Max

by Howard Fast

  His bitterness worn fuzzy by time, Max had been persuaded by his colleagues to rehire Gerald Freedman, who during the past dozen years had directed a series of films hailed by the critics as artistic triumphs. Max had his own opinion of just how triumphant these films were, but he appreciated Freedman’s reputation, and he succumbed to Barney Enfield’s pleadings that this venture into talking pictures be encased with every publicity gimmick that could be bought or invented. Enfield, no longer a single, lone flack but chief of a public relations and advertising section of Britsky Productions that employed eighteen men and women, sensed the gigantic revolution in the whole world of entertainment that the talking pictures would produce, perhaps more so even than Max, and he insisted that when the first talking picture was made, it be launched with more fanfare than any opening in the history of film. Max agreed. Sometime in the past decade, this thing spawned out of the kinetoscopes and the nickelodeons had changed from a storefront entertainment for illiterate immigrants into an art form, generating a whole new order of critics; and Max sensed that the talking picture would complete the transition.

  And now Max said to Sam Snyder, ‘You’re right. I’m nervous as a cat, Sam, because I got to be first. It was my idea, and by now I put over a million dollars into it, and now every goddamn studio out here is trying to get in there with a talking picture device, only there ain’t no device and what we got is not a device. That’s what Freddy keeps telling me. We don’t have a device and we can’t patent it, so either we get in there first or we’ll be entirely up shit creek.’

  They were walking along the studio street toward the sound laboratory, part of the eddying population of what Max called his dream factory, Max as always in proper dark gray, white shirt and striped tie, and Sam Snyder in the blue jeans and work shirt he donned each morning on reaching the studio, a great ring of keys and a flashlight hanging from his belt, still with no real title, but nevertheless the man who operated the mechanisms of this vast enterprise, with its own security force, fire department, electric generating plant, water supply, garbage collection, plaster casting shop, carpentry shop, machine shop, auto pool, warehouse, garment factory, art studios, paint shops, and, of course, fake streets, castles, cities, suburbs, stages, and offices. And still, calm and unhurried as he said to Max, ‘Come off it. We are not up shit creek, and you know it. No one can beat us, Max. We got five hundred theatres wired for sound already. It will take at least a year for any other studio to catch up with us, so why don’t you just relax and let it happen.’

  ‘You think we got it? I paid Mike Benson fifty grand to come in and make it work.’

  ‘It’s money well spent. He’s damn good. What about Jake Stein?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘They took him to the hospital yesterday. His wife says they can’t operate. The cancer’s too far gone. I think he’s dying, Max.’

  ‘Yeah, poor bastard. I feel guilty as hell. I never liked him.’

  ‘We ought to go to the hospital.’

  ‘I hate hospitals. God Almighty, I hate hospitals.’

  ‘Yeah. Still, he’s been with us a long time. What’s to feel guilty about?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what. All these years I never said two words to the man that wasn’t business, never went to his house, and last week, when I heard he was sick, someone tells me he’s still on the payroll for three hundred a week. Never asked for a raise, never asked for a nickel for himself, worked himself out like a goddamn slave – what the hell for? I don’t ask for anything like that.’

  Snyder shrugged. ‘We’ll talk to his wife. See what she needs.’

  They were at the sound laboratory now, a square, gray, windowless stucco building, much like the shooting stages that lined the studio streets, only smaller; and inside, out of the bright, eternal sunshine into the cavelike darkness of the entry, they stood blinking while Mike Benson greeted them. He was a pudgy, moon-faced, middle-aged man who, like so many other important sound experts, had gotten his early training with Edison. He had been waiting for them, and he shook hands eagerly.

  ‘This time.’ He nodded. ‘This time, absolutely. We’re set up. The others are here.’

  The sound lab had a small viewing room, three rows of six seats. Freedman was there with his assistant director and the screenplay author, Eugene Cape, three Broadway hits and the best writing reputation in the legitimate theatre world, Fred Feldman, Bert Bellamy, Barney Enfield, Clifford Abel, who was designing the film, and Max’s brother Ruby. Max and Snyder took their places in the last row. Ruby sat down next to Max, and said to him nervously, ‘What’s this about Jake going to the hospital?’

