Only the Dead Know Burbank

by Bradford Tatum

  The Trout’s twenty-four hours came and passed and no pages were produced. Just shrieks and frustrated shouts from behind the plywood door of our little garret. Herr Zann just smiled, somehow imbued by the Trout’s pangs of labor. Perhaps he saw them as the only true emotion in the place. He was one of those men whose proximity to greatness made him immune to its sting and he was willing to wait for whatever creature burst forth from that sealed little room. Mutter grew restless and once, when a light was called for, he lifted the enormous apparatus and placed it as casually as a dinner plate. After that little exhibition his services were much in demand and he tried to recruit me in his labors.

  But my only interest were the cameras. I would spend hours just looking at them. So pure, so simple, so economical in their design and function. Yet inside them seethed endless horizons that could never fill the temptations of ten thousand Pandoras. The operator was a large man whose bones had been reduced to rumor from the slurry of flesh that rounded his angles. He was immensely fond of fried potatoes and I made it my singular mission to keep him supplied with hot salted platefuls just to be near him. In his tight-fitting coat he looked more like a butcher than a technical professional, but it was clear after a single day watching him work that if a picture was to have any stylistic pulse, it would be entirely due to his efforts. After a week of grinning at my mooning face he finally took pity on me and let me follow him to the stock room. It was as quiet as a witch’s circle in there, the air sour-smelling with chemicals. And in the bloodred dark, like a fat druid with his sacrificial scythe, I watched him carefully open the camera.

  “The stock is male when it goes in,” he said. “Fickle and shallow, nothing on his mind. Then it is threaded through the gate here and light touches it for the first time. The image is burned and in that moment a marvelous thing happens. The film becomes female, enthralled, stained with secrets that she will only whisper in the dark. It is a marital occasion, this transformation. So we must dress.”

  Here he stuffed his stubby fingers into white gloves and chuckled at my wide eyes and said, “We must handle her like a lady in love now, gently.”

  I watched his thick wrists slowly extract the reel and tape the tail down, writing a few numbers or key words on the tape, then tucking it away among the other exposed reels before reaching for a fresh roll. “The threading of the film is the most important part,” he said. “You screw this up, my little cabbage, a whole day can be lost. You must know the path of the film through these sprockets like you know the way home.” Then he doused the red light and we were just two creatures in the dark, one breathing, the other as silent as the countryside, the snaking crackle of the celluloid the only other sound with us.

  THE DAYS PASSED WITH STILL NO BUTTER CHURNED IN THE TROUT’S milky brain. Mutter moved on to location, but I wanted to learn more and so was left to fumble my bridal ceremonies in the dark. I was given dead leader, lengths of film with no emulsion, with which to practice. I wrestled with endless strands of the stuff for days, mangling most of it in the process. My small fingers were pinched in the cogs, torn in the teeth of the sharp gears. But I had no blood that could foul the sensitive mechanism. From my cuts drifted only an odd pink dust I could clear with a breath before I started again. When the studio slept, I kept at it. I pictured the sprockets as turnings in a coiled river, my hands blind captains that never longed for land. Over and over. Until the snags were smoothed, the path cleared. I was finally allowed to remove and catalog the exposed film. I would watch the footage meter turn over slowly, my anticipation growing as if arriving at some wonderful destination. The numbers finally settled to their maximum count and I would snatch the camera from its stand and plunge into the dark. I became good at this, better than the cameramen themselves. I could have the film out, looped and labeled, and a fresh roll taut in the cogs and back out on the floor before the director could even miss me. Then one day, instead of leading me to the dark, I was shown to a ceramic bowl filled with a dozen broken eggs.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Rhythm,” the cameraman said, handing me a wire eggbeater. “The eggs are for resistance. Start whipping and feel the count, three to the second. One whisk for each second.”

  He looked down at a small stopwatch. I heard it click. “Begin.”

