Tea was a Doris Day pic, and I wondered if she was on Alis’s bad-dancer list. She deserved to be. She smirked her way toothily through a tap routine with Gene Nelson, set in a rehearsal hall Alis would have killed for, all floor space and mirrors and no stacks of desks. There was a terrible Latin version of “Crazy Rhythm,” Gordon MacRae singing “I Only Have Eyes for You,” and then Virginia Gibson’s big number.
And there was no question of her being Alis. With her hair down, she didn’t even look that much like her. Or else the ridigaine was kicking in.
The routine was Hollywood’s idea of ballet, more chiffon and a lot of twirling around, not the kind of routine Alis would have bothered with. If she’d had ballet back in Mea-dowville, and not just jazz and tap, but she hadn’t, and Virginia obviously had, so Alis wasn’t Virginia, and I was sober, and it was back to the bottles.
“Forward 64,” I said, and watched Doris smirk her way through the title number and an unnecessary reprise. The next number was a big production number. Virginia wasn’t in it, and I started to ff again and then stopped.
“Rew to music cue,” I said, and watched the production number, counting the frame numbers. A blond couple stepped forward, did a series of toe slides, and stepped back again, and a dark-haired guy and a redhead in a white pleated skirt kicked forward and went into a side-by-side Charleston. She had curly hair and a tied-in-front blouse, and the two of them put their hands on their knees and did a series of cross kicks. “Frame 75-004, forward 12,” I said, and watched the routine in slow motion.
“Enhance quadrant 2,” and watched the red hair fill the screen, even though there wasn’t any need for an enhancement, or for the slowmo, either. No question at all of who it was.
I had known the instant I saw her, the same way I had in the barnraising scene, and it wasn’t the booze (of which there was at least fifteen minutes’ worth less in my system) or klieg, or a passing resemblance enhanced with rouge and eyebrow pencil. It was Alis. Which was impossible.
“Last frame,” I said, but this was the Good Old Days when the chorus line didn’t get into the credits, and the copyright date had to be deciphered. MCML. 1950.
I went back through the movie, going to freeze frame and enhance every time I spotted red hair, but I didn’t see her again. I ff’d to the Charleston number and watched it again, trying to come up with a theory.
Okay. The hackate had sent her to 1950 (scratch that—the copyright was for the release date—had sent her to 1949) and she had waited around for four years, dancing chorus parts and palling around with Virginia Gibson, waiting for her chance to clunk Virginia on the head, stuff her behind a set, and take her place in Brides. So she could impress the producer of Funny Face with her dancing so that he’d offer her a part, and she’d finally get to dance with Fred, if only in the same production number.
Even splatted on chooch, I couldn’t have bought that one. But it was her, so there had to be an explanation. Maybe in between chorus jobs Alis had gotten a job as a warmbody. They’d had them back then. They were called stand-ins, and maybe she got to be Virginia Gibson’s because they looked alike, and Alis had bribed her to let her take her place, just for one number, or had connived to have Virginia miss a shooting session. Anne Baxter in All About Eve. Or maybe Virginia had an AS problem, and when she’d showed up drunk, Alis had had to take her place.
That theory wasn’t much better. I called up the menu again. If Alis had gotten one chorus job, she might have gotten others. I scanned through the musicals, trying to remember which ones had chorus numbers. Singin’ in the Rain did. That party scene I’d taken all that champagne out of.
I called up the record of changes to find the frame number and ff’d through the nonchampagne, to Donald O’Connor’s saying, “You gotta show a movie at a party. It’s a Hollywood law,” through said movie, to the start of the chorus number.
Girls in skimpy pink skirts and flapper hats ran onstage to the tune of “You Are My Lucky Star” and a bad camera angle. I was going to have to do an enhance to see their faces clearly. But there wasn’t any need to. I’d found Alis.
And she might have managed to bribe Virginia Gibson. She might even have managed to stuff her and the Tea for Two redhead behind their respective sets. But Debbie Reynolds hadn’t had an AS problem, and if Alis had crammed her behind a set, somebody would have noticed.
It wasn’t time travel. It was something else, a comp-generated illusion of some kind in which she’d somehow managed to dance and get it on film. In which case, she hadn’t disappeared forever into the past. She was still in Hollywood. And I was going to find her.
