by Kim Newman
Geneviève raised an eyebrow.
“Most X-rated films are better directed than the slop that comes out of the majors,” Martin insisted. “I could show you a reel of something by Gerard Damiano or Jack Horner that you’d swear was Bergman or Don Siegel. Except for the screwing.”
Martin wrote “scripts” for adult movies, under well-guarded pseudonyms to protect his Writers’
Guild membership. The guild didn’t have any moral position on porno, but members weren’t supposed to take jobs which involved turning out a full-length feature script in two afternoons for three hundred dollars. Martin claimed to have invented Jamie Gillis’s catchphrase, “Suck it, bitch!”
“What can you tell me about John Alucard?”
“The name is-“
“Besides that his name is ‘Dracula’ written backwards.”
“He’s from New York. Well, that’s where he was last. I heard he ran with that art crowd. You know, Warhol and Jack Smith. He’s got a first-look deal at United Artists, and something cooking with Fox. There’s going to be a story in the trades that he’s set up an independent production company with Griffin Mill, Julia Phillips, and Don Simpson.”
“But he’s never made a movie?”
“The word is that he’s never seen a movie. That doesn’t stop him calling himself a producer. Say, are you working for him? If you could mention that I was available. Mention my rewrite on Can’t Stop the Music. No, don’t. Say about that TV thing that didn’t happen. I can get you sample scripts by sundown.”
Martin was gripping her upper arm.
“I’ve never met Alucard, Jack. I’m checking into him for a client.”
“Still, if you get the chance, Gené. You know what it would mean to me. I’m fending off bill collectors, and Sharkko Press still hasn’t come through for the Tenebrous Twilight limiteds. A development deal, even a rewrite or a polish, could get me through winter and spring. Buy me time to get down to Ensenada and finish some stories.”
She would have to promise. She had learned more than the bare facts. The light in Jack Martin’s eyes told her something about John Alucard. He had some sort of magic effect, but she didn’t know whether he was a conjurer or a wizard. Now she would have to build on that.
Short of forcing her way into Alucard’s office and asking outright whether he was planning on leaving Orson Welles in the lurch, there wasn’t much more she could do. After Martin, she made a few phone calls to industry contacts, looked over recent back numbers of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter and hit a couple of showbiz watering holes, hoping to soak up gossip.
Now, Geneviève was driving back along the Pacific Coast Highway to Paradise Cove. The sun was down, and a heavy, unstarred darkness hung over the sea. The Plymouth, which she sometimes suspected of having a mind of its own, handled gently, taking the blind curves at speed. She twiddled the radio past a lot of disco and found a station pumping out two-tone. That was good, that was new, that was a culture still alive.
“… mirror in the bathroom, recompense all my crimes of self-defence…”
She wondered about what she had learned.
It wasn’t like the old days, when the studios were tight little fiefdoms and a stringer for Louella Parsons would know everything going on in town and every current scandal. Most movies weren’t even made in Hollywood any more, and the studios were way down on the lists of interests owned by multinational corporations with other primary concerns. The buzz was that United Artists might well be changing its name to TransAmerica Pictures.
General word confirmed most of what Martin had told her, and turned up surprisingly few extra details. Besides the Welles deal, financed off his own line of credit with no studio production coin as yet involved, John Alucard had projects in development all over town, with high-end talent attached.
He was supposed to be in bed with Michael Cimino, still hot off The Deer Hunter, on The Lincoln County Wars, a Western about the vampire outlaw Billy the Kid and a massacre of settlers in Roswell, New Mexico, in the 1870s. With the Mill-Simpson-Phillips setup, he was helping the long-in-development Anne Rice project, Interview With the Mummy, which Elaine May was supposed to be making with Cher and Ryan O’Neal, unless it was Nancy Walker, with Diana Ross and Mark Spitz.