  I dipped the beater into the eggs and began my rotations, counting under my breath. The whites began to froth, splattering onto the wooden platform.

  “Stop,” the cameraman said. “Again. Three, child. No more. No less.” I heard the click of the watch. “Begin.”

  “But what for? Why am I doing this?” I asked.

  “You are wasting time,” he said looking at his watch.

  “But why,” I asked, wondering if my loading had been somehow unsatisfactory.

  “Because your big uncle Karl is going to be directing pictures soon and you are the only one I trust to run the camera.” He winked at me, curling my fingers around the whisk in my small hand. “I used to run the camera for Lang. Now look at him. He’s all set to go to Hollywood.” Was that the first time I had ever heard that word? “But first you need to build up your wrist, lock the rhythm in the bones there.”

  That was all I needed to know. I spent my nights with a running stopwatch pressed to my ear until I thought my brain was powered by a mainspring. I don’t know how many eggs were sacrificed in the service of my proficiency. I whipped through what seemed like a hundred dozen of them each day, and when the basin was finally full of wintery meringue, shooting stopped and the cook made everyone omelets the size and consistency of cumulus clouds. Only after weeks of this, when Zann finally complained about the excess of our dairy bill, did the cameraman ask if I would like to try the real thing. He reached for my hand and held it there in his.

  “Your hands are cold. You feeling well?” he asked.

  I nodded, and he turned my hand over in his, looking for swelling, a sign of stress. Finding none, he smiled as if down at a lucky penny, and said, “You got filmmaking wrists, my dear.” He took my stool and dragged it over to the camera. “You don’t worry about a thing but the count, okay? Three turns in one second exposes sixteen frames. Sixteen frames are one second of film. We build the image by the second, so keep the count steady like you did before. But be easy with the rotations, let the spool do the work, the counterweight will take care of the upstroke. Just keep the count nice and steady. Try it.”

  The brass handle was warm where he had been holding it and I felt the warmth drift into the curl of my fingers, the coolness on my own finally eclipsing it. I turned the crank slowly and the machine shivered awake. This was a whole new world. Nothing dull and domestic in these turnings like with the eggs. This creature of brass and wood came to life under my volition. It whirred and crackled, and it wasn’t hard for me to surrender cause to the machine, to let the life that churned in that narrow box bleed into me. This was the real osmosis of the enterprise. It lived. It turned me.

  The director spoke Begin and the actors jerked to life and I felt that leap in my nerves, what cables must feel in the duty of carrying current. I was that fine, finished cog in the god of clocks, weighing all moments equally, parceling out to each a single second, even turns regardless of the truth conveyed or the artifice indulged before me. I was judgeless and served only the steady round sweep of the big hand. I pressed my cheek to the lacquered wood and swore I felt heat there, perhaps friction but something more, a metabolic blush from such steady feeding of this repetitive diet of frozen stills, the lie of motion. How like me, I thought. By the mere accumulation of dead things it provided the perception of something living. How could one say we were not kindred?

  I turned that little crank over a hundred features, sometimes blazing through one whole scenario in a single day. I watched the cameraman work, his lips and fingers greasy from his buckets of fried potatoes, spitting out positions and righting light beams, tinkering out there in his own cosmos that was hung with only three stars. One key light and two fi
lls. All he needed to illuminate entire little three-walled worlds. There was no formal instruction; we worked too quickly for that. All was taught by example. “Light always throws at a slant,” he might say to a gaffer. Or “Curb that spill over there, keep half that face in shadow.” It was the lighting of the old masters he was after. A crisp transformational singularity cutting through the dark and illuminating the martyred saints, the tortured faces of Ribera and Caravaggio. Those who toss the look of these films to the abstract expressionists miss their history. I pored over too many fine art monographs to gleefully hand over our textured shadows to the block printers of Die Brücke. It is only the light, after all, that has survived.

