The Camera Always Lies

by Hugh Hood

  But she still couldn’t manage Jasper’s choreography, and didn’t seem to be getting any closer to it. The girls in the chorus whizzed effortlessly through the air around her, as though they had steel springs for legs. They seemed to hang in the air as long as they willed it. She couldn’t do it.

  “Let’s go, Rose,” said Jasper, and she snapped to attention. The chorus was at the other end of the hall, boys and girls chasing each other in complicated Bacchic coils, typical Jasper Saint John direction.

  “They look good,” said the director as he walked her along towards the piano. “It’s going to be a sensational number. Now just watch me, Rose, and I’ll show you. Easy now.”

  The pianist began the dream music and the familiar theme made Rose feel nervous. She nodded at Jasper obediently.

  “All right,” he said, “it’s up to Max to look after the frames that bring you into the situation in your street clothes. You walk along the serving areas looking at pieces of pie through the glass. And then you see from your reflection in the little windows that you aren’t in street clothes any more. You’re in spangles and a plumed headdress. Your eyes pop. I love the way you pop your eyes, Rose dear, it makes you look about twelve. THEN we cut to Medium Shot, and the boys leap up behind you on that chord. Give her the chord, Mitch.”

  The pianist hit it good and loud.

  “They’re standing behind you—Ray, Elmer, Gene, Harry, in that order from left to right. You whirl and face them. I’ll show you the twist I want. It has to come very sharp and fast and you hold your arms stiff like this. Energy and menace, force, the left thigh cocked out forward like this, see? Point the toe, stab it out! Hard. That’s better.”

  She made the whirl a couple of times.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they use a shot of you in that pose for most of the publicity layouts. They can shoot it from a low angle and you’ll look taller. And remember, you’ll be wearing that headdress; be ready to cope with that.”

  She nodded, docile and willing.

  “Now watch me,” ordered the director, standing in front of her with his arms jabbed stiffly in the attitude he’d described. He was a wonderful mime. Instantly, with no change in his clothes or manner, he became a girl, his movements were exactly those of a young girl dancer, his timing, the whole nuance of his body line. He did a little strut and then stuck his tongue between his teeth and jumped, BANG. There was Rose, or his idea of Rose, standing in the Automat; you could almost see the spangles and the plumes. He did the twist he showed her; another chord from the piano and he fell into Harry’s arms, sure that Harry would catch him, with just the sureness that Rose didn’t have. She wasn’t getting to the right place at quite the right time . . .

  . . . and the plumes held her back and the boning in her spangled bodice felt uncomfortable and irritating after days and days of unrestraining rehearsal clothes. When she tried to soar, the headdress dragged her down, making her an ungainly and unimpressive figure on camera. On the colossal sound stage the music crashed in on multiplex stereo in ultradimensional fidelity with tiptoematic voom and the rest of it. They would mime, shoot, dub, mime again, shoot again, try for something like a decent sync, again, again. It’s a crazy costume, she thought, flipping along the line of dancers, rolling from Harry to Gene to Elmer to darling old Ray, her mentor. She loved Ray, who had guided her through this, step by step, who would guide her through four more numbers the same way. She smiled at him as she came up from the last turn of the four and he made the lift, planting his broad palms softly but firmly at the top of the hipbones and with a smooth and immensely strong motion of his forearms moving her forward and up to where she must sparkle and look gay. He lowered her and she ran, with what dignity she could manage and as gracefully as possible, between two rows of ostensibly singing choristers dressed rather romantically as customers, some waving pieces of pie, others with trays of prop dishes, still others with parcels and boxes.

  On the prerecorded tape the inane lyrics of the number blared out in a complicated crescendo in quadruple counterpoint plagiarized from Bach. Male and female customers, and Automat employees, forming a conventional S.A.T.B. choir, were supposed to be singing:

  sopranos: Quarters, dimes and nickels,

  Jingle in your pocket.

  altos:Jingle in your purse,

  Jingle in your purse,

  tenors:Just a little piece of change

  All alone in old Manhattan.

  basses:Gonna go from bad to worse,

  Gonna go from bad to worse.

