”
“They go there to dance. Take her to the microbrewery.”
“Ump. Romantic.”
“I met Harriet at a crime scene. Our second date was an autopsy.”
“We’re a fine pair of academics, you with your CSI beauty, me with my prom queen. Running around solving murders and haunting old theaters like the Phantom of the Opera. If Henry Anklemire were half the flack he thinks he is, he’d have us up to our mortarboards in paparazzi morning, noon, and night.”
“I’m not an academic.”
“Very well. Archivist.”
“Not that either.” Valentino pocketed his cell phone, took out a silver-plated card case, and handed it to Broadhead, It was engraved:
VALENTINO
FILM DETECTIVE
Broadhead sighed and handed it back. “One would think you were smart enough to save your money. That’s a crystal doorknob for the ladies’ lounge.”
“You’re not the only one who gives me presents.” Valentino admired the case and put it away. “I got it from Harriet for my birthday.”
“Your birthday was in July.”
“We hadn’t met yet. We’re making up for lost time.”
Broadhead’s mouth formed something cutting. Then his face paled a shade. “Fanta’s birthday is next week. What do young woman want these days?”
“How about a complete set of Agatha Christie’?”
The professor went back upstairs to finish adjusting the projector. Alone in the lobby, Valentino saw that a candle had gone out. He lifted the taper off the empty candy counter, lit it from a candle, and stepped over a bank of tiny flames to reignite the wick. When he turned back, the taper burning in his hand, he looked into the stern face of Erich von Stroheim.
The director stood in the center of the red carpet with his feet spread in black boots that glistened to his knees, both hands folded behind his back. Tonight he wore the uniform of a high-ranking officer in the Austrian Imperial Guard, or what Valentino thought such a uniform would look like if he’d ever visited Vienna before the collapse of the empire; it was a dead ringer for the one von Stroheim had worn in The Merry Widow, down to the skintight black tunic paved with medals and crowned with epaulets and ropes of braid, and the spiked helmet fixed with a gold tassle that hung down to cover it completely, like the fezzes worn by Shriners. His monocle glittered, and candlelight twinkled on the rows of decorations from battles won and lost. His tan riding breeches showed every muscle in his powerful thighs; the old auteur had observed a military regimen of exercise in his prime. Valentino smelled polished leather; a new feature in these visitations. The others had been sight and sound only.
“Look,” Valentino said, “you can stop pestering me now. The silver nitrate’s here, and we’ve got it on safety in negative and positives in long-term storage. We’re releasing it to theaters through MGM next spring. It’ll be out on DVD in the fall. I don’t know what else I can—”
A palm in an immaculate white glove swept out from behind the other’s back and up, silencing him. It snapped down to his side, the thumb precisely parallel with the seam of his breeches. He stood motionless in that position for what seemed a full minute. Then he bowed, a short, jerky movement from the waist, no more than an inch. His heels collided with an explosive charge. He straightened and swept up his other hand. The braided leather riding-crop he held in it touched the visor of his helmet. It swished when he swept it back down.
The toe of one boot hooked itself behind the heel of the other, and with one movement, von Stroheim turned his back on his host and marched directly into the full-length stained-glass window in the wall. His squared shoulders and pinched waist blended with those of the Teutonic knight silhouetted on the panes and evaporated.
For an instant between the bow and the salute, Valentino thought he’d seen a tear gleam in the autocrat’s naked eye. Surely he’d imagined that part.
“Are you interviewing ushers tonight?” Broadhead asked.
Valentino jumped. He hadn’t heard him coming down from the projection booth. He blew out the taper and turned to face his friend standing in the auditorium doorway. “Not yet. It’s way too early for that. Why?”
“Then who was the character in the uniform?”
“You saw him?”
“I couldn’t miss him in that getup.” He looked around. “Where’d he go?”
“I don’t know, but don’t tell Harriet.”
**
She arrived by cab, wearing a simple black dress, high heels, and a white lace wrap covering her bare shoulders. Valentino opened the car door for her and paid the driver. They entered the lobby arm in arm. “You look beautiful.”
“So do you. I wasn’t sure about the dress. All these years in L.A. and I’ve never been to an opening.”
“Not even with your negative cutter?”
She kissed him. It lasted fifteen seconds.
When their lips parted, she leaned back in his arms and used her fingertip to rub lipstick from his mouth. “That was to shut you up. You don’t bring up old relationships on a hot date.”
“I’d better get a booster shot, just in case.” He kissed her.
He took her on a tour of the ground floor. She gasped when they entered the auditorium. The light coming from the square opening of the booth flattered the threadbare carpet and the rows of seats awaiting reupholstering. He’d spent all day dusting and polishing the woodwork and climbing up and down a stepladder with a broom, sweeping cobwebs out of the coffers. He’d had the shreds of the old linen screen removed and replaced with one made of a synthetic material that seemed to provide its own source of illumination. “I never dreamed you’d made so much progress,” she said.
“Most of it’s illusion. It’s Hollywood, don’t forget. The halfway point’s still so far away you can’t see it.”
