A Graveyard for Lunatics

  It was down an alley of such buildings, sounds, and musics that I ran now, pursued by nothing, gazing up, as Hitler raved from the east, and a Russian army sang across the soft high night winds west.

  I jolted to a stop and stared up at … Maggie Botwin’s editing room. The door stood wide.

  I yelled. “Maggie!”

  Silence.

  I moved up the stairs toward the flickering firefly light and the stuttering chatter of the Moviola as the shadows blinked on her high ceiling.

  I stood for a long moment in the night, gazing in at the one place in all this world where life was sliced, assembled, then torn apart again. Where you kept doing life over until you got it right. Peering down at the small Moviola screen, you turn on the out-board motor and speed along with a fierce clacking clap as the film slots through, freezes, delineates, and rushes on. After staring into the Moviola for half a day, in a subterranean gloom, you almost believe that when you step outside life itself will reassemble, give up its moron inconsistencies, and promise to behave. Running a Moviola for a few hours encourages optimism, for you can rerun your stupidities and cut off their legs. But the temptation, after a time, is to never step out in daylight again.

  And now at Maggie Botwin’s door, with the night behind me and her cool cave waiting, I watched this amazing woman bent to her machine like a seamstress sewing patchwork lights and shades while the film sluiced through her thin fingers.

  I scratched at her screen door.

  Maggie glanced up from her bright wishing well, scowled, trying to see through the mesh, then gave a glad cry.

  “I’ll be damned! This is the first time in forty years a writer ever showed up here. You’d think the damn fools would be curious about how I cut their hair or shorten their inseams. Wait!”

  She unlocked the screen and pulled me in. Like a sleepwalker I stepped to the Moviola and blinked down.

  Maggie tested me. “Remember him?”

  “Erich Von Stroheim,” I gasped. “The film made here in ’21. Lost.”

  “I found it!”

  “Does the studio know?”

  “Those s.o.b.s? No! Never appreciated what they had!”

  “You got the whole film?”

  “Yep! The Museum of Modern Art gets it when I drop dead. Look!”

  Maggie Botwin touched a projector fixed to her Moviola so it threw images on the wall. Von Stroheim strutted and weathercocked along the wainscot.

  Maggie cut Von Stroheim and made ready to put on another reel.

  As she moved, I suddenly leaned forward. I saw a small bright green film can, different from the rest, lying on the counter amongst two dozen other cans.

  There was no printed label, only an ink-stick drawing on the front of a very small dinosaur.

  Maggie caught my look. “What?”

  “How long have you had that film?”

  “You want it? That’s the test your pal Roy dropped by three days ago for developing.”

  “Did you look at it?”

  “Haven’t you? The studio’s nuts to fire him. What was the story on that? Nobody’s said. Only thirty seconds in that can. But it’s the best half minute I’ve ever seen. Tops Dracula or Frankenstein. But, hell, what do I know?”

  My pulse beat, rattling the film can as I shoved it in my coat pocket.

  “Sweet man, that Roy.” Maggie threaded new film into her Moviola. “Give me a brush, I’d shine his shoes. Now. Want to see the only existing intact copy of Broken Blossoms? The missing outtakes on The Circus? The censored reel from Harold Lloyd’s Welcome Danger? Hell, there’s lots more. I—”

  Maggie Botwin stopped, drunk on her cinema past and my full attention.

  “Yeah, I think you can be trusted.” And she stopped. “Here I am, rattling on. You didn’t come here to listen to an old hen lay forty-year-old eggs. How come you’re the only writer ever came up those stairs?”

  Arbuthnot, Clarence, Roy, and the Beast, I thought, but could not say.

  “Cat got your tongue? I’ll wait. Where was I? Oh!”

  Maggie Botwin slid back a huge cupboard door. There were at least forty cans of film stashed in five shelves, with titles painted on the rims.

  She shoved one tin into my hands. I looked at some huge lettering, which read: Crazy Youths.