  ‘So I’m told. I think he’s dying.’

  ‘Dying? What the devil do you mean, dying?’

  ‘He has cancer and he’s dying,’ Max said flatly. ‘It happens. You want to talk about it, we’ll talk later. Now I got to watch this.’

  ‘I don’t understand this? Why didn’t I know?’

  ‘You want to weep over Jake, I can understand,’ Max said not unkindly. ‘Maybe somebody ought to cry over him. But not now.’

  ‘I just want to know what this is about him dying?’

  ‘Not now!’ Max said with annoyance.

  Ruby rose and stalked out of the room, saying as he left, ‘I got to call him, I mean the hospital.’

  ‘Since when is he that close to Jake?’ Snyder wondered.

  ‘He’s always been chummy with Jake,’ Bert Bellamy said.

  ‘Shall we wait for him?’ Benson asked Max.

  ‘No, go ahead.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’ Benson rose and faced them. ‘There could be a hitch when we change records. I hope not, but it is just possible. It isn’t that we don’t understand the problem and how to overcome it. It’s just that we had to build every component for the slow-turning mechanism, and some parts need further testing. So if we go out of sync, bear with us.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Max said. ‘I’ve seen it out of sync fifty times. Like hell I’ll bear with you.’

  Benson sighed and nodded as he went into the control room. Snyder glanced at Max.

  ‘So it ain’t nice. That son of a bitch is paid to do it, not to make excuses,’ Max said. ‘You ever known me to ask anyone to bear with me?’

  Snyder smiled. ‘There you got me, Max.’

  The lights went off, and the identifying numbers flashed onto the screen. Then the film ran blank for a few seconds, and then the picture of an attractive young woman appeared, standing on a stage fitted with four platforms of varying heights. There was also a set of drums on the stage, several folding chairs and a small table.

  The young woman smiled and nodded, and said, ‘This is sync test number forty-seven. My name is Sandra Johnson. I am a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York, and I have been brought out here at the suggestion of Mr Benson, not because I’m any great shakes as a singer, but because I have both a high range and a middle range. We’re also old friends – can I say that, Mike? – pardon me. Now to business. I’ll start with a simple song, Stephen Foster’s “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair.”’

  Max, listening open-mouthed, his gaze glued to the woman’s lips, looking for the almost inevitable out-of-sync gap, failed to find even an indication, and he whooped with delight. ‘Benson, you ugly son of a bitch, you done it!’

  ‘Wait for the transition,’ Benson’s voice pleaded through the woman’s song.

  After ‘Jeannie,’ Sandra Johnson sang an aria from La Traviata and then a light patter song from Gilbert and Sullivan. As she sang, she moved, going from one platform to the next, running a few steps, then standing still. Next, a radio sound man came on, spreading his equipment on the table. ‘I’ll do a succession of sounds,’ he explained, ‘aiming for recognition. First the sound, then I name it.’

  ‘Do you hear a slight undersound?’ Sam Snyder whispered to Max. ‘A scratch sound?’

  ‘It damn well don’t matter! Goddamn it, Sam, you technicians want to be God. We
got a talking picture.’

  ‘That was a door closing,’ the sound man said. A telephone began to ring. ‘I’m sure I don’t have to identify that.’

  Bert Bellamy had reached for the control phone next to him. ‘I’ll be damned!’ he shouted. ‘Did you see that, Max? I actually reached for the damn telephone. I actually thought it was ringing.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Max said softly. ‘I had the same damn reaction. I just don’t believe it.’

  The sound man gathered up his equipment and then scattered some nutshells in front of him. ‘You have to walk for this one,’ he said, and then he walked across the crackling shells and off the screen. An enormous black man appeared on the screen. His name was Art Jones; and he had a small role in a jungle film they were doing at the other end of the lot. He was vaguely familiar to Max.