In an interview in the Reporter, Alucard said, “The pursuit of making money is the only reason to make movies. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. Our obligation is to make money.” A lot of execs, and not a few directors and writers, found his a refreshing and invigorating stance, though Geneviève had the impression Alucard was parroting someone else’s grand theory. If he truly believed what he said, and was not just laying down something the studios’ corporate owners wanted to hear, then John Alucard did not sound like someone who would happily want to be in business with Orson Welles. Apart from anything else, his manifesto was a 1980s rewrite, at five times the length with in-built repetition to get through to the admass morons at the back of the hall, of “showmanship, not genius.”
The only thing she couldn’t find out was what his projects really were. Besides Welles’s Dracula, which wasn’t mentioned by anyone she had talked with, and the long-gestating shows he was working with senior production partners, he had a half dozen other irons in the fire. Directors and stars were attached, budgets set, start dates announced, but no titles ever got mentioned, and the descriptions in the trades-“intense drama,” “romantic comedy”-were hardly helpful. That was interesting and unusual. John Alucard was making a splash, waves radiating outwards, but surely he eventually would have to say what the pictures were. Or had that become the least important part of the package? An agent at CAA told her that for men like Alucard, the art was in the deal not on the screen.
That did worry her.
Could it be that there wasn’t actually a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow? The man was a vampire, but was he also a phantom? No photographs existed, of course. Everyone had a secondhand description, always couched as a casting suggestion: a young Louis Jourdan, a smart Jack Palance, a rough-trade David Niven. It was agreed that the man was European, a long time ago.
No one had any idea how long he had been a vampire, even. He could be a newborn, fresh-killed and risen last year, or a centuried elder who had changed his face a dozen times. His name always drew the same reaction: excitement, enthusiasm, fear. There was a sense that John Alucard was getting things on the road, and that it’d be a smart career move to get close to him, to be ready to haul out of the station with him.
She cruised across sandy tarmac into the trailer park. The seafood restaurant was doing a little New Year’s Day business. She would be thirsty soon.
Someone sat on the stairs of her trailer, leaning back against her door, hands loose in his lap, legs in chinos, cowboy boots.
Someone dead.
Throughout Welles’s career, Dracula remained an idée fixe. The Welles-Mankiewicz script was RKO property, and the studio resisted Welles’s offer to buy it back. They set their asking price at the notional but substantial sum accountants reckoned had been lost on the double debacle of Ambersons and the unfinished South American project, It’s All True.
When Schaefer, Welles’s patron, was removed from his position as Vice-President in Charge of Production and replaced by Charles Koerner, there was serious talk of putting the script into production through producer Val Lewton’s unit, which had established a reputation for low-budget supernatural dramas with Cat People (1942). Lewton got as far as having DeWitt Bodeen and then Curt Siodmak take runs at further drafts, scaling the script down to fit a straitjacket budget.
Jacques Tourneur was attached to direct, though editor Mark Robson was considered when Tourneur was promoted to A pictures. Stock players were assigned supporting roles: Tom Conway (Dr. Seward), Kent Smith (Jonathan Harker), Henry Daniell (Van Helsing), Jean Brooks (Lucy), Alan Napier (Arthur Holmwood), Skelton Knaggs (Renfield), Elizabeth Russell (Count
ess Marya Dolingen), Sir Lancelot (a calypso-singing coachman). Simone Simon, star of Cat People, was set for Mina, very much the focus of Lewton’s take on the story, but the project fell through because RKO were unable to secure their first and only choice of star, Boris Karloff, who was committed to Arsenic and Old Lace on Broadway.
In 1944, RKO sold the Welles-Mankiewicz script, along with a parcel of set designs, to 20th Century-Fox. Studio head Darryl F.
Zanuck offered Welles the role of Dracula, promising Joan Fontaine and Olivia dc Havilland for Mina and Lucy, suggesting Tyrone Power (Jonathan), George Sanders (Arthur), John Carradine (Quincey) and Laird Cregar (Van Helsing). This Dracula would have been a follow-up to Fox’s successful Welles-Fontaine Jane Eyre (1943), and Welles might have committed if Zanuck had again assigned weak-willed Robert Stevenson, allowing Welles to direct in everything but credit. However, on a project this “important,” Zanuck would consider only two directors; John Ford had no interest-sparing us John Wayne, Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond, and John Agar as brawling, boozing, fearless vampire slayers-so it inevitably fell to Henry King, a specialist in molasses-slow historical subjects like Lloyd’s of London (1936) and Brigham Young (1940). King, a plodder who had a brief flash of genius in a few later films with Gregory Peck, had his own, highly developed, chocolate box style and gravitas, and was not a congenial director for Welles, whose mercurial temperament was unsuited to methods he considered conservative and dreary. The film still might have been made, since Welles was as ever in need of money, but Zanuck went cold on Dracula at the end of the war when the Count was moving into his Italian exile.
