His hands on my shoulders, he forced me gently down.
At last I raised my eyes and looked along the table at twelve people watching me.
“Now,” announced Fritz, “he will tell us about his Search for the Beast!”
The Beast.
Since it had been announced that Roy and I were to write, build, and birth the most incredibly hideous animal in Hollywood history, thousands had helped us in our search. One would have thought we were seeking Scarlett O’Hara or Anna Karenina. But no … the Beast, and the so-called contest to find the Beast, appeared in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. My name and Roy’s were in every article. I clipped and saved every dumb, stillborn item. Photographs had begun to pour in from other studios, agents, and the general public. Quasimodos Numbers Two and Three showed up at the studio gate, as did four Opera Phantoms. Wolfmen abounded. First and second cousins of Lugosi and Karloff, hiding out on our Stage 13, were thrown off the lot.
Roy and I had begun to feel we were judging an Atlantic City beauty contest somehow shipped to Transylvania. The half-animals waiting outside the sound stages every night were something; the photographs were worse. At last, we burned all the photographs and left the studio through a side entrance.
So it had been with the search for the Beast all month.
And now Fritz Wong said again: “Okay. The Beast? Explain!”
12
I looked at all those faces and said: “No. No, please. Roy and I will be ready soon, but right now …” I took a fast sip of bad Hollywood tap water, “I’ve been watching this table for three weeks. Everyone always sits at the same place. So-and-so up here, such-and-such over across. I’ll bet the guys down there don’t even know the guys over here. Why not mix it up? Leave spaces so every half hour people could play musical chairs, shift, meet someone new, not the same old guff from familiar faces. Sorry.”
“Sorry!?” Fritz grabbed my shoulders and shook me with his own laughter. “Okay, guys! Musical chairs! Allez-oop!”
Applause. Cheers.
Such was the general hilarity as everyone slapped backs, shook hands, found new chairs, sat back down. Which only suffered me into further confused embarrassment with more shouts of laughter. More applause.
“We will have to seat this maestro here each day to teach us social activities and life,” announced Fritz. “All right, compatriots,” cried Fritz. “To your left, young maestro, is Maggie Botwin, the finest cutter/film editor in film history!”
“Bull!” Maggie Botwin nodded to me and went back to her omelet, which she had carried with her.
Maggie Botwin.
Prim, quiet lady, like an upright piano, seeming taller than she was because of the way she sat, rose, and walked, and the way she held her hands in her lap and the way she coifed her hair up on top of her head, in some fashion out of World War I.
I had once heard her on a radio show describe herself as a snake charmer.
All that film whistling through her hands, sliding through her fingers, undulant and swift.
All that time passing, but to pass and repass again.
It was no different, she said, than life itself.
The future rushed at you. You had a single instant, as it flashed by, to change it into an amiable, recognizable, and decent past. Instant by instant, tomorrow blinked in your grasp. If you did not seize without holding, shape without breaking, that continuity of moments, you left nothing behind. Your object, her object, all of our objects, was to mold and print ourselves on those single bits of future that, in the touching, aged into swiftly vanishing yesterdays.
So it was with film.
With the one difference: you could live it again, as often as need be. Run the future by, make it now, make it yesterday, then start over with tomorrow.
What a great profession, to be in charge of three concourses of time: the vast invisible tomorrows; the narrowed focus of now; the great tombyard of seconds, minutes, hours, years, millennia that burgeoned as a seedbed to keep the other two.
And if you didn’t like any of the three rushing time rivers?
Grab your scissors. Snip. There! Feeling better?
And now here she was, her hands folded in her lap one moment and the next lifting a small 8-millimeter camera to pan over the faces at the table, face by face, her hands calmly efficient, until the camera stopped and fixed on me.
I gazed back at it and remembered a day in 1934 when I had seen her outside the studio shooting film of all the fools, the geeks, the aut
ograph nuts, myself among them.