“Are you exaggerating?”
“You’ll know I’m not when you find yourself using the gentlemen’s lounge. They’re still pulling asbestos out of the ladies’.”
“What about your organ?”
He hesitated, searching her face in the reflected light. “The pipe organ! It needs new stops, a new pedal assembly, new everything. We evicted a family of mice from one of the pipes. A man’s on his way from Chicago to dismantle it and put it right. He works for the company that made it originally. It’s still in business; and so will the Oracle be, only not soon.”
“Will you open it to the public?”
“I may have to, to cover the overhead. I haven’t decided.”
“Are you going to live here?”
He smiled. “Where better, for a professional film buff?”
“You’ll never get away from the movies.”
“The movies are where you go to get away from everything else.”
She shook her golden head. “I have a confession to make. I’ve never seen a silent movie.”
“What about those Rudolph Valentino shorts in Toronto?”
“We got in a fight during the first scene. I left.”
“That’s not so bad, as confessions go. You have to promise to see it again when it’s scored. Silent films were never really silent. Dr. Broadhead
’s prowling the UCLA Music Department for a gifted young composer who won’t charge us the farm.” He opened the hidden door to the stairs. They started up.
“Is a skeleton going to fall in my lap?”
“If it did, you’d probably dust it for prints.”
They entered the projection booth, which bore no resemblance to the gutted chamber of only a month before. Electric lamps cast a soft glow over a pair of armchairs from Valentino’s apartment, a low round coffee table supporting a bottle of wine and two long-stemmed glasses, a figured rug, a sofa that unfolded into a bed. The massive air-cooled projector borrowed from the university stood sentinel at the opening into the auditorium, Greed stacked neatly in forty-two archival-quality cans on the floor beside it, the package of disposable latex gloves to hand. Harriet laughed when she saw the microwave oven and packets of unpopped corn.
Valentino started the film rolling and joined her on the sofa, set on a raised platform to look down on the screen. She snuggled close to him and intertwined her fingers with his. He asked her where she’d been all his life.
“I know where I’ll be for the next eight hours.”
“Or ten.” He smiled.
**
CLOSING CREDITS
The following sources were instrumental in the writing of Frames:
BOOKS
TECHNICAL
Cameron, James R. Sound Pictures: Motion Picture Projectionist’s Guide. Woodmont, Conn.: Cameron, 1944.
The material is dated, but that was no hindrance to a story centered around a film shot eighty years ago. This updated edition of “the most practical book ever offered projectionists” appeared twenty-nine years after the first, with insights on the handling and presentation of nitrocellulose (silver nitrate) film, four years before the introduction of cellulose triacetate (“safety stock”).
Kiesling, Barrett C. Talking Pictures: How They Are Made/How to Appreciate Them. New York: Johnson, 1937.
Dated also, Kiesling’s entertaining text nevertheless dissects the Dream Factory at the height of its success.
Schary, Dore (as told to Charles Palmer). Case History of a Movie. New York: Random House, 1950.
The movie, The Next Voice You Hear, is a dog; but Schary, head of production first at RKO, then MGM (Irving Thalberg’s old job), provides an insider’s tour of the moviemaking process from concept to public exhibition.
HISTORICAL
Architectural Digest, “Hollywood at Home” (various issues). New York: Condé Nast, 1990-2000.
For many years a fixture at Academy Awards time, the swanky home magazine served up capsule biographies of stars, directors, writers, and producers classic and contemporary, with glimpses of their private lives and bushels of industry anecdotes—until cranky letters from color-photo fetishists persuaded the editors to discontinue the tradition.
Brownlow, Kevin. Napoleon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.
Brownlow’s firsthand account of the search for a complete print of Abel Gance’s Napoleon reads like a Tom Clancy thriller, with a triumphant ending.
Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade’s Gone By. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1968.
This is the only indispensable source on the history of the silent film. Brownlow, a historian with matchless credentials (see Films: Hollywood; also the Acknowledgments), traces the evolution of an art form from its nineteenth-century beginnings to its annihilation by sound. His prose is both scholarly and eminently readable.
Donnelly, Paul. Fade to Black. London: Omnibus, 2000.
The author’s a gossip, and in no small way a tabloid hack, emphasizing the lurid and sensational over the journalistic approach one would prefer; but his fat (633 page) collection of movie obituaries is handy for fast-track biographical research, as well as a helpful reminder of who’s dead. Sort of a Who Was Who in Hollywood.
Drew, William M. Speaking of Silents: First Ladies of the Screen. New York: Vestal, 1989.
We should all thank providence for chroniclers like Drew and Kevin Brownlow, who have the foresight to interview Hollywood pioneers while they’re still in a condition to reminisce. (Brownlow wrote the Foreword.) Legends Colleen Moore, Blanche Sweet, Laura La Plante, and others are no longer around to share the stories they tell here in first person.
Lames, John Douglas. The MGM Story. New York: Crown, 1985.
This entry in a monumental series on the major studios is a meticulous year-by-year history of the Tiffany of Tinseltown, 1924—1981.
