“Come on,” I said, and grabbed Alis’s hand.
“Where are we going?”
Someplace. Anyplace. A theater where some other movie is showing. “Hollywood,” I said, pulling her out into the hall. “To dance in the movies.”
Camera whip-pans to medium-shot: LAIT station sign. Diamond screen, “Los Angeles Instransit” in hot pink caps, “Westwood Station” in bright green.
We took the skids. Mistake. The back section was closed off but they were still practically empty—a few knots of tourates on their way home from Universal Studios clumped together in the middle of the room, a couple of druggates asleep against the back wall, three others over by the far side wall, laying out three-card monte hands on the yellow warning strip, one lone Marilyn.
The tourates were watching the station sign anxiously, like they were afraid they’d miss their stop. Fat chance. The time between Instransit stations may be inst, but it takes the skids a good ten minutes to generate the negative-matter region that produces the transit, and another five afterward before they turn on the exit arrows, during which time nobody was going anywhere.
The tourates might as well relax and enjoy the show. What there was of it. Only one of the side walls was working, and half of it was running a continuous loop of ads for ILMGM, which apparently didn’t know it’d been taken over yet. In the center of the wall, a digitized lion roared under the studio trademark in glowing gold: “Anything’s Possible!” The screen blurred and went to swirling mist, while a voice-over said, “ILMGM! More Stars Than There Are in Heaven,” and then announced names while said stars appeared out of the fog. Vivien Leigh tripping toward us in a huge hoop skirt; Arnold Schwarzenegger roaring in on a motorcycle; Charlie Chaplin twirling his cane.
“Constantly working to bring you the brightest stars in the firmament,” the voice-over said, which meant the stars currently in copyright litigation. Marlene Dietrich, Macaulay Culkin at age ten, Fred Astaire in top hat and tails, strolling effortlessly, casually toward us.
I’d dragged Alis out of the dorm to get away from mirrors and the Beguine and Fred, tippity-tapping away on my frontal lobe, to find something different to look at if I flashed again, but all I’d done was exchange my screen for a bigger one.
The other wall was even worse. It was apparently later than I’d thought. They’d shut the ads off for the night, and it was nothing but a long expanse of mirror. Like the polished floor Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell had danced on, side by side, their hands nearly—
I focused on the reflections. The druggates looked dead. They’d probably taken capsules Heada told them were chooch. The Marilyn was practicing her pout in the mirror, flinching forward with a look of openmouthed surprise, and splaying her hand against her white pleated skirt to keep it from billowing up. The steam grating scene from The Seven Year Itch.
The tourates were still watching the station sign, which read La Brea Tar Pits. Alis was watching it, too, her face intent, and even in the fluorescents and the flickering light of ILMGM upcoming remakes, her hair had that curious backlit look. Her feet were apart, and she held her hands out, braced for sudden movement.
“No skids in Riverwood, huh?” I said.
She grinned. “Riverwood. That’s Mickey Rooney’s hometown in Strike Up the Band,” she said. “We only had a little one in Galesburg. And it had seats.”
“You can squeeze more people in during rush hour without seats. You don’t have to stand like that, you know.”
“I know,” she said, moving her feet together. “I just keep expecting us to move.”
“We already did,” I said, glancing at the station sign. It had changed to Pasadena. “For about a nanosecond. Station to station and no in-between. It’s all done with mirrors.”
I stood on the yellow warning strip and put my hand out toward the side wall. “Only they’re not mirrors. They’re a curtain of negative matter you could put your hand right through. You need to get a studio exec on the make to explain it to you.”
“Isn’t it dangerous?” she said, looking down at the yellow warning strip.
“Not unless you try to walk through them, which ravers sometimes try to do. There used to be barriers, but the studios made them take them out. They got in the way of their promos.”
She turned and looked at the far wall. “It’s so big!”
“You should see it during the day. They shut off the back part at night. So the druggates don’t piss on the floor. There’s another room back there,” I pointed at the rear wall, “that’s twice as big as this.”
