And suddenly wished I hadn’t left what remained of Constance Rattigan’s laughter behind.
Late at night a motion picture studio talks to itself. If you move along the dark alleys past the buildings where the editing rooms on the top floors whisper and bray and roar and snack-chatter until two or three or four in the morning, you hear chariots rushing by in the air, or sand blowing across Beau Geste’s ghost-haunted desert, or traffic coursing the Champs-Elysées all French horns and derogatory cries, or Niagara pouring itself down the studio towers into the film vaults, or Barney Oldfield, on his last run, gunning his racer around Indianapolis to the shout of faceless mobs, while further on as you walk in darkness someone lets loose the dogs of war and you hear Caesar’s wounds open like rosebuds in his cloak, or Churchill bulldogging the airwaves as the Hound bays over the moors and the night people keep working these shadowed hours because they prefer the company of Moviolas and flicker-moth screens and closeup lovers to the people stranded at noonday, stunned by reality outside the walls. It is a long-after-midnight collision of buried voices and lost musics caught in a time cloud between buildings, released from high open doors or windows while the shadows of the cutter-editors loom on the pale ceilings bent over enchantments. Only at dawn do the voices still and the musics die as the smilers-with-the-knives head home to avoid the first traffic of realists arriving at 6 A.M. Only at sunset will the voices start again and the musics rise in tender strokes or tumults, as the firefly light from the Moviola screens washes over the watchers’ faces, igniting their eyes and prompting razors in their lifted fingers.
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.