Fox wound up backing Prince of Foxes (1949), directed by King, with Power and Welles topping the cast, shot on location in Europe. A lavish bore, enlivened briefly by Welles’s committed Cesare Borgia, this suggests what the Zanuck Dracula might have been like. Welles used much of his earnings from the long shoot to pour into film projects made in bits and pieces over several years: the completed Othello (1952), the unfinished Don Quixote (begun 1955) and, rarely mentioned until now, yet another Dracula. El conde Dracula, a French-Italian-Mexican-American-Irish-Liechtensteinian-British-Yugo slav-Moroccan-Iranian coproduction, was shot in snippets, the earliest dating from 1949, the latest from 1972.
Each major part was taken by several actors, or single actors over a span of years. In the controversial edit supervised by the Spaniard Jesus Franco-a second-unit director on Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1966)-and premiered at Cannes in 1997, the cast is as follows: Akim Tamiroff (Van Helsing), Micheál MacLiammóir (Jonathan), Paola Mori (Mina), Michael Redgrave (Arthur), Patty McCormick (Lucy), Hilton Edwards (Dr. Seward), Mischa Auer (Renfield). The vampire brides are played by Jeanne Moreau, Suzanne Cloutier, and Katina Paxinou, shot in different years on different continents. There is no sight of Francisco Reiguera, Welles’s Quixote, cast as a skeletal Dracula, and the Count is present only as a substantial shadow voiced (as are several other characters) by Welles himself. Much of the film runs silent, and a crucial framing story, explaining the multinarrator device, was either never filmed or shot and lost. Jonathan’s panicky exploration of his castle prison, filled with steam like the Turkish bath in Othello, is the most remarkable, purely Expressionist scene Welles ever shot. But the final ascent to Castle Dracula, with Tamiroff dodging patently papier-mâché falling boulders and wobbly zooms into and out of stray details hardly seems the work of anyone other than a fumbling amateur.
In no sense “a real film,” El conde Dracula is a scrapbook of images from the novel and Welles’s imagination. He told Henry Jaglom that he considered the project a private exercise, to keep the subject in his mind, a series of sketches for a painting he would execute later. As Francis Coppola would in 1977, while his multimillion-dollar Dracula was bogged down in production problems in Romania, Welles often made comparisons with the Sistine Chapel. While Coppola invoked Michelangelo with some desperation as the vast machine of his movie seemed to be collapsing around him, Welles always resorted playfully to the metaphor, daring the interviewer with a wave and a wink and a deep chuckle to suggest the Pope probably did turn up every day wanting to know when the great artist would be finished and how much it was going to cost.
In 1973, Welles assembled some El conde Dracula footage,
along with documentary material about the real Count Dracula and the scandals that followed his true death in 1959: the alleged, much-disputed will that deeded much of his vast fortune to English housewife Vivian Nicholson, who claimed she had encountered Dracula while on a school holiday in the early fifties; the autobiography Clifford Irving sold for a record-breaking advance in 1971, only to have the book exposed as an arrant fake written by Irving in collaboration with Fred Saberhagen; the squabbles among sundry vampire elders, notably Baron Meinster and Princess Asa Vajda, as to who should claim the Count’s unofficial title as ruler of their kind. Welles called this playful, essaylike film-constructed around the skeleton of footage shot by Calvin Floyd for his own documentary, In Search of Dracula (1971)-When Are You Going to Finish el conde Dracula?, though it was exhibited in most territories as D Is for Dracula. On the evening Premier Ceausescu withdrew the Romanian Cavalry needed for Coppola’s assault on Castle Dracula in order to pursue the vampire banditti of the Transylvania Movement in the next valley, Francis Ford Coppola held a private screening of D Is for Dracula and cabled Welles that there was a curse on anyone who dared invoke the dread name.
