Max

by Howard Fast

  ‘Are you sure, Max? I have tickets for a concert tonight, and I was going to take Freida, because I know how you detest concerts.’

  ‘Forget the concert. Let Freida find a guy for once. I need you to help me with the meeting tonight.’

  ‘What time?’ Sally asked. How could she refuse him when he specified that he needed her? That had been his first enticement, long ago.

  ‘Suppose we eat early. I’ll tell them to be there at eight o’clock.’

  At eight p.m., all of them were present in Max’s dining room, sipping the tea Sally had poured for them and nibbling pieces of cake – all of them appropriately glum. By now, everyone present, including Sally, knew about the Stanford-Calvin ultimatum and Max’s response. Sam Snyder was the oldest of the group, in his mid-thirties now, round and prosperous, vice president of Britsky Theatres, with a wife and five children and a brownstone house on Brooklyn Heights.

  Bert Bellamy, head of theatre operations, was still unmarried; and Max had the feeling that he would never marry. A shell had hardened around Bert, and no man or woman would ever be given the right to penetrate it. Once Max would have unhesitatingly trusted Bert with his life and fortune, but now? Once, long ago, Max felt, they had done everything together – goofed around together, dated together, shared their dreams and secrets, hugged each other after an absence. Not now. Bert encased himself in his three-piece suits, locked himself behind a golden watch chain, wore stiff collars and dark ties, and smiled infrequently.

  Fred Feldman, on the other hand, wore his heart on his sleeve, a small, round teddy bear of a man who loved Max and tried to protect him. He understood the strange innocence beneath Max’s tough, street-wise shell, a knowledge neither Bellamy nor Stein shared. Stein was a hungry man, hungry eyes, hungry hands – too smart to be a bookkeeper, but too crude to have been much more until Max hired him. He had a narrow hatchet of a face, heavy brows, and a habit of plucking hairs from his nose. Sally detested him, and when he joined the others at the table, Sally prepared to retreat.

  ‘Please stay,’ Max asked her.

  ‘Can she handle cigar smoke?’ Bert wanted to know. Max brought out a humidor, and suddenly it was all very much like a dream, this group of men who worked for him sitting in a woodpaneled dining room around a substantial oak table, lighting twenty-five-cent cigars of the finest Havana leaf while he poured brandy from a cut-glass carafe. Beyond the dream, it made little sense, and even the ominous future spelled out by Stanford and Calvin could not fix it to reality.

  ‘Max?’ Sally said.

  They were watching him as he stood motionless, the brandy carafe in his hand.

  ‘Thinking,’ he said.

  ‘I like cigar smoke,’ Sally said. ‘Otherwise I’d move out.’

  ‘Nobody likes it. You endure it.’

  Then they fell silent and watched Max, who seated himself gingerly, as if the unsubstantial aspect of reality had infected everything in the house.

  He was Max Britsky. The past was very close to him, the past of poverty and indignity and filth and roaches and the stink of urine pervading the tenement on Henry Street, and here he was, the past much more real than this present. He had never really conquered the curse of the inarticulate; he was full of anger and frustration and fear, and he could not verbalize any of it, not even to himself. He was still a lousy little kike. That was how the uptown Jews put it; if your name ended with a ky, such as Britsky did, they took the ky and made it a designation and a curse, turning it into kike. To the white Protestants who ran things, he was an upstart Jew bastard.

  He looked around and there was Sally, standing tentatively at one end of the big table. ‘For God’s sake, sit down!’ he snapped at her; and then she sat down, wondering what she had done to make him, angry, but Max said apologetically, ‘Oh, hell. I’m sorry. Those two bastards kicked my belly in.’

  ‘Max,’ Fred Feldman asked, ‘is there no other source for moving pictures?’

  ‘Sure. They make some here and there. That don’t help us. We got over thirty outlets. And if National’s pictures stink, which they do, what do you expect from the others?’ He turned to Snyder. ‘Sam, can we make pictures ourselves?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What does maybe mean?’