  This number, “A Little Piece of Change,” about which Max and Jasper have been sharing grave doubts, has somehow evolved into the principal musical spot in the picture.

  Barbara has come uptown from West Tenth Street alone, for the first time since she and Goody hit town. They have been quarreling, and wonder if they might not enjoy themselves more if they broke up, so they won’t be competing for the same men. Barbara has been looking for modelling work all day; now she’s tired, footsore. Maybe a change would be the best thing for both sisters. She realizes that it’s time she had something to eat, because she is faint with hunger and very dispirited. She sees the big electric sign: AUTOMAT, standing out like a dream image among a cluster of lights. She stops in the middle of the sidewalk to count her money; all she can find is seventy-five cents, two quarters, two dimes, and a nickel.

  close-up: the silver in her palm. Cut to:

  medium long shot: Barbara going through the doors. We see her through the glass. Chorus up under with the verse of “A Little Piece of Change,” and we cut to:

  medium close shot: Barbara wandering along the row of little windows, looking at the food and the prices. She sings, recitative:

  A little peace. A little change.

  Gotta get away from Goody.

  The best way out for all of us.

  Just a little piece of change.

  Max hasn’t been too happy about these lyrics. He’s been making a lot of remarks about the good old days in Berlin with Bert, Kurt, and all the boys.

  Barbara looks from the money in her hand to the window with the pie behind it.

  And

  pow into spangles and plumes—the dream sequence—as she takes the fall into Harry’s arms and rolls along the row and up up, easy now, up. Ray boosts her outward and down and she runs between the chorus rows. Chorus chants:

  Gotta get away from Goody,

  Gonna go from bad to worse.

  Down down down to the back of the set; we see her tiny figure sparkling and shining in crossing bands of different coloured lights. Now the chorus is ranked along the serving windows, which flip open and shut, and we get a good feeling of thirties comedy, something from Modern Times perhaps, the automatic restaurant, the man in the machine. The chorus starts to feed the slots with coins; they seize the food. Some are eating and others run in a long circling line past us into the background, where they dance around tables and chairs.

  We see Barbara running along an enormous steam table, kicking the lids off the holes, with a manager in a cutaway chasing her, followed by cooks in tall white hats, busboys with trays, dishwashers. We see that she is carrying a platter with a whole turkey on it, tripping and cursing to herself as she accidentally puts her foot into the steam-table holes, instead of just kicking away the lids .

  “Christ, she’ll never do it. Look at that.”

  “Who choreographed this?”

  “Never mind that,” says Jasper indignantly. “Who thought up the idea for the number? Not me. I’ve done the best I could.”

  Rose tries her run along the steam table for the fifth time, carrying alight metal disk painted to look like a platter, with a papier-mâché turkey glued to it. I’ll break a leg in one of those holes, she thinks—and just misses doing it. What the hell am I doing here, in this ridiculous getup, at my age?

 
Things are getting very fugal:

  Gotta get away from Goody.

  (Quarters, dimes and nickels

  Jingle jingle in your purse.)

  Just a little peace, a little change.

  (Just a little piece of change,

  Gotta get away from Goody.)

  Gonna go from bad to worse.

  A little peace

  (A little piece of change.)

  A little change

  A little piece.

  (All alone in old Manhattan

  It’s the best way out for all of us.)

  And into a choral “Amen’’ on “Manhattan.”

  sopranos: Ma, aaaa, aaa, aaa, haaa, aaa, aaa,

  altos:Ah ah ah ah, ah ah ah ah,

  tenors:Maa, aa, aa, hat, ha, aaa, aaa, aaa,

  basses:Ha, aa, tan. Ha aa, tan tan. Ha aa tan.

  And soon.

  “We’ll have to back-project that.”

  “Or a mat shot.”