“Off,” I said to the comp, grabbed my jacket, and flung myself out the door.
MOVIE CLICHE #419: The Blocked Escape. Hero/Heroine on the run, near escape with bad guys, eludes them, nearly home free, villain looms up suddenly, asks, “Going somewhere?”
SEE: The Great Escape, The Empire Strikes Back, North by Northwest, The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Heada was standing outside the door, arms folded, tapping her foot. Rosalind Russell as the Mother Superior in The Trouble with Angels.
“You’re supposed to be lying down,” she said.
“I feel fine.”
“That’s because the alcohol isn’t out of your system yet,” she said. “Sometimes it takes longer than others. Have you peed?”
“Yes,” I said. “Buckets. Now if you’ll excuse me, Nurse Ratchet…”
“Wherever you’re going, it can wait till you’re clean,” she said, blocking my way. “I mean it. Ridigaine’s not anything to fool with.” She steered me back into the room. “You need to stay here and rest. Where were you going anyway? To see Alis? Because if you were, she’s not there. She’s dropped all her classes and moved out of her dorm.”
And in with Mayer’s boss, she meant. “I wasn’t going to see Alis.”
“Where were you going?”
It was useless to lie to Heada, but I tried it anyway. “Virginia Gibson was in Funny Face. I was going out to try to find a copy of it.”
“Why can’t you get it off the fibe-op?”
“Fred Astaire’s in it. That’s why I asked you if he was out of litigation.” I let that sink in for a couple of frames. “You said it might just be a likeness. I wanted to see if it’s Ms or just somebody who looks like her.”
“So you were going out to look for a pirated copy?” Heada said, as if she almost believed me. “I thought you said she was in six musicals. They aren’t all in litigation, are they?”
“There weren’t any close-ups in Athena” I said, and hoped she wouldn’t ask why I couldn’t enhance. “And you know how she is about Fred Astaire. If she’s going to be in anything, it’d be Funny Face”
None of this made any sense, since the idea was supposedly to find something Virginia Gibson was in, not Alis, but Heada nodded when I mentioned Fred Astaire. “I can get you one,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said. “It doesn’t even have to be digitized. Tape’ll work.” I led her to the door. “I’ll stay here and lie down and let the ridigaine do its stuff.”
She crossed her arms again.
“I swear,” I said. “I’ll give you my key. You can lock me in.”
“You’ll lie down?”
“Promise,” I lied.
“You won’t,” she said, “and you’ll wish you had.” She sighed. “At least you won’t be on the skids. Give me the key.”
I handed her the card.
“Both of them,” she said.
I handed her the other card.
“Lie down” she said, and shut the door and locked me in.
MOVIE CLICHE #86: Locked In.
SEE: Broken Blossoms, Wuthering Heights, The Phantom Foe, The Palm Beach Story, The Man with the Golden Arm, The Collector.
Well, I needed more proof anyway before I confronted Alis, and I was starting to feel the headache I’d lied to Heada about having. I went into the bathroom and followed orders and then laid down on the bed
and called up Singin’ in the Rain.
There weren’t any telltale matte lines or pixel shadows, and when I did a noise check, there weren’t any signs of uneven degradation. Which didn’t prove anything. I could do undetectable paste-ups with a fifth of William Powell’s Thin Man rye in me.
I needed more data. Preferably something full-length and a continuous take, but Fred was still in litigation. I called up the list of musicals again. Alis had been wearing a bustle the day I went out to see her, which meant a period piece. Not Meet Me in St. Louis. She had said there wasn’t any dancing in it. Showboat, maybe. Or Gigi.
I went through both of them, looking for parasols and backlit hair, but it took forever, and ff’ing made me dizzy.
“Global search,” I said, pressing my hand to my eyes, ’dance routines,” and spent the next ten minutes explaining to the comp what a dance routine was. “Forward at 40,” I said, and took it through Carousel.
The program worked okay, though this was still going to take forever. I debated eliminating ballet, decided the comp wouldn’t have any more idea than Hollywood did of what it was, and added an override instead.