  ‘It means that those bastards at National can tie us up pretty damn good’ – turning to Sally – ‘If you’ll forgive my language, Mrs Britsky. They’re tied in with Edison and Eastman, and once they saw us beginning to buy film and cameras, they’d crack down.’

  ‘Not to mention how long it would take,’ Jake Stein said. ‘The houses are half empty now. Let them sit empty for a month, and maybe we couldn’t survive.’

  ‘What do you mean, maybe? Everyone’s got a maybe. Could we or couldn’t we survive?’

  ‘I don’t know, Max. I’d have to sit down with the books and do some very careful figuring. I also need decisions. Who do we keep on payroll and who do we lay off? We got doormen, ushers, janitors, projectionists, ticket sellers – a whole army of people. And it wouldn’t be only a month. How long does it take to make a moving picture? We got rentals to meet and maybe taxes.’

  ‘I hate to throw cold water on things,’ Fred Feldman said, ‘but I listen to you talking and I think of something else. You asked Jake the wrong question. You ask him how long we can survive if the houses are dark –’

  ‘What’s the right question?’ Max snapped.

  ‘You should ask him how long we can survive the way things are right now. Five years ago, the movies were so new and improbable that people didn’t object to looking at some stupid film that showed a dog standing on his hind legs and begging for food. Anyway, a nickel was not so much to pay, and for a dime a mother could get an hour of relief from three kids, but when you charge twenty-five cents in your theatres, the people want something in return.’

  ‘Come on,’ Max said, ‘we show better than a dog begging. What about the Fireman and The Great Train Robbery?’

  ‘How many times can you show The Great Train Robbery and expect people to pay for it? The other stuff we show is boring trash. None of it makes any sense. So even if we make moving pictures, if they’re the kind of pictures National makes, we’re out of business.’

  ‘Do you agree with him?’ Max asked Snyder.

  ‘Well, I guess so.’

  ‘He’s right about the attendance figures,’ Bert Bellamy said. ‘They keep dropping. It’s not so noticeable in the nickelodeons, but in the theatres we’re being hit below the belt. We’re just about breaking even, and whatever profits show come from the nickelodeons.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Max said. ‘I just can’t believe that I hear what you’re saying. You’re telling me that moving pictures are just a passing fad. No! I don’t believe that! Moving pictures are the greatest thing that ever happened in the entertainment industry. You’re so damn smart, Fred, tell me something. How come in the uptown theatres where they show Shaw and Shakespeare and stuff like that – and a lot of it ain’t Shakespeare but just garbage, from what Sally tells me – their houses are full and they’re turning people away?’

  ‘Ask Sally,’ Fred replied.

  They all turned toward Sally, who nodded and said, ‘Yes, that’s so. I tried to get tickets to Hedda Gabler, which opened last week, but they’re sold out weeks in advance. And it isn’t only because Nazimova is playing Hedda. It’s because Ibsen tells a wonderful story about a woman and tries to explain why she does what she does.’

  ‘Put it down on Houston Street and it closes in twenty-four hours,’ Max said.

  ‘I’m not saying that Hedda Gabler is the thing for film. I just feel that almost everything you show, even The Great Train Robbery, is utterly pointless. You have no story and you never really grip the audience. There’s a thing you learn about when you take a drama course. It’s called empathy, and it means to make the audience feel and suffer what the actor is feeling and suffering. That’s something that exists in every good stage play, but one never feels it
in those awful motion pictures.’

  There was a long moment of silence. Max had never heard Sally assert herself in such terms, and on her part, Sally was overcome with a wave of embarrassment that made her wish she could retreat into invisibility. But Sam Snyder, groping for words, shook one stubby finger at Sally and said, ‘You’re absolutely right, Mrs Britsky. You need a story. My wife always says the same thing. But in a moving picture, nobody says anything. That’s the difference between film and the theatre, and how can you tell a story that will really grab people without words? I was reading that new book of O. Henry’s, and he really does it. Great stories, just great, and all about the city here – but words. He couldn’t tell any story without words. He calls it The Four Million – four million stories to tell right here in New York.’

