Kubrick's Game

  Brodsky didn’t answer. He continued his brisk pace, puffing clouds of smoke with each step.

  “Dr. Brodsky? Do you remember you’re—”

  “I heard you the first time! I don’t answer pointless questions.”

  They walked up a spiral stairway that led to the rooftop of the observatory’s tri-domed main building. Brodsky led them to the far left dome, unlocked a door, placed his pipe on a receptacle, entered, and then beckoned them inside.

  “Come in or go back. The other way is safer.”

  Odd phrasing, thought Shawn.

  Wilson walked forward, but Sami and Shawn hesitated. The room was pitch black.

  “We can’t turn back now,” said Wilson. He held out both hands.

  Sami and Shawn took them, and they walked through the dark doorway as one.

  The lights came on, and Shawn was relieved to see they were alone in the room with Brodsky. At the center was a ten-foot-long, twelve-inch-wide telescope.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Brodsky. “I’ve personally discovered twenty-six asteroids with her.”

  Screens circled the room above a control board filled with buttons and control sticks. Brodsky pressed one and the roof of the dome opened. Droplets of rain fell through.

  “Have to hurry. We’ll have to close the dome if it rains any harder.” He punched in coordinates and the telescope moved on its own into a horizontal position. He then stepped up a short metal staircase to the eyepiece. “Come up here and take a look.”

  “But Dr. Brodsky,” said Sami, “it’s too cloudy to see anything.”

  “Have a look anyway,” said Brodsky, raising an eyebrow.

  Wilson stepped up to the eyepiece.

  As he peered through it, Brodsky said, “Don’t ruin the moment by opening your mouth.”

  When Wilson stood back from the telescope, his eyes were wide and fearful. “Sami, Shawn, you should look.”

  Sami went next, and had the same reaction.

  Shawn stepped up to the eyepiece and looked. The telescope zoomed in on the Hollywood skyline, and at the center of the lens was a billboard. On the billboard was the face of a beautiful woman with a neon watch around her wrist. It seemed to be an advertisement for a watch company. Beneath the logo, a simple motto read: We’re watching you.

  Shawn’s stomach dropped.

  “Amazing what you can see even on a night like this, eh?”

  The three remained silent. Shawn wasn’t sure how to interpret this message. Was it a threat? A warning?

  “You must be wondering why I’ve brought you here. What you’ve just seen is the original landing site of the Apollo 11 spacecraft. The telescope is so powerful that you can even detect the American flag standing in the distance. So you see, there is no validity to anything the internet tells you. You’ve seen the hard proof with your own eyes. Now, I trust this will put an end to your foolish questions and you’ll be on your way.”

  Shawn attempted to make sense of everything they’d just heard. These last several minutes felt like a series of clues. Seeing the “We are watching you” sign felt like more of a warning to him after what Brodsky had just said. He was putting on an act.

  Brodsky closed the dome and walked back through the doorway. He picked up his pipe and placed it in his mouth. “You should go back where you came from. I’m heading the other way.”

  The other way? Shawn flashed back to what Brodsky had said minutes prior: “The other way is safer.”

  Wilson and Sami seemed to be having the same thought.

  Shawn motioned to his friends to follow Brodsky down a back stairwell, ignoring his instructions to exit back through the courtyard.

  Brodsky didn’t look back as he continued to a corner behind the complex, where the walkway ended and a mountain trail began.

  He turned. “Listen closely, because it won’t take long for them to realize you’re not returning to your car. I was visited today by a group of dangerous men. They gave me detailed instructions to discredit the staged moon landing theory and send you back through the entrance. I’m glad you picked up my clues because it appears we’ve outsmarted them, at least for the time being. You may not believe what I’m going to tell you, but I am one of the last people still alive who knows the truth.

  “I was on mission control for Apollo 11. We did land on the moon, but what actually happened wasn’t what the world saw. We hired Stanley Kubrick to direct the moon landing. And by ‘we’ I don’t mean all of NASA. I mean a small group on the inside who were tasked with the media operation.