“It’s like a rehearsal hall,” Alis said. “Like the dance studio in Swingtime. You could almost dance in here.”
“‘I won’t dance,’” I said. “‘Don’t ask me.’”
“Wrong movie,” she said, smiling. “That’s from Roberta.”
She turned back to the mirrored side wall, her skirt flaring out, and her reflection called up the image of Eleanor Powell next to Fred Astaire on the dark, polished floor, her hand—
I forced it back, staring determinedly at the other wall, where a trailer for the new Star Trek movie was flashing, till it receded, and then turned back to Alis.
She was looking at the station sign. Pasadena was flashing. A line of green arrows led to the front, and the tourates were following them through the left-hand exit door and off to Disneyland.
“Where are we going?” Alis said.
“Sight-seeing,” I said. “The homes of the stars. Which should be Forest Lawn, only they aren’t there anymore, They’re back up on the silver screen working for free.”
I waved my hand at the near wall, where a trailer for the remake of Pretty Woman, starring, natch, Marilyn Monroe, was showing.
Marilyn made an entrance in a red dress, and the Marilyn stopped practicing her pout and came over to watch. Marilyn flipped an escargot at a waiter, went shopping on Rodeo Drive for a white halter dress, faded out on a lingering kiss with Clark Gable.
“Appearing soon as Lena Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain,” I said. “So tell me why you hate Gene Kelly.”
“I don’t hate him exactly,” she said, considering. “American in Paris is awful, and that fantasy thing in Singin’ in the Rain, but when he dances with Donald O’Connor and Frank Sinatra, he’s actually a good dancer. It’s just that he makes it look so hard.”
“And it isn’t?”
“No, it is. That’s the point.” She frowned. “When he does jumps or complicated steps, he flails his arms and puffs and pants. It’s like he wants you to know how hard it is. Fred Astaire doesn’t do that. His routines are lots harder than Gene Kelly’s, the steps are terrible, but you don’t see any of that on the screen. When he dances, it doesn’t look like he’s working at all. It looks easy, like he just that minute made it up—”
The image of Fred and Eleanor pushed forward again, the two of them in white, tapping casually, effortlessly, across the starry floor—
“And he made it look so easy you thought you’d come to Hollywood and do it, too,” I said.
“I know it won’t be easy,” she said quietly. “I know there aren’t a lot of liveactions—”
“Any,” I said. “There aren’t any liveactions being made. Unless you’re in Bogota. Or Beijing. It’s all CG’s. No actors need apply.”
Dancers either, I thought, but didn’t say it. I was still hoping to get a pop out of this, if I could hang onto her till the next flash. If there was a next flash. I was getting a killing headache, which wasn’t supposed to be a side-effect.
“But if it’s all computer graphics,” Alis was saying earnestly, “then they can do whatever they want. Including musicals.”
“And what makes you think they want to? There hasn’t been a musical since 1996.”
“They’re copyrighting Fred Astaire,” she said, gesturing at the screen. “They must want him for something.”
Something is right, I thought. The sequel to The Towering Inferno. Or snuffporn movies.
“I
said I knew it wouldn’t be easy,” she said defensively. “You know what they said about Fred Astaire when he first came to Hollywood? Everybody said he was washed up, that his sister was the one with all the talent, that he was a no-talent vaudeville hoofer who’d never make it in movies. On his screen test somebody wrote, ‘Thirty, balding, can dance a little.’ They didn’t think he could do it either, and look what happened.”
There were movies for him to dance in, I didn’t say, but she must have seen it in my face because she said, “He was willing to work really hard, and so am I. Did you know he used to rehearse his routines for weeks before the movie even started shooting? He wore out six pairs of tap shoes rehearsing Carefree. I’m willing to practice just as hard as he did,” she said. “I know I’m not good enough. I need to take ballet, too. All I’ve had is jazz and tap. And I don’t know very many routines yet. And I’m going to have to find somebody to teach me ballroom.”
