by Kim Newman
As a boy, the mage-Kenneth Anger to mortals of this plane-had appeared as the Prince in the 1935 Max Reinhardt film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In later life, he had become a filmmaker, but for himself not the studios (his “underground” trilogy consisted of Scorpio Rising, Lucifer Rising and Dracula Rising), and achieved a certain notoriety for compiling Hollywood Babylon, a collection of scurrilous but not necessarily true stories about the seamy private lives of the glamour gods and goddesses of the screen. A disciple of Aleister Crowley and Adrian Marcato, he was a genuine movie magician.
He was working on a sequel to Hollywood Babylon, which had been forthcoming for some years.
It was called Transylvania Babylon, and contained all the gossip, scandal, and lurid factoid speculation that had ever circulated about the elder members of the vampire community. Nine months ago, the manuscript and all his research material had been stolen by a couple of acid-heads in the employ of a pair of New Orleans-based vampire elders who were the focus of several fascinating, enlightening, and perversely amusing chapters. Geneviève had recovered the materials, though the book was still not published, as Anger had to negotiate his way through a maze of injunctions and magical threats before he could get the thing in print.
She hesitated on the steps that led down to his slightly sunken sanctum. Incense burned before the framed pictures, swirling up to the low stucco ceiling.
“Do you have to be invited?” he asked. “Enter freely, spirit of dark.”
“I was just being polite,” she admitted.
The mage was a little disappointed. He arranged himself on a pile of harem cushions and indicated a patch of Turkish carpet where she might sit.
There was a very old bloodstain on the weave.
“Don’t mind that,” he said. “It’s from a thirteen-year-old movie extra deflowered by Charlie Chaplin at the very height of the Roaring Twenties.”
She decided not to tell him it wasn’t hymenal blood (though it was human).
“I have cast spells of protection, as a precaution. It was respectful of you to warn me this interview might have consequences.”
Over the centuries, Geneviève had grown out of thinking of herself as a supernatural creature, and was always a little surprised to run into people who still saw her that way. It wasn’t that they might not be right, it was just unusual and unfashionable. The world had monsters, but she still didn’t know if there was magic.
“One man who helped me says his career has been ruined because of it,” she said, the wound still fresh. “Another, who was just my friend, died.”
“My career is beyond ruination,” said the mage. “And death means nothing. As you know, it’s a passing thing. The lead-up, however, can be highly unpleasant, I understand. I think I’d opt to skip that experience, if at all possible.”
She didn’t blame him.
“I’ve seen some of your films and looked at your writings,” she said. “It seems to me that you believe motion pictures are rituals.”
“Well put. Yes, all real films are invocations, summonings. Most are made by people who don’t realise that. But I do. When I call a film Invocation of My Demon Brother, I mean it exactly as it sounds. It’s not enough to plop a camera in front of a ceremony. Then you only get religious television, God help you. It’s in the lighting, the cutting, the music. Reality must be banished, channels opened to the beyond. At screenings, there are always manifestations. Audiences might not realise on a conscious level what is happening, but they always know. Always. The amount of ectoplasm poured into the auditorium by drag queens alone at a West Hollywood revival of a Joan Crawford picture would be enough to embody a minor djinni in the shape of the Bitch Queen, with a turban and razor cheekbones and shoulder pads out to here.”
She found the image appealing, but also frightening.
“If you were to make a dozen films about, say, the devil, would the Prince of Darkness appear?”
The mage was amused. “What an improbable notion! But it has some substance. If you made twelve ordinary films about the devil, he might seem more real to people, become more of a figure in the culture, get talked about and put on magazine covers. But let’s face it, the same thing happens if you make one ordinary film about a shark. It’s the thirteenth film that makes the difference, that might work the trick.”
“That would be your film? The one made by a director who understands the ritual?”