  ‘That ain’t what moving pictures are for,’ Jake Stein said.

  Feldman nodded at him. ‘Suddenly you’re an expert on moving pictures.’

  ‘I’d like to hear what Sally has to say,’ Bert Bellamy told them. ‘At least she’s done some thinking about this.’

  ‘I’m less of an expert than even Mr Stein,’ Sally protested. ‘At least he knows the business. I only see the pictures.’

  ‘I think you know more than any of us,’ Snyder said. ‘At least you’re in front of the screen, Mrs Britsky. We’re all behind the projector.’

  ‘Well, yes, I do think about it a great deal, and I do think there is a way to tell a story with words, even though you can’t hear what anyone says. I got my idea from the French moving picture makers, who break up the picture with cards. For example, they will show you a picture of a steel mill, and then they photograph a lettered card which says, “A steel mill on the banks of the Rhone” – or something.’

  ‘We do the same thing,’ Max said.

  ‘Yes, sometimes. They use it more. But I was thinking of carrying it one step further. Suppose Mr Snyder here is a character in a story, and in the story he says to his wife, “Let’s go out for a walk, my dear.” You photograph him saying those words, and as soon as he has completed the statement, you cut the film and insert a card with the words lettered on it.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Fred Feldman said. ‘I lost that somewhere. Would you do it again.’

  His eyes closed, Snyder had his hands up in front of him. ‘I’m trying to visualise it. Wouldn’t the card have to come before he speaks?’

  ‘Oh, no After. Mr Feldman, this way. Watch me, and I say, “I think it would work.” But you’re watching a picture of me without any sound, and then I think you would remember the picture while you read the card.’

  ‘But, Sally,’ Max said, ‘suppose you could do it that way. Most of the people who buy tickets in our houses can’t read.’

  ‘Not most of them,’ Bellamy protested. ‘And if some kid is there with his mother, he can read her the cards.’

  ‘You’d have a racket.’

  ‘No, let’s not get into that. I want to know how Sally would project that through a whole story,’ Max said.

  ‘Max, I haven’t really thought this whole thing through, and I must confess that I did a good deal of the thinking just sitting here tonight. It would have to be a very simple story, and I don’t think we’d have to have cards for everything. Suppose you and I, we were having a terrible fight and screaming at each other –’

  ‘We don’t scream at each other,’ Max interrupted. ‘I don’t want anyone to get that idea.’

  ‘I’m just trying to make a point. Of course we don’t, but suppose the people in the story do. We could show them screaming and waving their arms. I don’t think we’d have to put every word on cards. I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.’

  ‘How long would such a film have to run?’ Sam Snyder asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I never gave that any thought.’

  ‘If it was a real story.’ Bellamy said, ‘you couldn’t tell it in much less than an hour, and if this card thing worked -Well, you need time to read. Most people don’t read quick.’

  ‘Most don’t read at all.’

  ‘I don’t see anything like that,’ Stein said. ‘It just sounds crazy, somebody talking and then the words printed out later.’

  ‘That’s the trouble,’ said Snyder. ‘I just can’t put the two together, somebody talking and then the words. Suppose somebody pulls a gun and says, “Hands up!” There’s a card. Then the other guy says, “No, sir, I am not putting my hands up.” Then we need another card, and this first fellow with the gun, he shoots the other man, but when? While we’re reading the card?’

  ‘What about that, Sally?’ Max asked.

  ‘I think you’re making a simple thing needlessly complex. You remember that little picture we had about Baby Lou, four or five years ago. You remember, she falls asleep, and then the dog barks, and they put in a card that said, “The dog’s barking awakens Baby Lou.” Well, all they had to print on that card was “Bow, wow, wow.” It would be the same. The truth is that people have been reading cards for years, but no one ever thought of using the cards for dialogue.’ She looked from face to face, and then she got up and said, ‘Give me a minute, please,’ and ran from the room.

  ‘What do you think?’ Max asked them.

  ‘I’m trying to visualise it,’ Feldman said.

  ‘It might just work,’ Snyder said.