  “Stanley came aboard, but he didn’t know the truth of it. He thought he would just be planning the lighting and camera angles that would be used to make the landing as cinematic as possible. He took it more seriously than we imagined he would, and told us he could build sets that would be so realistic nobody would be able to tell the difference. He wanted to choreograph every movement and word for optimal impact, so we let him have a go at it. The front-screen projection and slow motion effects of the moonwalk looked realistic, though not totally accurate.

  “When the time came for the rocket launch, the top brass was nervous. Earth-based television broadcasts were prone to their fair share of technical difficulties, and the moon-landing broadcast was the most important event in human history, not to mention a crucial victory in the Cold War. Any flubs would have been disastrous. So somewhere along the line, the order went in to use Stanley’s footage for broadcast. They didn’t think it would be a big deal. The landing was happening, so who needed to be the wiser?

  “Well, when Stanley saw it was his footage, he was none too pleased, but the bosses reminded him that he was under a strict confidentiality agreement. We all noticed when Stanley started dropping clues in his films, especially The Shining. They also knew Stanley kept meticulous records. He warned them that if anything happened to him or his family the truth would come out. I don’t know anything about his death, but when nothing surfaced afterward, the insiders were relieved. That is, until a few weeks ago. Something has stirred them. Stanley left something behind, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” said Shawn. “It’s—”

  “I don’t want to know!” Brodsky held his hands up as if to protect himself. “If you tell me, they’ll do awful things to get me to talk, and at my age I wouldn’t hold out long. But none of this matters without proof. There’s no evidence that I know of except for one thing: the original negatives of the moon landing broadcast—Kubrick’s footage. Analysis of the negatives would prove everything I’ve told you. Only problem is, all the negatives were destroyed or have mysteriously disappeared. Except for one.”

  “Where is it?” asked Wilson.

  “Just so happens it’s nearby. It’s being preserved at the UCLA Film Archive in Valencia. The plan is to restore it for a fiftieth anniversary broadcast in 2019. Only a few of us know it’s there besides the archivist. If you want to confirm what I’ve said, that’s your destination.”

  “Understood,” said Wilson. “But how do we leave? My car is near the entrance.”

  “Forget about the car,” said Brodsky. “I’d never turn the ignition on it again, in fact. You need to leave at once. There’s no more to tell.”

  Sami looked around nervously. “Dr. Brodsky, how do we—”

  “Shh!” He pointed to a trail that led down the mountain. “Careful, the mountain is slippery in the rain.”

  From somewhere in the distance, they could hear the sound of footsteps dashing through puddles.

  “Go!” Brodsky urged.

  The three quickly hopped off the ledge onto the leafy dirt below.

  Wilson and Sami took off running, but Shawn stopped and turned. “Doctor! When did Kubrick invite you into the game?”

  “Game?” The man seemed genuinely puzzled. “What game?”

  “Come on!” said Sami. She pulled Shawn by the arm, and all three bounded down the mountain and disappeared into the dark of the woods.

  As they reached the bottom of the
hill, a horrifying scream rose in the distance, but was abruptly silenced.

  Shawn, Wilson, and Sami stepped out of a cab at Shawn’s family home. They wanted to go all the way to Valencia to the UCLA Archive, but none of them had enough for the hundred-dollar cab fare. Sami had gotten them as far as Shawn’s family home with the last of her cash.

  “Well, what the hell do we do now?” said Wilson, standing arms crossed on Shawn’s driveway.

  “We have to get to the UCLA archive and find the original moon landing footage,” said Shawn. “Do we know anyone who will give us a ride?”

  Wilson pouted. “You expect someone to pick us up in NoHo and then drive us thirty miles to Valencia, wait in the car while we try to break inside, then drive us all the way back? Something tells me that would be a tough sell. I say we swallow our pride and contact the USC team. Shawn, you still have Desiree’s number, right?”

