Kansas City Noir

by Steve Paul

  * * *

  Author’s note: This story is based on local history; however, it has been fictionalized and all persons appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  LAST NIGHT AT THE RIALTO

  BY MITCH BRIAN

  The Celluloid City

  Marty had sold the popcorn machine last week on the condition that it would stay in the theater until closing night. Marty was like that. Always making deals with conditions. I’ll do this but you have to do that. It probably made him feel powerful. Claire was cleaning the machine a final time, wiping off the stainless steel bottom of the popcorn bin so it shined and reflected the shape of her face like a fun house mirror, when Rance came out of the projection booth and crossed the lobby to the snack bar.

  She turned and smiled: “All done.”

  Rance looked at the machine. She’d done a good job all right. Better than Marty deserved. Tomorrow whoever Marty sold it to would pick it up, or send somebody and that would be that. Rance bet Marty already had the money in his pocket. Marty could feel like he stiffed the guy for a week. Marty was like that. Rance looked back at Claire, taking in her short black hair, wide mouth, and the tiny stud in her left nostril.

  She hooked a thumb back at a box beside the soda fountain. “Candy’s all in the box. You want me to unhook the fountain?”

  “Naw, I’ll get it,” Rance said. “I’ll lock up behind you.”

  Rance watched her walk back to the cash register, grab her backpack, and sling it over her shoulder. She walked heavy for somebody so light and thin. She’d be elegant someday but she’s still a teenager, Rance thought, even if she is twenty-one. He was twice her age and then some. She could be his daughter but he didn’t like to think about her that way.

  He walked with her to the glass doors as he had done hundreds of time before, crossing the carpet with its swirling red-and-gold patterns and angular masks of comedy and tragedy. He stopped just short of the door and she seemed to follow his lead, not breezing out as she usually did. Rance felt a little shiver, like they were of one mind. She turned to him and he said, “You want anything?”

  She met his eyes, uncertain. He couldn’t hold her stare for long and as always when this happened, he shifted his gaze to the stud in her nose. It was hard to look at her when she was looking at him. He liked it better when she didn’t know he was watching.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  He knew he’d caught her off guard. It was awkward. “A souvenir. Something to remember the place by.”

  “What, like a light fixture?” She managed a half-laugh, like she was trying to ease the tension.

  He didn’t mean for this to be tense. Maybe he’d been too abrupt when he stopped at the door like that. “I just thought you might have wanted something.”

  She looked past him, scanning the lobby. He watched her and wondered if her skin was as soft as he imagined. He saw her blink and could make out every eyelash. If this was a movie it would be a close-up. A luminous, Technicolor, Hollywood close-up as she gazed across the lobby of gold and red.

  She looked back at him. And caught him staring. They both knew. She gave that shrug of hers and leaned toward the door.

  “I’ll remember it fine. See you round, Rance.” And she was out the glass doors.

  He turned the lock and heard it click. He watched her unlock her bike from the rack under the neon glow of the marquee. He didn’t want to watch her ride off into the night. He shifted his weight and was instantly aware of his own reflection staring back at him: short cropped blond hair concealing gray strands, silver frames of his glasses on his pudgy face, faded Hawaiian shirt. He turned his back on her and headed across the lobby to the double doors leading into the auditorium. Just one more thing to do tonight. One last thing before closing forever.

  Rance walked down the sloping aisle of the auditorium, headed for the red velvet curtains covering the fifty-foot screen. He’d opened and closed those drapes thousands of times. He once tried to do the math and figure out how many movies he’d projected here over the past twenty-two years. And then there was another ten before that at the old Fine Arts across the state line in Kansas. And the year before that he’d worked a few months at the Brookside Theatre before it closed. A year later, when it was set to be turned into a nightclub, somebody went in during the middle of the night and burned the place down. Rance hated the idea of it burning, but even worse was the thought of disco music rattling those sweet old columns along the walls and the balcony gutted and turned into a lounge with fake leather sofas and shag carpet. Sometimes the mob did right by this town. Torching the Brookside before it could be spoiled was okay by him. And anyway, this place beat the shit out of either of those.