  “No, look at the small print typed on the tiny label on the flat side,” said Maggie.

  “Intolerance!”

  “My own, uncut version,” Maggie Botwin said, laughing. “I helped Griffith. Some great stuff was cut. Alone, I printed back what was missing. This is the only complete version of Intolerance extant! And here!”

  Chortling like a girl at a birthday party, Maggie yanked down and laid out: Orphans of the Storm and London After Midnight.

  “I assisted on these films, or was called for pickup work. Late nights I printed the outtakes just for me! Ready? Here!”

  She thrust a tin marked Greed into my hands.

  “Even Von Stroheim doesn’t own this twenty-hour version!”

  “Why didn’t other editors think to do this?”

  “Because they’re chickens and I’m cuckoo,” crowed Maggie Botwin. “Next year, I’ll ship these out to the museum, with a letter deeding them over. The studios will sue, sure. But the films will be safe forty years from now.”

  I sat in the dark and was stunned as reel after reel shuttled by.

  “God,” I kept saying, “how did you outwit all the sons of bitches?”

  “Easy!” said Maggie, with the crisp honesty that was like a general leveling with his troops. “They screwed directors, writers, everyone. But they had to have one person with a pooper-scooper to clean up after they lifted their legs on prime stuff. So they never laid a glove on me while they junked everyone’s dreams. They just thought love was enough. And, God, they did love. Mayer, the Warners, Goldfish/Goldwyn ate and slept film. It wasn’t enough. I reasoned with them; argued, fought, slammed the door. They ran after, knowing I loved more than they could. I lost as many fights as I won, so I decided I’d win ’em all. One by one, I saved the lost scenes. Not everything. Most pictures should get catbox awards. But five or six times a year, a writer would write or a Lubitsch add his ‘touch,’ and I’d hide that. So, over the years I—”

  “Saved masterpieces!”

  Maggie laughed. “Cut the hyperbole. Just decent films, some funny, some tear jerkers. And they’re all here tonight. You’re surrounded by them,” Maggie said, quietly.

  I let their presence soak in, felt their “ghosts” and swallowed hard.

  “Run the Moviola,” I said. “I never want to go home.”

  “Okay.” Maggie swept back more sliding doors above her head. “Hungry? Eat!”

  I looked and saw:

  The March of Time, June 21st, 1933.

  The March of Time, June 20th, 1930.

  The March of Time, July 4th, 1930.

  “No,” I said.

  Maggie stopped in mid-gesture.

  “There was no March of Time in 1930,” I said.

  “Bull’s-eye! The boy’s an expert!”

  “Those are not Time reels,” I added. “It’s a cover. For what?”

  “My own home movies, shot with my eight-millimeter camera, blown up to thirty-five millimeters, and hid behind March of Time titles.”

  I tried not to lean forward too quickly. “You got a whole film history of this studio then?”

  “In 1923, 1927, 1930, name it! F. Scott Fitzgerald, drunk in the commissary. G. B. Shaw the day he commandeered the place. Lon Chaney in the makeup building the night he showed the Westmore brothers how to change faces! Dead a month later. Wonderful warm man. William Faulkner, a drunk but polite sad screenwriter, poor s.o.b. Old films. Old history. Pick!”

  My eyes roved and stopped. I heard the air jet from my nostrils.

  October 15, 1934. Two weeks before Arbuthnot, the head of the studio, was killed.

  “That.”

  Maggie hesitated, pulled it out, shoved the film i
nto the Moviola, and cranked the machine.

  We were looking at the front entrance of Maximus Films on an October afternoon in 1934. The doors were shut, but you could see shadows inside the glass. And then the doors opened and two or three people stepped out. In the middle was a tall, burly man, laughing, eyes shut, head back to the sky, shoulders quivering with his merriment. His eyes were slits, he was so happy. He was taking a deep breath, almost his last, of life.