“Instant to next routine, cue,” I said. “Next, please,” and called up On Moonlight Bay.
Bay was another Doris Day toothfest, so even with the override it took far too long to get through it, but at least I could “next, please,” when I saw there weren’t any bustles.
“Vernon and Irene Castle” I said. No, that was a Fred Astaire. The Harvey Girls?
I got more legalese. Was everybody in litigation? I called up the menu, scanning it for period pieces.
“In the Good Old Summertime” I said, and then was sorry. It was a Judy Garland, and Alis had been right, there wasn’t any dancing in Judy Garland movies. I tried to remember what else she’d said that night in my room and what movies she’d asked for. On the Town.
It wasn’t in litigation. But her nemesis, Gene Kelly, was in it, leaping around in a white sailor suit and making it look hard. “Next, please,” I said, and Ann Miller appeared in a low-cut dress, apple cheeks, and Marilyn figure, tapping her way between dinosaur skeletons. Even with makeup and digital padding, Alis couldn’t have been mistaken for her, and I had the feeling that was important, but the clatter of Ann’s taps was making my head pound. I “next, please” ’d to the Meadowville number Alis had said she liked, Vera-Ellen and the overenergetic Gene Kelly in a softshoe. Vera-Ellen was a lot more Alis’s size, she even had a hair ribbon, but she wasn’t Alis either. “Next, please.”
Gene Kelly did one of his overblown ballets, Frank Sinatra and Betty Garrett danced a tango with an Empire State Building telescope, and Ann Miller, in an even more low-cut dress, showed up, and then Vera-Ellen. Wearing the green weskit and black skirt Alis had worn to the party that first night. I sat up.
Vera-Ellen took Gene Kelly’s hand and spun away from the camera. “Freeze,” I said. “Enhance,” and there was no mistaking that backlit hair, and sure enough, when she spun back out of the turn, it was Alis, reaching her hand out, smiling delightedly at Gene.
I asked for a menu of Vera-Ellen movies. “Belle of New York,” I said.
Legalese. Fred Astaire. Ditto Three Little Words. I finally got The Kid from Brooklyn, and went through it number by number, but Alis wasn’t in it, and there must be some other logic at work here. What? Gene Kelly? He’d been in both Singin’ in the Rain and On the Town.
“Anchors Aweigh,” I said.
Gene’s costars were Kathryn Grayson and Jose Iturbi, neither of whom were noted for their dancing ability, so I didn’t expect there to be any production numbers. There weren’t. Gene Kelly danced with Frank Sinatra, with a chorus line of sailors, with a cartoon mouse.
It was another of his overblown fantasy numbers, this time with an animated background and Tom and Jerry and a lot of pre-CG special effects, but he and Tom the Mouse danced a soft-shoe side by side, hand and paw nearly touching, and it almost looked like the real thing.
I accessed Vincent, decided I didn’t want this on the feed, and punched in a key override, wishing there was a way I could find out whether Heada was standing guard without opening the door.
There wasn’t, but it was okay. She wasn’t there. I locked the door in case she came back, and went down to the party. Vincent was demonstrating a new program to a trio of breathless Marilyns.
“Give it a command,” Vincent said, pointing at the screen, where Clint Eastwood, dressed in a striped poncho and a concho-banded hat, was sitting in a chair, his hands at his sides like a puppet’s. “Go ahead.”
The Marilyns giggled. “Stand,” one of them said daringly. Clint got woodenly to his feet.
“Take two steps backward,” another Marilyn said.
“Mother, may I?” I said. “Vincent, I need to talk to you.” I got between him and the Marilyns. “I need to bluescreen some liveaction into a scene. How do I do that?”
“It’s easier to do a scratch construct,” he said, looking at the screen where Clint was standing, waiting for orders. “Or a paste-up. What kind of liveaction? Human?”
“Yeah, human,” I said, “but a paste-up won’t work. So how do I bluescreen it in?”
He shrugged. “Set up a pixar and compositor. Maybe an old Digimatte, if you can find one. The tourate traps use them sometimes. The hard part’s the patching—lights, perspective, camera angles, edges.”
I’d stopped listening. The A Star Is Born place down on Hollywood Boulevard had had a Digimatte. And Heada’d said Alis had gotten a job down there.