  “Yes,” said Max, “a traveling mat.”

  “Oh my poor number,” said Jasper, and he wept without restraint, while Ray, Elmer, Gene, and Harry, one to a limb; caught Barbara as she leaped off the end of the steam table in front of an enormous blowup of one of the little windows with a sign over it saying: STRAWBERRY PIE 15¢ SLICE, The four boys swung Rose forward and she came whizzing down a ramp like a piece of Automat pie, headfirst out of a window on her stomach, wearing a triumphant grin. But being swung like that made Rose sick to her stomach; no matter how many times they did it, she couldn’t muster up the necessary grin of triumph.

  “Never mind,” said Jasper at the last, “I’ll fix it. I’ll fix.”

  4

  Max Mars studied the writer’s instructions to the art director, and after a while felt satisfied:

  . . . the interior of a basement apartment on West Tenth Street, featuring a pair of folding doors or French windows which allow access to a tiny front patio below sidewalk level and screened by wrought-iron gratings. You could put a couple of small tables out there. People can go back and forth from apartment to patio quite easily. Any such apartment would cost like hell, of course, but it shouldn’t look that way. It should look like the kind of place two ignorant sisters from Canonsburg, Pa., might accidentally find, a real jewel.

  It would be hard to set up for, because of the goings-out and comings-in off that damned patio. But the patio falling-in-love scene had so much charm they had decided tentatively at last Friday’s story conference to leave it in. Max shuffled his papers while the crew moved the wrought-iron gratings. He checked the synopsis:

  . . . while Goody is in the living room dancing quietly around, Barbara wanders out onto the patio, before which all New York passes sooner or later. We see polished shoes, trouser legs. We are eight or ten steps below sidewalk level and we watch with Barbara’s eyes as a poodle happens along at the end of a leash and puts a friendly nose through the grating. She says, “Hello, poodle,” or something in character (see dialogue sheets) and the dog kisses her. We see that she is lonely and glad to see this friendly, if woolly, face. A voice above her says, “I’ll be glad to stand in for him, if his nose is too cold,” and then we see dog-walking Dino (change the shot???) on the other end of the leash.

  What Max was after was a distinct tone, not chic and not New York sophistication, but the unique Max Mars dry witty gravity, which was completely adult and whose last lingering impression was of an extraordinary sadness. Horler and Lenehan, who knew nothing whatsoever about direction, or how films are actually conceived and made, had never understood him. Max figured if they knew how sad a man he was they would never have given him this assignment.

  His pictures were like certain wines, having as many as four distinct effects on the palate, at first light and sweet, then heady, then bitter and cutting, and finally vanishing, evanescent, haunting, whatever the word was for some lost intense pleasure now irrecoverable. When a Max Mars comedy registered with you, you felt at first exhilarated and joyful, then intoxicated with laughter, then struck and self-critical because of the moral overtones, and then suicidally depressed.

  Maybe not quite suicidally. He didn’t want his audiences running to the sea like lemmings; he wanted them to be oppressed by a sense of loss. All Max Mars comedies tried for this fourfold effect, and often got it. He was a serious artist.

  He said to the cameraman, “Shots 106 to 114 can be handled with two cameras, but for shots 98 to 105, and for those after 114, down to 120 in your copy of the shooting script, we will use three, eh? There’s no need for more.”

  “Number Three on the boom?”

  “Yes. On the patio a pair of angles will do; we’ll choose between Rose and Tommy when we edit. But for the interior we’ll want variety. We’ll try some three-shots from crowd distance to get emptiness and aloneness.”

  “That sets up the party.”

  “Right. On the patio we’ll try for a tunnel effect with Two, set it up on the patio and shoot in, do you see, so we get distance and intimacy, like looking through a keyhole, a nice effect.”

  “Eavesdropping?”

  “In a sense. Every moviegoer is a voyeur, eh?”