“Sadly, no. A great tragedy of magic is that the most effective must be worked without conscious thought, without intent. To become a master mage, you must pass beyond the mathematics and become a dreamer. My film, of the devil you say, would be but a tentative summoning, attracting the notice of a spirit of the beyond. Fully to call His Satanic Majesty to Earth would require a work of surpassing genius, mounted by a director with no other intention but to make a wonderful illusion, a von Steinberg or a Frank Borzage. That thirteenth film, a Shanghai Gesture or a History Is Made at Night, would be the perfect ritual. And its goaty hero could leave his cloven hoofprint in the cement outside Grauman’s Chinese.”
In January 1981, Welles began filming The Other Side of
Midnight on the old Miracle Pictures lot, his first studio-shot-though independently financed-picture since Touch of Evil in 1958, and his first “right of final cut” contract since Citizen Kane, The ins and outs of the deal have been assessed in entire books by Peter Bart and David J.
Skal, but it seems that Welles, after a career of searching, had found a genuine “angel,” a backer with the financial muscle to give him the budget and crew he needed to make a film that was truly his vision but also the self-effacing trust to let him have total artistic control of the result.
There were nay-saying voices and the industry was already beginning to wonder whether still in-progress auteur movies like Michael Cimino’s The Lincoln County Wars or Coppola’s Dracula follow-up One front the Heart were such a great idea, but Welles himself denounced those runaways as examples of fuzzy thinking. As with his very first Dracula movie script and Kane, The Other Side of Midnight was meticulously preplanned and precosted. Forty years on from Kane, Welles must have known this would be his last serious chance. A boy wonder no longer, the pressure was on him to produce a
“mature masterpiece,” a career book-end to the work that had topped so many Best of All Time lists and eclipsed all his other achievements. He must certainly have been aware of the legion of cineastes whose expectations of a film that would eclipse the flashy brilliance of the Coppola version were sky-rocketing. It may be that so many of Welles’s other projects were left unfinished deliberately, because their creator knew they could never compete with the imagined masterpieces that were expected of him. With Midnight, he had to show all his cards and take the consequences.
The Other Side of Midnight occupied an unprecedented three adjacent soundstages, where Ken Adam’s sets for Bistritz and Borgo Pass and the exteriors and interiors of Castle Dracula were constructed.
John Huston shaved his beard and let his moustache sprout, preparing for the acting role of his career, cast apparently because Welles admired his predator-patriarch Noah Cross (Chinatown, 1974). It has been rumoured that the seventy-four-year-old Huston went so far as to have transfusions of vampire blood and took to hunting the Hollywood night with packs of newborn vampire brats, piqued because he couldn’t display trophies of his “kills.” Other casting was announced, a canny mix of A-list stars who would have worked for scale just to be in a Welles film, long-time associates who couldn’t bear to be left out of the adventure and fresh talent. Besides Welles (Van Helsing), the film would star Jack Nicholson (Jonathan Harker), Richard Gere (Arthur Holmwood), Shelley Duvall (Mina), Susan Sarandon (Lucy), Cameron Mitchell (Renfield), Dennis Hopper (Quincey), Jason Robards (Dr.
Seward), Joseph Cotten (Mr. Hawkins), George Couloris (Mr. Swales) and Jeanne Moreau (Peasant Woman). The three vampire brides were Anjelica Huston, Marie-France Pisier and then-unknown Kathleen Turner. John William
s was writing the score, Gary Graver remained Welles’s preferred cinematographer, Rick Baker promised astounding and innovative special make-up effects and George Lucas’s ILM
contracted for the optical effects.
There were other vampire movies in pre-production, other
Dracula movies, but Hollywood was really only interested in the Welles version.
Finally, it would happen.
Gates, ibid.
Geneviève parked the Plymouth near Bronson Caverns, in sight of the Hollywood sign, and looked out over Los Angeles, transformed by distance into a carpet of Christmas lights. MGM used to boast “more stars than there were in the heavens,” and there they were, twinkling individually, a fallen constellation. Car lights on the freeways were like glowing platelets flowing through neon veins.
