* * *
Hal ordered as much spectacle as he could, Edison’s included, but it was impossible to source enough celluloid to show at the Brooklyn theater. They ran twenty screenings a day, seven days a week, and if the projectionist overcranked the reels they could squeeze in one extra viewing per night. The audiences cycled through the titles within a week and then they wanted something different.
* * *
So Hal began to think about expansion. He knew there was more money to be made upriver, by making his own films, and he’d managed to make a handful of reels with Sabine, Claude, and Chip. But it was nearly impossible to assemble them all in the same place for a shoot, and besides, he was always at the Bijoux, nights and weekends, making sure the seats were full and his mother remembered to turn off the cast-iron kettles at the concession stand before she went to bed.
* * *
Late at night, alone in the office, Hal tallied their ticket sales and filed the bank statements with their accumulating savings. He also read economics, studying vertical integration, the way a shoe factory might also own a cattle ranch, a tannery, and a storefront. Edison was trying to annihilate the competition by controlling the means of production—the camera, the film, the method of projection and distribution. Hal pictured his own moviemaking studio, a factory that made and released images like so many widgets. But until he got out from under the debt he carried with Alroy Healy, the man suspected of killing Chester Bender, there was no possibility of expansion. Healy was in for 20 percent of ticket sales until the principal was paid back, so that, in Hal’s mind, a fifth of every projected reel was tainted with his father’s blood.
* * *
Unable to face him for years, Hal sent his debt repayments to Alroy via a messenger every Monday morning, once the weekend box office had been tallied. But one morning in the summer of 1905, Hal decided to go settle his accounts with Healy, to look him in the eyes and see what floated there.
* * *
Healy owned a number of businesses on disreputable blocks of Fulton Street and Myrtle Avenue, including a saloon, a flophouse, a mattress store, three pawnshops, and two underground poolrooms. His unofficial headquarters was behind the bar inside the Brazen Head, the watering hole he’d inherited from his father. Hal suspected he liked to maintain the pretense of being a barkeep so that he could poison his boozing enemies, keep an eye on the street, and reach for a revolver he was rumored to keep behind a bag of onions. Ordering a drink in Alroy’s saloon got you a small plate of sliced onions with some crumbling cheese alongside.
* * *
When Hal walked into the Brazen Head just after ten in the morning, the place was mostly empty. Alroy stood hunched over the back counter, filleting a twenty-pound bluefish, its silver scales iridescent in the gaslight of the saloon. The barroom was dug belowground, a root cellar smelling of beer and sawdust. Alroy looked up at Hal, wiped his bloody hands down his white apron.
* * *
Fuck me dainty, look who’s graced us with his presence, Alroy said to his bookkeeper, an elderly man named John Burns who had a blunt, expressionless face and a beer between two palsied hands. It was said that the old bookkeeper kept not only a meticulous ledger of outstanding debts but a running list of a borrower’s relatives and relations, a family tree, in case the loans went south. Hal’s father had been a regular here and he’d once developed a daguerreotype portrait of Alroy as a way to pay off a poolroom loss. It now hung behind the bar—Alroy staring out audaciously beside a mantel, arms folded in houndstooth, a wall of mounted deer heads and hunting rifles in the background. He was short, ginger-bearded, going bald, slouching into middle age with an ale drinker’s paunch and drooping eyelids.
* * *
Is it from the Hudson? Hal asked, taking a stool at the bar and gesturing to the enormous fish. He knew you had to start with small talk when it came to these men. Brooklyn was full of criminals who liked to talk about baseball and the weather before they shot you in broad daylight or robbed you blind.
—She’s a beauty, don’t you think? Hauled her up off Red Hook, down by the navy yards. And to what do we owe this pleasure?
He brought the knife down on the silver tail and squared it off. Hal thought about the noxious smell of the water down in Red Hook, the way it hung over Brooklyn when the wind blew wrong.
—I’m just stopping by. To work out what I owe.