  The cameraman wandered off to think this over, and to set up the patio shots. Time wasted, Max thought. About one-third to half the time it took him to make a film, he realized for the thousandth time, was spent standing around waiting for several different groups of people to finish their work. Directing a movie was like conducting a battle from an unhandy command post, except that a general had a staff and an intelligence service and a logistics team to supply his wants, whereas most of the co-ordinating on a film had necessarily to be planned by the director, who decided what the unit would do today and what they would do tomorrow unless it rained, in which case they would do something else, or something else.

  He wasn’t looking forward to tying in the musical sequences, which he’d sooner have omitted completely. That decision, at least, had not been his. Officially they were producing a “comedy with music,” which wasn’t a musical comedy, or just a comedy, but a hybrid. Like most hybrids, Max thought, the form had the defects of its parents without their virtues. He hadn’t told Horler and Lenehan that, and he intended to make an excellent picture, though not exactly the picture the partners had projected.

  In a spaghetti-like nest of heavy cables in a corner of the sound stage, Rose, Charity, and Tommy were reading lines. He watched them from a distance and marveled, as he always did at the sight of actors at work, that three people could share the same professional psychology so plainly, the actor’s need for attention and love and his hysterical need to verbalize and dramatize, and nevertheless in such totally distinct ways.

  Tommy never made a waste motion when he was working, and the rest of the time he dawdled and idled, saving himself. He knew how old he was.

  Rose kept trying to be a good person. A word he hadn’t used in decades crossed Max’s mind, virtuous. That’s it, he thought, Rose is virtuous. If she had just a bit more talent, she’d be a great woman.

  Charity. Blotting paper. Never took her eyes off you if you could teach her something. She was watching everybody on the sound stage with total absorption, entranced with the way Tommy read his lines, with Rose’s professionalism and her status . . .

  . . . he’s here every day or he has been, and it looks like he will be, whenever Rose is working. You’d think that she’d introduce us, not that she isn’t nice, and she couldn’t possibly have anything on me. She hasn’t thought of it, that’s all, she’s so sweet. Everybody says she’s so sweet, you get sick of hearing that. I’m not nice. I wonder exactly how old she is. The date is in her official biography, 1933, but she might be older. She doesn’t look older but you can never tell with the stars. They get all the attention, the best appointments at the hairdressers, more fittings than anybody, better numbers. She’ll h
ave twice the footage I’ll have, and look at the way Max Mars treats her, as though she was a queen and I was one of the peasants. I wish I could hurry it up. I’ll be a star pretty soon. One more picture if I’m lucky, two or three at the outside. I can feel it. There he is.

  He sits in the shadows like he was scared or something. Why wouldn’t he just come right out and speak up? Whispering in the corners with his wife. His wife. I wonder what they do together when they go home. What do you do? When you’re in your thirties, although he doesn’t look it, he looks in his late twenties and hardly anybody else does. And he’s rich, boy, is he rich. He owns scripts and part of a recording company and he has money in the agency. What about that agency anyway?

  Mama says to display myself and I’m ashamed to do what she says; it’s immodest. But I guess I have to; that’s what I’m going to be, a sexpot. I wish it was different. I wish I could be a lady like Rose. She isn’t a great lady of the screen, like Deborah Kerr, but she’s a lady, you can tell it a mile away. I wonder what they do alone together. Would they go to nightclubs? I’ve been in the movies two years now, counting “Hairbrush,” and I’ve never been to a nightclub, why is that? I’d like that, but I don’t have the time. If they’re going to bill me as a sex bomb, they ought to start letting me get around a bit, because it would help with the promotion.

  There he is, looking at me. Think I can’t tell?

  In the dark like he’s hiding something. And there’s Tommy, Max always calls him dear old Tommy Dewar when his back is turned. Some kind of joke. He must be a million years old, and he’s the boy star . . . isn’t that a laugh. Imagine with him . . . imagine . . .

  “. . . we’re ready for positions,” Max said, crossing to them. “What about walking through some of them, just for size?”