From up here, you couldn’t see the hookers on Hollywood Boulevard, the endless limbo motels and real estate developments, the lost, lonely, and desperate. You couldn’t hear the laugh track, or the screams.
It came down to magic. And whether she believed in it.
Clearly, Kenneth Anger did. He had devoted his life to rituals. A great many of them, she had to admit, had worked. And so did John Alucard and Ernest Gorse, vampires who thought themselves magical beings. Dracula had been another of the breed, thanking Satan for eternal nightlife.
She just didn’t know.
Maybe she was still undecided because she had never slipped into the blackness of death. Kate Reed, her Victorian friend, had done the proper thing. Kate’s father-in-darkness, Harris, had drunk her blood and given of his own, then let her die and come back, turned. Chandagnac, Geneviève’s mediaeval father-in-darkness, had worked on her for months. She had transformed slowly, coming alive by night, shaking off the warm girt she had been.
In the last century, since Dracula came out of his castle, there had been a lot of work done on the subject. It was no longer possible to disbelieve in vampires, even in a country like the United States which was still comparatively free of them. With the nosferatu in the open, vampirism had to be incorporated into the prevalent belief systems, and this was a scientific age. These days, everyone generally accepted the “explanation” that the condition was a blood-borne mutation, an evolutionary quirk adapting a strain of humankind for survival. But, as geneticists probed ever further, mysteries deepened: vampires retained the DNA pattern they were born with as warm humans, and yet they were different creatures. And, despite a lot of cracked theorising, no one had ever convincingly adjusted the laws of optics to account for the business with mirrors.
If there were vampires, there could be magic.
And Alucard’s ritual-the mage’s thirteen movies-might work. He could come back, worse than ever.
Dracula.
She looked up from the city lights to the stars.
Was the Count out there, on some intangible plane, waiting to be summoned? Reinvigorated by a spell in the beyond, thirsting for blood, vengeance, power? What might he have learned in hell, that he could bring to the Earth?
She hated to think.
She drove through the studio gates shortly before dawn, waved on by the uniformed guard. She was accepted as a part of Orson’s army, somehow granted an invisible armband by her association with the genius.
The Miracle Pictures lot was alive again. “If it’s a good picture, it’s a Miracle!” had run the self-mocking, double-edged slogan, all the more apt as the so-called fifth-wheel major declined from mounting Technicolor spectacles like the 1939 version of The Duelling Cavalier, with Errol Flynn and Fedora, to financing drive-in dodos like Machete Maidens of Mora Tau, with nobody and her uncle.
In recent years, the fifty-year-old soundstages had mostly gone unused as Miracle shot their product in the Philippines or Canada. The standing sets-seen in so many vintage movies-had been torn down to make way for bland office buildings where scripts were “developed” rather than shot. There wasn’t even a studio tour.
Now it was different.
Orson Welles was in power, and legions swarmed at his command, occupying every department, beavering away in the service of his vision. They were everywhere: gaffers, extras, carpenters, managers, accountants, makeup men, effects technicians, grips, key grips, boys, best boys, designers, draughtsmen, teamsters, caterers, guards, advisors, actors, writers, planners, plotters, doers, movers, shakers.
Once Welles had said this was the best train set a boy could have. It was very different from three naked girls in an empty swimming pool.
She found herself on Stage 1, the Transylvanian village set. Faces she recognised were on the crew: Jack Nicholson, tearing through his lines with exaggerated expressions; Oja Kodar, handing down decisions from above; Debbie W. Griffith (in another life, she presumed), behind the craft services table; Dennis Hopper, in a cowboy hat and sunglasses.
The stage was crowded with onlookers. Among the movie critics and TV reporters were other directors-she spotted Spielberg, DePalma, and a shifty Coppola-intent on kibbitzing on the master, demonstrating support for the abused genius or suppressing poisonous envy. Burt Reynolds, Gene Hackman, and Jane Fonda were dressed up as villagers, rendered unrecognisable by makeup, so desperate to be in this movie that they were willing to be unbilled extras.