  The Rialto had been built in 1949 and wasn’t as flashy as the Boller Brothers theaters that dominated the Midwest in the ‘20s and ‘30s. It had no balcony, no atmospheric ceiling with fake stars twinkling down, no mock Spanish colonnades. Instead it had clean, modern lines. The walls ascended forty feet and then seemed to ring the auditorium, circling over the top of the screen with a thin line of satin aluminum. Above it, the ceiling curved gently, enhanced by the white plaster, creating the illusion of being open and infinite. It reminded Rance of a planetarium dome before it filled with constellations. The illusion would be perfect except for the water stains that marred the ceiling from a leaky roof. Insurance had fixed the roof, but wouldn’t pay to replaster and paint, and Marty refused to go to the hip for it. “People come to look at the screen, not the ceiling,” he’d say. But the truth was that he planned to sell the Rialto as soon as he could find a buyer and wasn’t about to sink another dime into it.

  The Rialto had been dying a slow death for years. The audience for independent movies was shrinking and the big theater chains were booking those few remaining offbeat, specialty, and world-cinema titles that used to be the bread and butter of art houses like the Rialto. These days a single-screen theater, especially one in Midtown, simply couldn’t compete. Marty had hoped to find somebody who wanted to take it over, but in the end a real estate developer who liked the location had made a good offer and Marty had found his buyer. Now he was going make a big chunk of change. And it wasn’t just the theater he planned to unload.

  Rance slowed as he reached the curtain, stepped behind the plush drapes, and stared at the canisters lined up in front of him. These were Marty’s prints. Cans of thirty-five-millimeter films collected here in the dusty space behind the screen. There were several crime films, an art house domestic drama, a hospital comedy, a jazz flick, even a sort of western set during the border war. All were in mint condition and all had been shot here in Kansas City. This was Marty’s personal memorial to his hometown. If a movie had footage shot anywhere in the five counties that made up the two-state metro area, Marty had to have it. Movies set in Kansas City but shot somewhere else, like that piece of shit Burt Reynolds–Clint Eastwood abortion, didn’t make the cut. Marty was adamant about what was and wasn’t worthy of his stash.

  He came upon the prints in all sorts of ways. He’d used the Big Reel newsletter and then the Internet had made it even easier. But mostly Marty knew people. People who worked at film depots, shipping companies, other theater owners, especially back in the day before things got computerized and corporations got involved. Marty knew people who could get him the movies he wanted. And he squirreled away the prints here, behind the screen. Once in a while he’d tell Rance to thread one up (Marty was all thumbs when it came to the projectors), but more often than not, he just liked having them.

  “Closing night after the last show, I want you to put all the prints into your truck and bring ‘em over to my place,” he told Rance. He’d just dropped the bomb on Rance that he was selling the place and he said it almost like an afterthought. He’d given no warning. Hadn’t even hinted he was looking for a buyer. After all, Rance was just the projectionist. Marty probably figured he’d find another job
easily enough. Or maybe just do something else. Everything was going digital anyway. Projectionists, he’d joked, were a dying breed. It may have been funny to Marty, but not to Rance. It was the truth. Rance was dying. He’d kept that from Marty. Same way Marty’d kept the news of the sale from Rance. It wouldn’t do any good to tell Marty, anyway. Marty didn’t give a shit. He offered no health insurance to employees and what he paid Rance wasn’t enough to afford the premiums. Not that Rance cared about insurance. At least not initially. He’d always been healthy as a horse. He didn’t smoke, he ate right, and he walked to work no matter what the weather. He’d thought he was in pretty good shape until he started feeling lousy and finally bit the bullet to get his first physical in fifteen years, so the spot on his lung came as a helluva shock. Even worse was how little could be done. And then the news he was soon to be out of a job—devastating. So now Marty didn’t know Rance was sick. Marty didn’t know Rance had nothing to lose. Marty didn’t know how dangerous Rance was about to become. These prints were not going to Rance’s truck.