  ‘My name is Art Jones,’ he said. ‘I’m not a professional singer, but I do my thing in church ever since I been a little kid. Main reason for me being here is I’m a basso profundo. I’m a going to sing an old spiritual called “Go Down Moses,” and Mr Benson say to give it all I got. So here goes.’

  The voice blasted into the small viewing room, filling it with an almost physical presence of sound: ‘When Israel was in Egypt land –’

  The tremendous voice continued. Benson came out of the control room and slid into the seat next to Max. ‘A little bit of undernoise,’ he admitted. ‘Can’t help it with this low range and extreme volume. We’d never allow such volume in a theatre, and I can cut back to practically eliminate the undersound. Have you been looking for the transition?’

  ‘When is it coming?’ Max wanted to know.

  ‘Coming? My dear Max, it came. And not in a silent interval, either. We shifted records while Art was talking.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Scout’s honor.’

  There were tears in Max’s eyes. ‘Benson, you bastard.’ He threw his arms around Benson and kissed his cheek.’

  The others, having overheard, were applauding. The black man finished singing, and four couples appeared on the screen, all of them talking and shouting at once, eight voices assaulting the ability of the records to pick up and clarify. It worked, but no one was paying much attention at this point. They crowded around Max and Benson.

  ‘This is historic,’ Bert Bellamy said. ‘This is goddamn historic. Max, do you know what this means?’

  Max wasn’t sure he knew, although he had gone over this in his mind at least a hundred times. Perhaps better than the others, he at least sensed that the world would never be the same, that a new, somewhat frightening genie had popped out of its bottle and would never be contained again. Most assuredly, life could be displayed and reflected in pictures, but the human condition was sound. All of his life, he had worked with half of a thing; now it was completed and whole; and now what?

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Barney Enfield crowed. ‘This has got to be the biggest newsbreak in the history of the business. We hold a press conference and bring out our four biggest stars to back Max up. Get everyone – press, wire services –’

  ‘Barney, this is sound,’ Freedman said. ‘Do you know what your four biggest stars sound like?’

  ‘I’m not sure about the press conference. Maybe we ought to sit on it.’

  ‘You can’t sit on it. The technicians know. The studio knows. How can you sit on it?’

  ‘What do you think, Max?’

  ‘I think we start making the picture and we let the world know. What’s to hide?’

  ‘Shoot the works?’ Enfield asked him.

  ‘We’re all shouting,’ Max said, pointing to the screen, ‘and they’re shouting back at us. I’m trying to make some sense out of it. Sure, shoot the works. Only, I’m thinking about the piano players. We fire five hundred piano players. I hate to do that.’

  They broke out into laughter. Big joke, but Max hadn’t meant it as a joke, not at all.

  Sam Snyder changed into city clothes. They decided that the very least they could do in terms of Jake Stein, like him or not, was to pay a visit to the hospital. He was dying. It cast a damper over their triumph and sobered them. Stein, like a handful of others, had been there at the beginning. On their way to the hospital in downtown Los Angeles, they drove through the deep cleft of Cahuenga, the sides wet and green with a burst of rainfall, the air sweet as honey, the blue sky speckled with a handful of fluffy white clouds, so rare in the California sky. The intensely high and low moments tugged at their emotions; they were both quiet and thoughtful and turned inward.

  In Hollywood, they stopped for lunch at a tiny place called Leon’s East Coast Deli. They made a matzo ball soup that reminded Max of his mother’s cooking but tasted better. Sarah was never a good cook. Snyder liked their heavy pot roast and potatoes. There were no German restaurants in Los Angeles. ‘Why don’t you use one of the studio drivers?’ Snyder asked Max as he parked his big Cadillac in the muddy lot behind Leon’s.

  ‘I like to drive. I had a driver back east, Shecky Blum, remember him, Sam?’

  Snyder shook his head.

  ‘Big tough guy. Good with his fists. He started with a carriage – horse and carriage. My God, the world changes. We behaved like a bunch of hoodlums. Settled things with ax handles. You remember those days.’

  ‘I’d rather forget them.’