“It still won’t be as good as a graphic,” he was saying. “But if you’ve got an expert melder, it’s possible.”
And a pixar, and the comp know-how, and the accesses. None of which Alis had. “What if you didn’t have accesses? Say you wanted to do it without anyone knowing about it?”
“I thought you had full studio access,” he said, suddenly interested. “Did Mayer fire you?”
“This is for Mayer. I’m taking the AS’s out of a hackate movie,” I said glibly. “Rising Sun, There are too many visual references to do a wipe. I’ve got to do a whole new scene, and I want it to be authentic.”
I was counting on his not having seen the movie, or knowing it was made before accesses, a good bet with somebody who’d turn Clint Eastwood into a marionette. “The hero superimposes a fake image over a real one. To catch a criminal.”
He was frowning vaguely. “Somebody breaks into the fibe-op feed in this movie?”
“Yeah,” I said. “So how do I make it look like the real thing?”
“Source piracy? You don’t,” he said. “You have to have studio access.”
Nowhere fast. “I don’t have to show anything illegal,” I said, “just talk about how he finds a bypass around the encryptions or breaks into the authorization guards,” but he was already shaking his head.
“It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “The studios have paid too much for their properties and actors to let source piracy happen, and encryptions, authorization guards, navajos, all those can be gotten around. That’s why they went to the fibe-op loop. What goes out comes back in.”
Up on the screen Clint had started moving. I glanced up. He was walking in a figure-eight pattern, hands down, head down. Looping.
“The fibe-op feed sends the signal out and back again in a continuous loop. It’s got an ID-lock built in. The lock matches the signal coming in against the one that went out, and if they don’t match, it rejects the incoming and substitutes the old one.”
“Every frame?” I said, thinking maybe the lock only checked every five minutes, enough time to squeeze in a dance routine.
“Every frame.”
“Doesn’t that take a ton of memory? A pixel-by-pixel match?”
“Brownian check,” he said, but that wasn’t much better. The lock would check random pixels and see if they matched, and there’d be no way to know in advance which ones. The only thing you’d be able to change the image to was anoth
er one exactly like it.
“What about when you have accesses?” I said, watching Clint make the circuit, around and around. Boris Karloff in Frankenstein.
“In that case, the lock checks the altered image for authorization and then allows it past.”
“And there’s no way to get a fake access?” I said.
He was looking at the screen irritatedly, as if I was the one who’d set Frankenstein in motion. “Sit,” he said. Clint sat.
“Stay,” I said.
Vincent glared at me. “What movie did you say this was for?”
“A remake,” I said, looking over at the door. Heada was coming in. “Maybe I’ll just stay with the wipe,” I said, and ducked off toward the stairs.
“I still don’t see why you insist on doing it by hand,” he called after me. “There’s no point. I’ve got a search-and-destroy program—”
I skidded upstairs and punched in the override, cursing myself for locking the door in the first place, opened it, got in bed, remembered the door was supposed to be locked, locked it, and flung myself back on the bed.
Hurrying had not been a good idea. My head had started to pound like the drums in the Latin number in Tea for Two.
I closed my eyes and waited for Heada, but it must not have been her in the doorway, or else she had gotten waylaid by Vincent and his dancing dolls. I called up Three Sailors and a Girl, but all the “next, please” ’s made me faintly seasick. I closed my eyes, waiting for the queasiness to pass, and then opened them again and tried to come up with a theory that didn’t belong in a movie.
Alis couldn’t have bluescreened herself in like Gene Kelly’s mouse. She didn’t know anything about comps—she’d been taking Basic CG 101 last fall when I got her class schedule out of Heada. And even if she had somehow mastered melds and shading and rotoscoping, she still didn’t have the accesses.
Maybe she’d gotten somebody to help her. But who? The undergrad hackates didn’t have accesses either, and Vincent wouldn’t have understood why she insisted on doing it by hand.
So it had to be a paste-up. And why not? Maybe Alis had finally realized dancing in the movies was impossible, or maybe Mayer’d promised to find her a dancing teacher if she’d pop his boss. She wouldn’t be the first face to come to Hollywood and end up on a casting couch.