  He reached down and grabbed the closest print, two steel canisters containing Bucktown, a blaxploitation number starring Fred “The Hammer” Williamson. This was the first print Marty had got hold of. The one that started the collection. Nobody’d figure Marty for this kind of low-rent stuff. You could barely see the Kansas City locations in it because it took place mostly at night and was too goddamned dark to see anything besides an occasional street corner. But then Rance heard the story—Marty got a blowjob from a nightclub-scene extra called Roxie—and realized the guy’s interest in the print was sentimental. It was his memento of the wild 1970s. Like the face that launched a thousand ships, Roxie’s blowjob launched Marty’s collection.

  Rance knew the collection was under way when Marty proudly told him he’d been given a print of Kansas City Bomber the night after he’d salvaged a print of The Delinquents from a dumpster behind the old Calvin Film Studio.

  Rance remembered seeing Kansas City Bomber for a buck and a quarter at the Capri’s twilight show. Even though people said Raquel Welch had shot some scenes in Kansas City, Rance sure couldn’t spot them. Marty said they must have been cut out and kept the print despite his shot-in-town criteria. It wasn’t much of a picture but it did have the MGM lion at the beginning and Rance loved the way it reverberated in the cavernous space of the Rialto. Rance loved the sound of that roar.

  The Delinquents, on the other hand, had some nice car cruising scenes, especially in the credits, and you could see what downtown looked like back when the streets were lit up with countless bars and strip clubs.

  The Cool and the Crazy had even better location scenes, including a sweet shot of the Indian statue overlooking the city, and Marty had snatched up a print of that not long after getting The Delinquents. Too bad he’ll never get to see it again, thought Rance as he reached the lobby and turned to the door marked with white-stenciled letters: Employees Only. He pushed through the door and went inside.

  Rance carried the print into the projection booth. The electrical box was buzzing its constant tone that always grated on Marty but made Rance feel at home. For all intents and purposes, this was Rance’s home. He’d worked here, ate here, drank, fucked (only once), and occasionally slept here for over two decades. The place was lovingly hung with posters. And there were a few real collector’s items—a framed letter from Stanley Kubrick with instructions on the projection of Barry Lyndon—that had been passed down to him from Uncle Frank. Beyond the 1980s platter system, the splicing bench sat against the back wall, immaculate and organized for maximum efficiency. There were white editor’s gloves but Rance never used them. He liked to feel the edges of the film against his fingertips. He liked holding the film up to the light to see the images. He liked the smell of the stuff. A corny, hand-painted plaque hung over the table saying, Old Projectionists never die, they just FADE OUT. It was hard to believe this was his last night in here.

  This was where it all happened. Up here in the booth. No projectionist, no movie. He was the last link in the chain from concept to script to production to post. It all climaxed up here with him. You can keep your movie stars. The projectionists were the real heroes of the pictures. The secret heroes who fixed whether a movie lived or died, whether it was hated or loved. He’d heard all the stories. How the guy showing Bonnie and Clyde had turned down the volume during the gunshots so it was all nice and even … and nearly been fired for it. Or how a civic-minded projectionist working a drive-in show in Kansas had said, “No smut here,” and cut out the vile scene in Midnight Express when the girl shoved her titties up against the glass. Rance didn’t blame him. If he’d directed that movie he’d have skipped all that shit in the middle and got right to the escape and revenge and spent a little more time torturing those fucking Turkish prison guards.

  Even better was what had happened when Prime Cut premiered over in Lawrence during the heyday of the hippies and student radicals. Marty had a print of Prime Cut because a lot of it was shot around the stockyards in the West Bottoms, at the Muehlebach Hotel and along the Missouri River. But the big chase scene was shot outside Lawrence at the Douglas County Fair. When the sequence started up and Lee Marvin was rescuing Sissy Spacek, there was the local sheriff, ol’ Rex Johnson himself, up on the screen. The hippies in the audience roared with laughter. They booed and jeered like he was the villain, not Gene Hackman. Somebody even threw popcorn. It was a disaster. The hippies had ruined the show. Before the next showing took place, the projectionist snipped the sheriff out of the print and the movie went just fine. He showed those fucking hippies who was running things. He saved the movie. Up in the booth, the projectionist was king. Here at the Rialto, Rance was king. And like a king, the title of projectionist had been passed down to him when he was still a boy.