  CHAPTER 11

  I took everything in. I watched shoulders and fingers and mouths and eyes, saw how light was a chisel against the fumed oak of shadows. And how shadows could be shaped into jagged corrals that could hide what the studio couldn’t afford to light. Mutter became especially adept at this. With his great strength, he had the luxury of anticipating contours. With the massive burning arcs perched like parasols on his shoulders, he could place the lights as easily as brush to canvas.

  Then one morning came forth the Trout, calf-fragile and quaking, the tails of his great mustache limp as raw strudel. In his fist, like Medea’s slaughtered brats, he clutched the bruised pages of his scenario. He was the pulp of Jacob after the corrections of the angel.

  “Get me Zann; he must hear this!”

  A dramatic pause. And when Zann arrived, his breakfast napkin still tucked into the collar of his starched shirt, the Trout did not even wait for him to sit before he began.

  “We begin in a graveyard.”

  My God, how many times would those words be spoken by second-rate screenwriters in need of beer money in the decades to come? But in those days, on that day, it was something new. Zann’s attention was polite. The Trout had commandeered a battered phonograph used to infuse emotions in the actors when the scripts called for actual feeling. And upon the lopsided turntable he placed a disk of the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem.

  “A bell tolls over a humble pit,” he began, “in pace requiescat mumbled by a lean priest . . .”

  I’ll spare you the rest of the overheated pablum that warbled out of his gullet that day. It was little more than a dusky wash over our previous and already dim scenario with a few worn highlights cobbled from the Brothers Grimm. A mother dies, leaving her toymaker husband and daughter to fend for themselves.

  Instead of moving to the city and getting on with their lives, the father becomes paranoid, obsessed with his daughter’s mortality to the point of constructing a huge mechanical man whose one purpose is to defend the daughter from death. The father’s will is strong but his craft isn’t quite up to the task. Desperate, he snares the dark charms of an old crone, promising her anything if she’ll just get his oversize toy off the worktable. She agrees. For a time the daughter and the big mechanical lug seem the best of friends. Then the crone’s vengeful intentions become clear. In some corny rose-tinted flashback we see the crone as a young woman, jilted by the toymaker as he frolics in the chamomile with the girl who will one day become his dead wife. Crone blows (literally) some pretty persuasive smoke into the windup man’s face and gets him to try to kill the daughter. The toymaker, conveniently lingering by a window, rushes in in time to somehow push the crone into the creature’s path. Crone gets throttled and father and daughter hug in a slow iris into blackout. Now, all the time the Trout was gesticulating to the back row, my head was exploding. I saw monochrome eyes electric in hatred. Needles purling through hanks of dead flesh. Murder and madness all in corpse white and funereal black. The clockwork creature held some especially horrific possibilities. And in the stunned if polite silence that followed the Trout’s frothy performance, something welled up in me, something tarry and intoxicating, an overwhelming desire to hurt, to make the frail and modestly clothed bodies in that room squirm.

  “That’s just a basic template,” I blurted. The Trout looked stricken. “The real horror is in the execution.”

  Zann cleared his throat, shooting a slightly apologetic look to the Trout before looking back at me. “Go on,” he said. The Trout huffed distractedly.

  “The creature, for instance,” I said duskily. “What does he look like?”

  “I was thinking something oddly grand,” the Trout interjected quickly. “Something like the mid-Renaissance automatons of Braccelli’s 1624 folio etchings from Bizzarie.”

  “Bullshit,” I spat. The word was like a knife in the air. But I could not stop myself. “Flesh. The crone should claim the creature by covering it in a dead man’s flesh. We could see it grow over the gears before our eyes. ”

  “That’s disgusting.” The Trout chuckled.

  “It’ll save a fortune not having to build a goddamned working doll,” I said, staring at Zann. “Mutter here could play it.”

  Zann said nothing, merely raised a single eyebrow.

  “And the crone,” I went on. “The crone manipulates the creature but not with some stagy smoke pot.”