  ‘I tried to get Shecky to come out here. Offered him good money too, and I told him he could bring his wife out and I’d find a house for them, but he wouldn’t budge. He said if he ever left the East Side of New York, he’d just curl up and die.’

  ‘People feel funny about a place. How many years we been out here, Max?’

  ‘Twelve, thirteen.’

  ‘I’m still not used to it. I look around at the damn palm trees and mesquite, and I wonder where I am.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Trouble is,’ Snyder said tentatively, ‘you never got over Della.’ He was uneasy talking to Max about Della, but he felt he had to. ‘You can’t live out your life alone in that damn cottage on the lot. There’s more to life than the lot and this business.’

  ‘You tell me what.’

  ‘What I mean to say,’ Snyder getting at it uneasily, ‘what I mean to say is that you can’t live without a woman. I know you that well, and we been together a long time, so I want to get this off my chest, and out here, my gracious, there are maybe more beautiful dames than in any other such given space in the whole world –’

  ‘Drop it, Sam,’ Max said. ‘Just drop it.’

  ‘Are you sore?’ Snyder wanted to know.

  ‘Sam, when did I get sore at you?’

  ‘Maybe it would do you good if you did. Anyway, I sure felt good about the sound. It wasn’t only that the damn thing finally worked, but I haven’t seen you enjoy anything so much in months.’

  ‘Yeah, and you know what else I could enjoy? Some of Alice’s cooking. So invite me around.’

  ‘Last three times I invited you –’

  ‘Screw the last three times.’

  ‘OK, OK. Tonight.’

  When they reached the hospital that afternoon, they were told that Jake Stein had passed away two hours earlier. His family had been there and left.

  Jake Stein’s funeral took place the following day, and after the funeral, Max went back to the lot, spent two restless hours in his office, and then walked across to the back lot, where the Battle of the Argonne Forest had been revived. The picture was tentatively titled Inferno, and its schematic was woven around a single day with an American rifle company in the war to end all wars. Max disliked war films. The enormous, monstrous horror of World War I affected him deeply, but the complex of causes, was beyond his understanding, and until now the Britsky Studio had made no important war films, only a number of comedies about the army and the recruits. Max had let himself be talked into the very large expenditure that Inferno required because Anthony Clark, their very best scenario writer, had put together a scenario that required almost no dialogue cards
. The story and the narrative were contained in the pictures, and to Max, this was a close to perfect use of the medium, and even though he disliked the content, he was so eager to see how far one could go in a moving picture without words that he decided to make the film.

  Today, it was not difficult for him, despite the blazing California sunshine, to imagine himself actually in a place where this lunatic action had happened. The gentle breeze carried the scent of gunpowder to him as the charges that simulated artillery fire were exploded; and walking up to the camera positions, climbing the twelve-foot-high wooden platform that held the cameras for this scene, he found himself looking down into a muddy trench where a line of actors dressed in doughboy uniforms crouched with their bayoneted rifles. Package charges of black gunpowder had been laid out in a complex pattern in front of the trench, and as Max approached the camera platform, the explosions moved toward the trench, simulating a German advance. Two more camera platforms gave different angles, and as Max stood watching, a line of advancing German soldiers appeared through the smoke and flung dirt of the explosions. Shouting into his megaphone, Gifford Brown, the director, screamed, ‘Will you goddamn motherfuckers get shot! Seven, four, nine, sixteen, twenty-two, you are dead! Do you hear me! Dead! Dead! Dead!’

  The five numbers indicated threw up their arms, staggered, and died. Brown reached out and an assistant handed him a clipboard, and from it he read: ‘Ten, twelve, fourteen, three! You stupid bastards!’

  More Germans fell before the gunfire of the men in the trench and the fragments of bursting shells. Brown thrust the clipboard to his assistant. ‘My voice is gone. Get those bastards out of the trench into the counterattack!’

  The scene went on. Max stood at the end of the platform, out of the way, a small, skinny man in a dark blue worsted suit. The director and the assistant director raged, the charges exploded, the doughboys climbed out of the trench into the counterattack, and finally the director waved his arms and shouted for them to cut.