  His Uncle Frank had been a union projectionist since the ‘50s. Rance was six when Uncle Frank stepped in to help his mom after the old man walked out. Frank was better than a father because he wasn’t around all the time, only when you needed him. He let Rance into the booth all the time, but the really big thing happened when he was eight and he went with Frank to the Royal to see a preview screening being projected by Frank’s buddy Walt. Rance and Frank slipped into the booth just before the show started and Rance sat on a stool, boosted up by a phone book, and watched the movie through a small glass window.

  The movie was The Wild Bunch. It was the bloodiest, dirtiest, most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. The theater was packed with people expecting to see a Hollywood western with movie stars like William Holden and Ernest Borgnine. There was a national teacher’s convention going on that week and dozens of ladies, in town for the weekend, had been given complimentary tickets. There were hippies too. Uncle Frank had pointed them out to Rance as they moved through the crowded lobby. Hippies taking a break from smoking dope or burning American flags. Hippies hoping to get out of the heat, putting their grimy feet up on the seats in front of them and making fun of a cowboy movie.

  Boy, did they get a surprise. Once the bunch started shooting the shit out of the town of Starbuck, people started leaving the theater. With every gunshot, every glorious eruption of crimson, every slow-motion tumble, another one would leave. One of the teachers let out a scream when a woman was shot in the back. Another tripped and fell in the aisle, trying to get out before Crazy Lee’s tongue went all the way inside that old lady’s ear. And outside in the alley, one of the hippies had bent over and barfed all over the pavement. An usher had come into the booth with the news, and as much as Rance wanted to see that hippie hurling his guts out, he would have had to stop watching the picture and he couldn’t do that. For two and half hours he sat there, mesmerized, in the projection booth, watching the movie from way back and high up, looking down on the crowd, some screaming, some covering their eyes, others enraptured, and at the end of it he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life in the booth. He’d see the world from up here. He’d travel through space and time from
up here. He’d watch every human emotion, every laugh, sob, howl, and scream from up here. He’d see it all.

  Rance’s phone rang, startling him back to himself. It was Marty. “When you getting over here?”

  “In a while. I’m still cleaning the popcorn machine.”

  “I told Claire to do that.”

  “I sent her home. Told her I’d do it. You really want to pay her for another hour?”

  “Goddamnit, Rance, what do I care if she costs me another eight bucks? I got the buyer coming over for the prints!”

  “I’ll be over soon as I can. Maybe an hour.”

  “An hour? Jesus.”

  “The sooner I get off the phone, sooner I’ll be there.” Rance knew that’d piss him off.

  “Hurry up.” Marty hung up.

  Rance smirked. Shook his head. The buyer. Right. Some fucking kid, a nephew of one of Marty’s poker buddies, goes off to Hollywood, sells some movie scripts, and is now a film collector. He’s rolling in dough and Marty’s about to make a killing off this rich kid with money to burn on thirty-five-millimeter prints. The world goes digital and this kid is buying prints. Marty probably tried to sell him the projector to go with them. “If you buy these movies, I’ll sell you the projector for cheap.” Apparently the kid only wanted the prints.

  Rance was hauling up the last of the prints, two cans containing In Cold Blood, when the phone rang again. Marty liked that In Cold Blood had lots of clean, black-and-white shots of Kansas City. Rance couldn’t care less about that. The movie was ponderous and went way too easy on those two killers. And Robert Blake reminded him of his old man. What was interesting about In Cold Blood was that one of the Finney County sheriff’s detectives who’d worked the real-life murder case became a projectionist once he’d retired. Rance met him when he was visiting relatives in Kansas. He’d just walked into the projection booth at the airport drive-in in Hutchinson, and as soon as he started talking projectors with the old guy, all sorts of interesting things came up. They wrote letters back and forth and not long before he passed away he sent a box via special delivery to Rance.