  “You know him?” asked Maggie.

  I peered down into this small half-dark, half-lit cave in the earth.

  “Arbuthnot.”

  I touched the glass as one touches a crystal ball, reading no future, only pasts with the color leached out.

  “Arbuthnot. Dead, the same month you shot this film.”

  Maggie cranked backward and started over. The three men came out laughing again and Arbuthnot wound up grimacing into her camera on that long-forgotten and incredibly happy noon.

  Maggie saw something in my face. “Well? Spit it out.”

  “I saw him this week,” I said.

  “Bosh. You been smoking those funny cigars?”

  Maggie moved three more frames through. Arbuthnot raised his head higher into an almost raining sky.

  And now Arbuthnot was calling and waving to someone out of sight.

  I took a chance. “In the graveyard, on Halloween night, there was a wire-frame papier-mâché scarecrow with his face.”

  Now Arbuthnot’s Duesenberg was at the curb. He shook hands with Manny and Groc, promising them happy years. Maggie did not look at me, but only at the dark-light dark-light pictures jumping rope below.

  “Don’t believe anything on Halloween night.”

  “Some other people saw. Some ran scared. Manny and others have been walking on land mines for days.”

  “Bosh, again,” Maggie snorted. “What else is new? You may have noticed I stay in the projection room or up here where the air’s so thin they get nosebleeds climbing up. That’s why I like loony Fritz. He shoots until midnight, I edit until dawn. Then we hibernate. When the long winter ends each day at five, we rise, timing ourselves to the sunset. One or two days a week, you will also have noticed, we make our pilgrimage to the commissary lunch to prove to Manny Leiber we’re alive.”

  “Does he really run the studio?”

  “Who else?”

  “I dunno. I just get a funny feeling in Manny’s office. The furniture looks unused. The desk is always clean. There’s a big white telephone in the middle of the desk, and a chair behind the desk that’s twice the size of Manny Leiber’s bottom. He’d look like Charlie McCarthy in it.”

  “He does act like hired help, doesn’t he? It’s the telephone, I suppose. Everyone thinks films are made in Hollywood. No, no. That telephone is a direct line to New York City and the spiders. Their web crosses the country to trap flies here. The spiders never come west. They’re afraid we’d see they’re all pygmies, Adolph Zukor size.”

  “Trouble is,” I said. “I was at the bottom of a ladder, in the graveyard, with that mannequin, dummy, whatever, in the rain.”

  Maggie Botwin’s hand jerked on the crank. Arbuthnot waved much too swiftly across the street. The camera panned to see: the creatures from another world, the uncombed crowd of autograph collectors. The camera prowled their faces.

  “Wait a minute!” I cried. “There!”

  Maggie cranked two more frames to bring up close the image of a thirteen-year-old boy on roller skates.

  I touched the image, a strange loving touch.

  “That can’t be you,” said Maggie Botwin.

  “Just plain old homely, dumpy me.”

  Maggie Botwin let her eyes shift over to me for a moment and then back down through twenty years of time to some October afternoon with a threat of rain.

  There was the goof of all goofs, the nut of all nuts, the crazy of all crazies, forever off balance on his roller skates, doomed to fall in any traffic, including pedestrian women who passed.

  She cranked backward. Again Arbuthnot was waving to me, unseen, on some autumn afternoon.

  “Arbuthnot,” she said quietly, “and you … almost together?”

  “The man on the ladder in the rain? Oh, yes.”

  Maggie sighed and cranked the Moviola. Arbuthnot got in his car and drove away to a car crash just a few short weeks ahead.

  I watched the car go, even as my younger self across the street, in that year, must have watched.

  “Repeat after me,” said Maggie Botwin, quietly. “There was no one up some ladder, no rain, and you were never there.”

  “—never there,” I murmured.

  Maggie’s eyes narrowed. “Who’s that funny-looking geek next to you, with the big camel’s-hair overcoat and the wild hair and the huge photo album in his arms?”