  Shawn agreed and dialed, but it went straight to voicemail. He left a message. “Hi Desiree, it’s Shawn. We’ve gotten into some trouble and could use Danny’s car right away. Please call me back. This is urgent. Thank you.”

  “We can’t rely on them,” said Sami. “What about a bus?”

  “Doable,” said Wilson, “but it might be miles to walk from the stop to the archive, and it makes a quick escape all but impossible.”

  “There’s only one viable solution,” said Shawn. “My dad’s car.”

  Sami and Shawn looked at the boxy white Volvo sitting in the driveway.

  “You think your parents will give us a ride?” said Wilson.

  “Not a chance. I’ll have to borrow it.”

  “They’ll let you?”

  “No, they won’t.”

  Two minutes later, the front door flew open and Shawn darted out of the house out at top speed.

  “Shawn, what the hell are you doing?” Don Hagan boomed from inside the house.

  “Go!” Shawn yelled, tossing the keys to Wilson, who stood by the driver’s-side door.

  “Bring back the keys this instant!”

  “I’ll bring it back!” Shawn shouted out the window.

  Wilson threw it in reverse, jolted backward over the front lawn, crushing a rose bush before peeling out down the block.

  10:34 p.m.

  For Tony Strauss, the night was just beginning. Lurched over a backlit table, a magnifying visor in front of his eyes and a soft scraper in his rubber-gloved hand, he set to work on cleaning each frame of a major new discovery in preparation for digital scanning and restoration. Not surprisingly, it had a serious case of “vinegar syndrome,” and the nitrate stock had gradually faded the images to near-nothingness over time.

  Strauss’s obsessive passion and pioneering techniques were a huge reason film preservation efforts were successful. He hardly felt like a hero as he toiled for endless hours in old sweatpants and a T-shirt. He was merely the right person for a particular job, someone who had no problem sacrificing all personal wants and desires for the sake of art and beauty.

  A knock at the front door echoed through the vast archive chamber, nearly causing him to scratch one of the frames. He ignored it, but when it continued, he raised his visor, huffed, and stomped toward the entrance door.

  “Go away!” he shouted at the three kids standing there. “We’re closed!”

  He turned away, but one of them shouted, “You have to let us in. This is concerning Stanley Kubrick!”

  “What do you mean, Stanley Kubrick?” said Strauss, cautiously approaching the double-glass security doors.

  “We’re on sort of a... quest,” said the kid. “If you let us in, I can explain.”

  Strauss pressed a code on the wall and the doors slid open. “Strange that the quest would lead you here, because this is where it started.”

  A moment later they all gathered in the archive’s entrance at a security station. Shawn marveled at the vintage movie posters on the walls and the dozens of viewing booths.

  “I received a letter from Stanley Kubrick a few months ago,” said Strauss. “It seemed fortuitous because a short time prior, a professor from UCLA told me to be on the lookout for anything related to Stanley Kubrick, and to contact him immediately if I found something.”

  “Was it Mascaro?” said Shawn.

  “That’s right. You know him?”

  “Yes. He showed us what was in the envelope and started us on this quest.”

  “I see. My name is Tony Strauss,” said the preservationist, holding out his hand. “I’m chief of film restoration and preservation here. You must tell me everything. I’ve been obsessed with Kubrick ever since I saw 2001 when I was nine years old.”

  Wilson chuckled and whispered to Shawn, “Dude, this guy is you thirty-five years into the future.”

  Strauss walked them through the archive building toward his studio.

  “What was it like when you saw 2001 on the big screen?” asked Shawn.

  “Magnificent. None of the modern prints or remastered Blu-rays come close to the brilliant colors of my memory. With each re-release the colors had deteriorated so badly, it looked like an entirely different film to me. That’s when I knew I wanted to go into film preservation.”

  When they reached the studio, the smell of chemicals hit them like a wave, forcing Shawn to hold his breath.

  “Here you go,” said Strauss, offering each a painter’s mask. “The smell takes some getting used to, but I assure you it’s not harmful in short bursts.”