Gates, ibid.
The someone on her steps was truly dead. In his left chest, over his punctured heart, a star-shaped blotch was black in the moonlight.
Geneviève felt no residue. The intangible thing-immortal soul, psychic energy, battery power-which kept mind and body together, in nosferatu or the warm, was gone.
Broken is the golden bowl, the spirit flown forever.
She found she was crying. She touched her cheek and looked at the thick, salt, red tears, then smeared them away on her handkerchief.
It was Moondoggie. In repose, his face looked old, the lines his smile had made appealing turned to slack wrinkles.
She took a moment with him, remembering the taste of the living man, that he was the only one who called her “Gidget,” his inability to put in words what it was about surfing that made him devote his life to it (he’d been in pre-med once, long, long ago-when there was a crack-up or a near-drowning, the doctor he might have been would surface and take over), and the rush of the seas that came with his blood.
That man was gone. Besides sorrow at the waste, she was angry. And afraid.
It was easy to see how it had happened. The killer had come close, face-to-face, and stuck Moondoggie through the heart. The wound was round, not a slit. The weapon was probably a wooden stake or a sharpened metal pole. The angle of the wound was upwards, so the killer was shorter than the rangy surfer. Stuck through, Moondoggie had been carefully propped up on her doorstep. She was being sent a message.
Moondoggie was a warm man, but he’d been killed as if he were like her, a vampire.
He was not cold yet. The killing was recent.
Geneviève turned in a half circle, looking out across the beach. Like most vampires, she had above average night vision for a human being-without sun glare bleaching everything bone white, she saw better than by day-but no hawklike power of distinguishing far-off tiny objects or magical X-ray eyesight.
It was likely that the assassin was nearby, watching to see that the message was received.
Counting on the popular belief that vampires did have unnatural eyesight, she moved slowly enough that anyone in concealment might think she was looking directly at them, that they had been seen.
A movement.
The trick worked. A couple of hundred yards off, beyond the trailer park, out on the beach, something-someone-moved, clambering upright from a hollow depression in the dry sand.
As the probable murderer stood, Geneviève saw a blonde ponytail whipping. It was a girl, mid-to-late teens, in halter top
and denim shorts, with a wispy gauze neck scarf, and-suggestive detail-running shoes and knee pads. She was undersized but athletic. Another girl midget: no wonder she’d been able to get close enough to Moondoggie, genial connoisseur of young bodies, to stab him in the heart.
She assumed the girl would bolt. Geneviève was fast enough to run her down, but the killer ought to panic. In California, what people knew about vampires was scrambled with fantasy and science fiction.
For once, Geneviève was tempted to live up to her image. She wanted to rip out the silly girl’s throat.
(and drink)
She took a few long steps, flashing forwards across the beach.
The girl stood her ground, waiting.
Geneviève had pause. The stake wasn’t in the dead man’s chest. The girl still had it. Her right hand was out of sight, behind her back.
Closer, she saw the killer’s face in the moonlight. Doll-pretty, with an upturned nose and the faintest fading traces of freckles. She was frowning with concentration now but probably had a winning smile, perfect teeth. She should be a cheerleader, not an assassin.
This wasn’t a vampire, but Geneviève knew she was no warm cream puff, either. She had killed a strong man twice her weight with a single thrust, and was prepared for a charging nosferatu.
Geneviève stood still, twenty yards from the girl.
The killer produced her stake. It was stained.
“Meet Simon Sharp,” she said. She had a clear, casual voice. Geneviève found her flippancy terrifying.
“You killed a man,” Geneviève said, trying to get through to her, past the madness.
“Not a man. One of you, undead vermin.”
“He was alive.”
“You’d snacked on him, Frenchie. He would have turned.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“That’s not what I hear, not what I know.”