  ‘That’s one smart lady,’ Bellamy agreed, ‘only it’s out of the question. It’s impossible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We got over thirty houses. It would take two, three months to make one moving picture the way Sally thinks it should be made, maybe an hour and a half of film. And to make ten, twenty of them – it would close us down.’

  Max shook his head. ‘Schmuck,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean, schmuck?’

  ‘By schmuck I mean schmuck, plain, simple English. Maybe what Sally wants to do is crazy, but if we can do it, we don’t need no thirty moving pictures. We need one, and then I have the laboratory make me thirty copies. We open every house with the same picture.’

  ‘And where do we get an audience for every night and every house with the same picture?’

  ‘From the three and a half, maybe three and three-quarters million people in this city who never saw a moving picture. From all the uptown Yankees who tell us that moving pictures are all right for Jews and Micks and Eyetalians and Krauts who can’t read anyway, but not for classy blueblood Americans. Because when you come to think about, Sally’s right. We show stupid crap. The moving picture is maybe the greatest invention Edison ever put together, and all we do with it is show them eight-hundred-foot schmuck pieces with magicians making birds and rabbits come and go until you never want to see a bird again, and then a runaway horse or a runaway train or a runaway automobile. I read where Caesar and Cleopatra opens last week and they’re selling one hundred and fifty standing room for every performance. You tell me, Bert – how much standing room you sold in the Bijou this year?’

  ‘Talk some sense, Max. They’re standing for Caesar and Cleopatra because it’s the newest Shaw play. What do we do – commission Shaw to write for the nickelodeons?’

  Sally returned to the room. She held a thin sheaf of cardboards in her hand, and she took a place at one end of the table. ‘I’m going to try a little experiment,’ she said. ‘Please bear with me. It will only take a minute or two.’

  They turned to face her, waiting expectantly. Then Sally began to speak, but no sound issued from her lips. Her lips moved to form words, but no words issued forth. Then she held up one of the cards she carried. On it, lettered in thick black crayon, was: ‘I am trying to make a point.’ After a few seconds, she dropped the card to the floor and again moved her mouth and lips without sound. Then she held up another card which read: ‘Moving pictures can tell a story.’ After a few seconds, she dropped the second card and spoke soundlessly again; then the third card: ‘Do you believe me now?’

  They all clapped, and Sam Snyder shouted, ‘It works! Mrs Britsk
y, it absolutely works.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Stein said.

  ‘It works for me,’ Feldman agreed.

  ‘What do you think?’ Max asked Bert.

  ‘I think it could work. It’s risky, but it just might work.’

  ‘You love Bert, don’t you?’ Sally said to Max. He had just come into their bedroom. Sally sat in front of her dressing table, combing her thick brown hair. She wore a white silk dressing gown that had been a birthday present from Max, who watched her now with caution and disbelief – always with a little caution and a little disbelief. It was not that Sally was beautiful. If anything, as her youth passed, whatever good looks she had had faded rather quickly. She was a small, thin, mousy woman.

  ‘Love him?’ Max said. ‘Maybe. We been together a long time. Bert got me into the act, and maybe that saved my life at the time.’

  Sally realised that she was a small, thin, mousy woman; she had no illusions. All the more reason for her astonishment when Bert, following her into the pantry ostensibly in search of a piece of ice for his drink, had embraced her from behind, cupping his hands over her small breasts. No man had ever done that to her before, no man except Max, no stranger, and she had no prepared response. She would have screamed, but realised that to scream would produce an endless procession of nasty consequences; and therefore she simply whispered hoarsely, ‘Please stop. Please don’t do that Bert.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t want you to.’

  ‘I think you do.’

  ‘I don’t, and if you don’t take your hands away, I’m going to scream.’ His whole body was pressing against her then, and she could feel the pressure of his hardening penis.

  ‘You’re aching for it. You know that. You get nothing from Max, and don’t tell me you’re made of stone.’

  ‘And you’re Max’s best friend.’

  ‘What does that prove?’

  ‘Don’t you have any sense of loyalty – after all he did for you?’