Where? I thought. There hasn’t been a dancing teacher in Hollywood in twenty years. Or a choreographer. Or a musical. CG’s might have killed the liveaction, but they hadn’t killed the musical. It had died all by itself back in the sixties.
“I’ll need a job to pay for the dancing lessons, too,” she was saying. “The girl you were talking to at the party—the one who looks like Marilyn Monroe—she said maybe I could get a job as a face. What do they do?”
Go to parties, stand around trying to get noticed by somebody who’ll trade a pop for a paste-up, do chooch, I thought, wishing I had some.
“They smile and talk and look sad while some hackate does a scan of them,” I said.
“Like a screen test?” Alis said.
“Like a screen test. Then the hackate digitizes the scan of your face and puts it into a remake of A Star Is Born and you get to be the next Judy Garland. Only why do that when the studio’s already got Judy Garland? And Barbra Streisand. And Janet Gaynor. And they’re all copyrighted, they’re already stars, so why would the studios take a chance on a new face? And why take a chance on a new movie when they can do a sequel or a copy or a remake of something they already own? And while we’re at it, why not star remakes in the remake? Hollywood, the ultimate recycler!”
I waved my hand at the screen where ILMGM was touting coming attractions. “The Phantom of the Opera,” the voice-over said. “Starring Anthony Hopkins and Meg Ryan.”
“Look at that,” I said. “Hollywood’s latest effort—a remake of a remake of a silent!”
The trailer ended, and the loop started again. The digitized lion did its digitized roar, and above it a digitized laser burned in gold: “Anything’s Possible!”
“Anything’s possible,” I said, “if you have the digitizers and the Crays and the memory and the fibe-op feed to send it out over. And the copyrights.”
The golden words faded into fog, and Scarlett simpered her way out of it toward us, holding up her hoop skirt daintily.
“Anything’s possible, but only for the studios. They own everything, they control everything, they—”
I broke off, thinking, there’s no way she’ll give me a pop after that little outburst. Why didn’t you just tell her straight out her little dream’s impossible?
But she wasn’t listening. She was looking at the screen, where the copyright cases were being trotted out for inspection. Waiting for Fred Astaire to appear.
“The first time I ever saw him, I knew what I wanted,” she said, her eyes on the wall. “Only ‘wanted’ isn’t the right word. I mean, not like you want a new dress—”
“Or some chooch,” I said.
“It’s not even that kind of wanting. It’s … there’s a scene in Top Hat where Fred Astaire’s dancing in his hotel room and Ginger Rogers has the room below him, and she comes up to complain about the noise, and he tells her that sometimes he just finds himself dancing, and she says—”
“‘I suppose it’s a kind of affliction,’” I said.
I’d expected her to smile at that, the way she had at my other movie quotes, but she didn’t.
“An affliction,” she said seriously. “Only that isn’t it either, exactly. It’s … when he dances, it isn’t just that he makes it look easy. It’s like all the steps and rehearsing and the music are just practice, and what he does is the real thing. It’s like he’s gone beyond the rhythm and the time steps and the turns to this other place…. If I could get there, do that…”
She stopped. Fred Astaire was sauntering toward us out of the mist in his top hat and tails, tipping his top hat jauntily forward with the end of his cane. I looked at Alis.
She was looking at him with that lost, breathless look she had had in my room, watching Fred and Eleanor, side by side, dressed in white, turning and yet still, silent, beyond motion, beyond—
“Come on,” I said, and yanked on her hand. “This is our stop,” and followed the green arrows out.
SCENE: Hollywood premiere night at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Searchlights crisscrossing the night sky, palm trees, screaming fans, limousines, tuxedos, furs, flashbulbs popping.
We came out on Hollywood Boulevard, on the corner of Chaos and Sensory Overload, the worst possible place to flash.
It was a DeMille scene, as usual. Faces and tourates and freelancers and ravers and thousands of extras, milling among the vid places and VR caves. And among the screens: drops and freescreens and diamonds and holos, all showing trailers edited à la Psycho by Vincent.