Griffith, Richard, and Mayer, Arthur. The Movies. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957; revised 1970.
The author of Frames learned most of what he still knows about the history of film through this huge volume, encountered at a very young age in first edition. Evidently, its authors are related to neither D. W. Griffith nor L. B. Mayer—but what fantastic billing!
Koszarski, Richard. Von: The Life and Films of Erich von Stroheim: Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Limelight, 2004.
Koszarski’s earlier biography, The Man You Loved to Hate, was well received by critics and readers. About a third of this new incarnation contains additional and rewritten material: proof that Von Stroheim’s reputation continues to grow. This early triple threat—actor/writer/ director—lived a life as colorful and dramatic as any of the characters he put through their paces before a camera, which if told on film would run at least as long as the original version of Greed.
Mordden, Ethan. The Hollywood Studios: House Style in the Golden Age of the Movies. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
Mordden has a bitchy attitude; who but a Broadway gadfly cares if Fred Astaire’s dialogue mixed up its theaters and performances in The Band Wagon? But his book dishes up a sharp and knowledgable comparison of Macy vs. Gimbel in Hollywood, as well as a fast-moving but richly detailed narrative of the rise and fall of the studio system.
Naylor, David. Great American Movie Theaters. Washington, D.C.: Preservation Press, 1987.
If you’re looking for a plush folio to display on your coffee table, filled with mouth-watering pictures in full color, this isn’t it. But being a National Trust publication, it’s exhaustive, divided up by geographical locations, and formatted to slip into your pocket like a mushroom hunter’s field guide. It’s designed to travel, but you might want to book your reservations now. Not many of the popcorn palaces it celebrates are still standing.
Sinyard, Neil. Silent Movies. London: Bison, 1990.
A solid entry-level introduction to the revolutionary medium in its formative years, with concise narrative and many photographs.
Staggs, Sam. Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream. New York: St. Martin’s, 2002.
It sounds like one of those fusty, pedantic snores penned for a Ph.D., with footnotes, but it’s a lively, consciously cinematic presentation of the movie behind the movie, and the unlikely events that brought together a great director, a has-been movie star, a troubled leading man, and two (uppercase) Great Directors to create the most powerful and hypnotic Hollywood-on-Hollywood movie ever made. Aside from Gloria Swanson’s brilliance as Desmond, this page-turner illuminates Erich von Stroheim’s Max Mayerling as emblematic of the pathos of the Austrian’s treatment by the industry. If you’ve seen Sunset Boulevard recently, it’s like watching it all over again in a revealing new director’s cut. If you haven’t seen it in a while, or if you’ve never seen it, Close-Up will make you want to right away (see Films: Sunset Boulevard).
FILM GUIDES
Halliwell, Leslie. Film Guide. New York: HarperCollins, 1977— present.
Halliwell was crotchedy, but correct in his details; a tradition that successors like John Walker continue to uphold. Just about everything one needs to know about just about every movie ever made is here, including the studio that made it—a detail most other guides overlook.
Maltin, Leonard. Movie Guide. New York: New American Library, 1970—present.
Maltin genuinely loves movies and it sh
ows, but he’s no toady, nor is anyone on his staff. His is the granddaddy of all movie guides, predating home video, when his readership was restricted to that curious species that set its alarm clocks for 2 A.M. to catch creaky old favorites on The Late Show. To keep the book a managable size, recent editions have jettisoned some listings, so it’s a good idea not to throw away the older ones to make room for the new. (Advice to Maltin: Scrap the star index at the back for space. When you dropped Erich von Stroheim and kept Melanie Griffith, you destroyed its purpose.)
FICTION
Respectable writers of fiction don’t crib from one another; but there’s nothing like a well-researched, skillfully written novel on a chosen subject to inspire creation and saturate one in pertinent detail. Recommendations include:
Baker, James Robert. Boy Wonder. New York: NAL Books, 1988.
This one’s a ride, a satiric, seriocomic take on the contemporary industry tracing the meteoric rise and pile-driver fall of an enfant terrible producer. Like the movie Network, what first appeared as a riotously over-the-top sendup of American media looks like a sober documentary in light of more recent events.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Last Tycoon. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941.
At the end of his gaudy, rickrack life—burned out at forty-four— the author of The Great Gatsby reached back into the past and his experiences as a screenwriter to tell the only great insider’s story of the bunkerlike life of a brilliant studio executive, based on Irving Thalberg—burned out at thirty-seven. Tragically, Fitzgerald didn’t live to finish the book. Sadder still, none has come along to equal it.
Kanin, Garson. Moviola. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.
Kanin was an insider: a phenomenally successful playwright, sought-after screenwriter (in tandem with his wife, actress Ruth Gordon), and close confidant of legends, including Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Moviola is a delectable retelling—through the eyes of a fictional ancient studio mogul—of such items of cinema lore as the romance between Greta Garbo and John Gilbert and David O. Selznick’s nationwide search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. There’s a good deal more truth here than in many straight histories.
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