  “How then?” Zann asked, his interest building.

  “When I was still learning to load film, I left a reel in the box and we accidentally shot over it. I realized you can expose film more than once. That you can create ghosts on demand, if you establish the proper parameters. I was thinking something like that for the crone. Her murderous eyes over the creature’s innocent ones. Her jealous hands bleeding through hands that hold the daughter’s throat.”

  “It will be all but unwatchable!” the Trout spat.

  “Interesting,” Zann said, nodding. “How would you get the flesh to grow? Over the . . . doll, I mean.”

  “Single-frame exposure,” I said, not quite understanding the concept myself. “We build the illusion of movement one frame at a time, Herr Zann. It is quite possible.” I had no idea how this insight had come to me. It simply bubbled out with a passion I did not recognize as my own.

  Zann nodded again. I felt something retreat in me then, a gentle slithering away into darkness that left me feeling weaker but still somehow triumphant.

  “You’re not seriously entertaining implementing these degenerate parlor tricks,” the Trout scoffed. Zann would not even look at him. “What about the great themes?”

  “Great themes don’t sell tickets. Not without encouragement. The medium must move forward,” Zann said, rising. “And collaboration, when carefully measured, is the most motive creative force I know. Don’t you agree, Herr Trout?”

  CHAPTER 12

  We began production on our nameless project in a warm month of 1919. The Trout was reticent behind the scene. The camera to him was a cheap interloper, an agent of reduction that must be appeased like some alehouse tart. But he was under contract to write and direct, and so he listlessly rose to the task. He had been soured by the theater, and framed every shot long and wide, floating in the embrace of the proscenium. When I suggested different focal lengths or actually moving the camera, he would shriek like an anti-vivisectionist.

  “Cut off legs? Cut off heads? Who could stomach the sight of such aberrations?”

  I knew the camera could be more than a passive observer, but I needed more informed instruction.

  I did not have to wait long.

  My body in its new state did not need sleep. My consciousness was always available to me, like a pistol on a night table. And while the others slept, I made a habit of roaming the empty stages even when I had no tasks to rehearse. Death is round, like a mother’s arms, with a breast that can nourish with a flow of dust. And at that breast one night was Volker. I know now he had been with me in whispers from almost the first mention of a contract at UFA. But then, that night, his presence became as real and terrible as any waking encounter. He stood in a pool of light from some far source, impeccable, the seams of his trousers straight and hard, and in his eye sockets were mouths. Straight white teeth where the lashes once grew. He bowed. I felt the ant
icipation of an embrace. He was not here to hurt. But he was no longer content to merely insinuate. He opened his mouths, the practical and the others. Earth poured from them, in thick fecal dowels, forcing his lips and lids into strained O’s. The soil coiled about his shoes, speckled with worm casings and leaf rot. The effluvium of the grave.

  See this earth, I heard him say in my mind. It is what is left of men. It is clay. And all stories are made of such clay. What is your story about?

  “I want to know how I should shoot it.”

  How can you shoot what you don’t understand? What is your story about?

  “A mother dies.”

  Mothers die every day. What is your story about?

  “Fear?” I said.

  And?

  “Loss?”

  And?

  “Anger?”

  Yes. Anger. Revenge.

  “Hopelessness.”

  Precisely.

  “Monstrosities.”

  Yes, but not the monster. The monster is innocent. The anger is not. You must show this.

  “How?”

  See first. Then show.

  “But how?”

  Like this.

  And the artist’s wife, decayed, fouled in death, stood before me. Dirt in the pits of her teeth, eyes eaten in a brickwork of maggots. I flinched. Volker smiled.

  Yes. Make them feel it. Make it unsafe. Push the camera to the rim of the grave, then see the staring eyes inside the box. Go back to the rim of the grave and see the grief playing out there. They will see the tears of the living but still think of the mother in the box. The audience is swine, my girl. Push their snouts into the shit. Make them feel it.