Trump’s Chinese Theater had two huge dropscreens in front of it, running promos of the latest remake of Ben-Hur. On one of them, Sylvester Stallone in a bronze skirt and digitized sweat was leaning over his chariot, whipping the horses.
You couldn’t see the other. There was a vid-neon sign in front of it that said Happy Endings, and a holoscreen showing Scarlett O’Hara in the fog, saying, “But, Rhett, I love you.”
“Frankly, my dear—I love you, too,” Clark Gable said, and crushed her in his arms. “I’ve always loved you!”
“The cement has stars in it,” I said to Alis, pointing down. It was too crowded to see the sidewalk, let alone the stars. I led her out into the street, which was just as crowded, but at least it was moving, and down toward the vid places.
Hawkers from the VR caves crushed flyers into our hands, two dollars off reality, and River Phoenix pushed up. “Drag? Flake? A pop?”
I bought some chooch and popped it right there, hoping it would stave off a flash till we got back to the dorm.
The crowd thinned out a little, and I led Alis back onto the sidewalk and past a VR cave advertising, “A hundred percent body hookup! A hundred percent realistic!”
A hundred percent realistic, all right. According to Heada, who knows everything, simsex takes more memory than most of the VR caves can afford, and half of them slap a data helmet on the customer, add some noise to make it look like a VR image, and bring in a freelancer.
I towed Alis around the VR cave and straight into a herd of tourates standing in front of a booth called A Star Is Born and gawking at a vid-pitch. “Make your dreams come true! Be a movie star! $89.95, including disk. Studio-licensed! Studio-quality digitizing!”
“I don’t know, which one do you think I should do?” a fat female tourate was saying, flipping through the menu.
A bored-looking hackate in a white lab coat and James Dean pompadour glanced at the movie she was pointing at, handed her a plastic bundle, and motioned her into a curtained cubicle.
She stopped halfway in. “I’ll be able to watch this on the fibe-op feed, won’t I?”
“Sure,” James Dean said, and yanked the curtain across.
“Do you have any musicals?” I asked, wondering if he’d lie to me like he had to the tourate. She wasn’t going to be on the fibe-op feed. Nothing gets on except studio-authorized changes. Paste-ups and slash-and-burns. She’d get a tape of the scene and orders not to make any copies.
He looked blank. “Musicals?”
“You know. Singing? Dancing?” I said, but the t
ourate was back wearing a too-short white robe and a brown wig with braids looped over her ears.
“Stand up here,” James Dean said, pointing at a plastic crate. He fastened a data harness around her large middle and went over to an old Digimatte compositor and switched it on.
“Look at the screen,” he said, and the tourates all moved so they could see it. Storm troopers blasted away, and Luke Skywalker appeared, standing in a doorway over a dropoff, his arm around a blank blue space in the screen.
I left Alis watching and pushed through the crowd to the menu. Stagecoach, The Godfather, Rebel without a Cause.
“Okay, now,” James Dean said, typing onto a keyboard. The female tourate appeared on the screen next to Luke. “Kiss him on the cheek and step off the box. You don’t have to jump. The data harness’ll do everything.”
“Won’t it show in the movie?”
“The machine cuts it out.”
They didn’t have any musicals. Not even Ruby Keeler. I worked my way back to Alis.
“Okay, roll ’em,” James Dean said. The fat tourate smooched empty air, giggled, and jumped off the box. On the screen, she kissed Luke’s cheek, and they swung out across a high-tech abyss.
“Come on,” I said to Alis and steered her across the street to Screen Test City.
It had a multiscreen filled with stars’ faces, and an old guy with the pinpoint eyes of a redliner. “Be a star! Get your face up on the silver screen! Who do you want to be, popsy?” he said, leering at Alis. “Marilyn Monroe?”
Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire were side by side on the bottom row of the screen. “That one,” I said, and the screen zoomed till they filled it.
“You’re lucky you came tonight,” the old guy said. “He’s going into litigation. What do you want? Still or scene?”
“Scene,” I said. “Just her. Not both of us.”