  The three quickly summed up the game, leaving out some of the more perilous details they thought might scare Strauss off.

  Wilson finished by saying, “So you see, Mr. Strauss, if the UCLA archive is in possession of the original moon landing footage, it may be the only hard evidence that exists as to whether the world saw the real thing or perhaps Kubrick’s greatest unknown masterpiece. We just need to borrow the film for a day, maybe two, then we’ll bring it straight back to you.”

  Strauss nodded and rubbed his chin. “I see. So you expect me to give you the original footage of the Apollo moon landing, possibly the most important reel of film in the history of the world, based on this conjecture? Can you even comprehend what you are asking me? The footage is being kept in the most secure storage unit ever created. There’s a team of armed guards downstairs 24/7. Plus it requires precise environmental control. You expect me to believe you would take such meticulous care of the film? I’m afraid what you are asking is impossible.”

  “He’s right,” said Shawn. “We can’t remove the film from the facility. It would be too risky. However, I assume you have access to the film?”

  “I’m the only one with access to the film, but the plan was to keep it stored for another couple years before I get to work on the restoration.”

  “I understand, but if we could just view it once. Surely, you must be curious to discover what it might reveal.”

  Strauss groaned, and they could see the conflict within him. He wanted to watch the film now as badly as they did, but he might also be in abject fear of anything happening to the footage.

  “Here is what I’m willing to do,” he finally said. “I have certain instruments that allow me to view film in infrared and ultraviolet light. They are crucial in detecting color balance and tiny dust particles. I myself will view the footage in the studio while you wait outside. If I find evidence that confirms front-screen projection, false shadows, or anything else out-of-the-ordinary, I will invite you in to verify and make you copies of the still images. That’s the best I can do.”

  The team followed Strauss into an elevator that led into an underground archival hall. The doors opened on to endless rows of film canisters on fifteen-foot shelves that stretched hundreds of yards. Guards met their arrival at a check-in desk, and Strauss explained that they were UCLA film students who needed footage for their finals.

  The guards took each of their student IDs before allowing them to pass under the preservationist’s supervision.

  Strauss guided them through
the maze of corridors until they reached a thick glass chamber. Temperature and barometric pressure readings were digitally displayed on screens. Strauss pressed his thumb to a small panel, unlocking the outer door, then pulled out a security card, swiped it, and punched in a code to open the inner door that led into the vault.

  They entered a small room filled with safety deposit boxes, each with its own keypad.

  Strauss walked up to one, punched in a code, and the box unlocked itself. Then he put on rubber gloves and carefully opened the door, revealing a canister marked Apollo 11.

  “Here it is,” said Strauss. “The most important, most highly scrutinized piece of film in the history of humanity.”

  They took the film back upstairs to one of Strauss’s separate viewing rooms.

  “Hmm,” said Strauss. “Is it me or do I feel a draft?”

  “Feels the same to me,” said Sami.

  “No, no,” said Strauss. “The temperature of this hall is a constant. One degree of difference may as well be thirty. Something is wrong. Quick, follow me into this room. We’ll have to lock the doors and call security.” He opened the viewing room door and stepped inside.

  Inside, two men wearing ski masks stood behind a man in a red cape and carnival mask.

  “Buona notte,” said the man in the mask, in a voice Shawn recognized as Mascaro’s.

  A fourth masked man stepped in front of the door, blocking the exit.

  “Mascaro? Is that you? How did you get in here?” said Strauss, also recognizing the distinct accent.

  “Being on the board of directors has its privileges,” said Mascaro. He paused as his goons took out guns and pointed them at the group. “You will kindly hand over what you have there.”

  “No!” Strauss clutched the footage. “This cannot leave the building. It will be destroyed if it’s exposed to outside air.”

  “It’s the film, or your lives.”

  The goons cocked their guns.

  “Please, professor,” said Wilson, dropping to his knees. “You have to let us watch the footage.”

  Mascaro reached into a satchel and pulled out a tablet. “How about you watch this first?”