Somewhere up there, in a platform under the roof, sat the big baby. The visionary who would give birth to his Dracula. The unwitting magician who might, this time, conjure more than even he had bargained for.
She scanned the rafters, a hundred feet or more above the studio floor. Riggers crawled like pirates among the lights. Someone abseiled down into the village square.
She was sorry Martin wasn’t here. This was his dream.
A dangerous dream.
The Other Side of Midnight
A Script by Orson Welles
Based on DRACULA, by Bram Stoker
Revised final, January 6,1981
1: An ominous chord introduces an extreme CU of a crucifix, held in a knotted fist. It is sunset, we hear sounds of village life. We see only the midsection of the village woman holding the crucifix. She pulls tight the rosary-like string from which the cross hangs, like a strangling chord. A scream is heard off camera, coming from some distance. The woman whirls around abruptly to the left, in the direction of the sound.
Almost at once the camera pans in this direction, too, and we follow a line of peasant children, strung out hand in hand and dancing, towards the inn, of the Transylvanian Village of Bistritz. We close on a leaded window and pass through-the set opening up to let in the camera-to find Jonathan Harker, a young Englishman with a tigerish smile, in the centre of a tableau Breughel interior, surrounded by peasant activity, children, animals, etc. He is framed by dangling bulbs of garlic, and the village woman’s crucifix is echoed by one that hangs on the wall.
Everyone, including the animals, is frozen, shocked. The scream is still echoing from the low wooden beams.
harker: What did I say?
The innkeeper crosses himself. The peasants mutter.
harker: Was it the place? Was it [relishing each syllable] Castle Dra-cu-la?
More muttering and crossing, harker shrugs and continues with his meal. Without a cut, the camera pans around the cramped interior, to find mina, harker’s new wife, in the doorway. She is huge-eyed and tremulous, more impressed by “native superstitions” than her husband, but with an inner steel core which will become apparent as Jonathan’s outward bluff crumbles under assaults. Zither and fiddle music conveys the bustle of this border community.
mina: Jonathan dear, come on. The coach.
Jonathan flashes a smile, showing teeth that wouldn’t shame a vampire, mina doesn’t see the beginnings of his viperish second face, but smiles indulgently, hesitant Jonathan pushes away his plate and stands, displacing children and animals. He joins mina and they leave, followed by our snakelike camera, which almost jostles them as they emerge into the twilight Some of the crowd hold aloft flaming torches, which make shadow-featured flick
ering masks of the worn peasant faces. Jonathan, hefting a heavy bag, and mina, fluttering at every distraction, walk across the village square to a waiting coach. Standing in their path, a crow-black figure centre-frame, is the village woman, eyes wet with fear, crucifix shining. She bars the harkers’ way, like the Ancient Mariner, and extends the crucifix.
village woman: If you must go, wear this. Wear it for your mother’s sake. It will protect you.
Jonathan bristles, but mina defuses the situation by taking the cross.
mina: Thank you. Thank you very much.
The woman crosses herself, kisses mina’s cheek, and departs.
Jonathan gives an eyebrows-raised grimace, and Mina shrugs, placatory.
coachman: All aboard for Borgo Pass, Visaria, and Klausenburg.
We get into the coach with the harkers, who displace a fat merchant and his “secretary” zita, and the camera gets comfortable opposite them.
They exchange looks, and mina holds Jonathan’s hand. The coach lurches and moves off-it is vital that the camera remain fixed on the harkers to cover the progress from one soundstage to the next, with the illusion of travel maintained by the projection of reflected Transylvanian mountain road scenery onto the window. We have time to notice that the merchant and zita are wary of the harkers; he is middle-aged and balding, and she is a flashy blonde. The coach stops.
coachman (v.o.): Borgo Pass.
Jonathan: Mina, here’s our stop.
merchant: Here?