  “Clarence,” I said, and added, “I wonder, right now, tonight, if … he’s still alive?”

  The telephone rang.

  It was Fritz in the final stages of hysteria.

  “Get over here. J. C.’s stigmata are still open. We got to finish before he bleeds to death!”

  We drove to the set.

  J. C. was waiting on the edge of the long pit of charcoal. When he saw me he shut his beautiful eyes, smiled, and showed me his wrists.

  “That blood looks almost real!” cried Maggie.

  “You could almost say that,” I said.

  Groc had taken over the job of pancaking the Messiah’s face. J. C. looked thirty years younger as Groc patted a final powder puff at his shut eyelids and stood back to smile in triumph at his masterwork.

  I looked at J. C.’s face, serene there by the embered fire, while a slow, dark syrup moved from his wrists into his palms. Madness! I thought. He’ll die during the scene!

  But to keep the film in budget? Why not? The mob was gathering again and Doc Phillips loped forward to check the holy spillage and nod yes to Manny. There was life yet in these holy limbs, some sap remained: Roll ’em!

  “Ready?” cried Fritz.

  Groc stepped back in the charcoal wind, between two vestal virgin extras. Doc stood like a wolf on his hind legs, his tongue in his teeth, his eyes swarming and teeming from side to side.

  Doc? I thought. Or Groc? Are they the true heads of the studio? Do they sit in Manny’s chair?

  Manny stared at the bed of fire, longing to walk on it and prove himself King.

  J. C. was alone in our midst, far off within himself, his face so lovely pale it tore a seam in my chest. His thin lips moved, memorizing the fine words John gave to me to give to him to preach that night.

  And just before he spoke, J. C. raised his gaze across the cities of the studio world and up along the facade of Notre Dame, to the very peak of the towers. I gazed with him, then glanced swiftly over to see:

  Groc transfixed, his eyes on the cathedral. Doc Phillips the same. And Manny between them, shifting his attention from one to the other, then to J. C. and at last, where some few of us looked, up, among the gargoyles—

  Where nothing moved.

  Or did J. C. see some secret motion, a signal given?

  J. C. saw something. The others noticed. I saw only light and shadow on the false marble facade.

  Was the Beast still there? Could he see the pit of burning coals? Would he hear the words of Christ and be moved to come and tell the weather of the last week and calm our hearts?

  “Silence!” cried Fritz.

  Silence.

  “Action,” whispered Fritz.

  And finally, at five-thirty in the morning, in the few minutes just before dawn, we filmed the Last Supper after the Last Supper.

  44

  The charcoals were fanned, the fish freshly laid, and as the first light rose over Los Angeles from the east, J. C. slowly opened his eyes with a look of such compassion as would still his lovers and betrayers and give them sustenance as he hid his wounds and walked off along a shore that would be filmed, some days later, in some other part of California; and the sun rose
, and the scene was finished with no flaw, and there was not a dry eye on the outdoor set, but only silence for a long moment in which J. C. at last turned, and with tears in his eyes, cried:

  “Won’t someone yell ‘cut!’?”

  “Cut,” said Fritz Wong, quietly.

  “You’ve just made an enemy,” said Maggie Botwin beside me.

  I glanced across the set. Manny Leiber was there glaring at me. Then he spun about, stalked away.

  “Be careful,” said Maggie. “You made three mistakes in forty-eight hours. Rehired Judas. Solved the ending of the film. Found J. C., brought him back to the set. Unforgivable.”

  “My God,” I sighed.

  J. C. walked off through the crowd of extras, not waiting for praise. I caught up with him.

  Where going? I said, silently.

  To rest awhile, he said just as silently.

  I looked at his wrists. The bleeding had stopped.

  When we reached a studio crossroads, J. C. took my hands and gazed off at the backlot somewhere.

  “Junior—?”

  “Yes?”