Alroy turned to the bookkeeper.
—If memory serves, Chester’s boy is already up to date. Didn’t that goose drop the funds yesterday? Regular as prune juice, that shaper.
—No, I mean all of it, said Hal.
Alroy set the knife down on the steel countertop and wiped his hands again.
—Leaving for China, are you? Flossy won’t like that.
—I’m branching out and want to get things squared away.
Alroy smiled, nodded.
—Branching out? What, like a tree?
Hal felt his pulse thickening behind his ears.
—I’m prepared to pay out the rest of the loan plus interest. All of it up front, but then we’re settled.
Alroy washed his hands methodically with soap in the bar sink and walked toward Hal, his fingertips dripping and raised like a scrubbed surgeon’s.
—Sounds big, like something your investors might like. What is it? Another theater where you’re going to show some bird’s flickering old tits and a couple of drunks in a street brawl?
It occurred to Hal that even as his biggest creditor, Alroy had never stepped foot inside the Bender Bijoux, that everything he knew of the operation was based on hearsay, that it was no different in his mind from a flophouse or a pawnshop, just another way to filch coins from a workingman’s pockets.
—I’m going to start shooting my own films across the river. A couple a week. Over in New Jersey.
—That so? Remind me, what’s your brother’s name, the one who used to turn pages for the organ-grinder in church?
—Angus.
—So Angus and your mother will run the parlor down the road?
—I’ll still keep an eye on the place.
Alroy nodded, puckered.
—Sounds like a fucking disaster. Your mother’ll be showing picnics and nuns on bicycles again in no time.
* * *
Alroy turned his back on Hal and spoke to the bookkeeper.
—Suppose, John, we were to let Hal Bender here walk away into the clear sunshine, what would that hypothetical number look like?
Old John took a sip of his beer and consulted a ledger that resembled a hymnal. Debtors called it the House Bible or the Fulton Street Book of the Dead, the brain trust of the Healy empire that always sat at the bar, smelling of ale and onions, guarded by the proprietor and put in the safe at night. John flipped shakily through some pages.
—We would have to factor in increased ticket sales over time, since we’re in for a take.
—We’re already showing reels twenty times a day and attendance is dropping. That’s why I need to make new product, Hal said.
—Assume full houses for the term of the loan, one year remaining, plus the interest, said Alroy.
John Burns wobbled a few numbers down on the back of an envelope and completed some long multiplication. He took another sip of his beer and handed the envelope to Alroy, who inspected the total, nodded in approval, then slid it across the bar to Hal. Underlined three times in pencil was the number: $3,565.22.
—You’ll have it by the end of the month, said Hal.
There was a moment of squinting hesitation, as if a better deal might have been brokered, before Alroy looked at John, who looked into his beer. Acquiescence came in the form of the bookkeeper’s meditative sip, then a slow blink. Alroy turned and extended his hand over the bar to Hal.
—I’ll give you one thing, Hal Bender, you manage money a hell of a lot better than your old man ever did.
When he put Alroy’s wet hand in his, Hal felt voltage in his scalp. It was a question pricklin
g through his skin: had he just shaken the iodine-smelling hand of his father’s murderer? He wanted to test the waters with Alroy, to open up his own ledger page for a future repayment.
—My mother would agree with you. He owed a lot of people money when he died.
Alroy dried his hands and began moving some glassware onto a shelf, his eyes averted.
—It was unfortunate, that whole business. Some men should never leave the house.
—My youngest brother, Michael, barely remembers him. You knew him pretty well?
Hal saw the bookkeeper look up from his beer at the other end of the bar. Alroy still with his eyes down.
—He used to come in here sometimes, or one of the poolrooms or pawnshops. Quick with a joke or a story, old Chester, but always with some calamity chasing him down like a rabid fucking dog.
* * *
For years, Hal had read people out in the street as he tried to lure them into the parlor. He prided himself on knowing the difference between shyness and worry, between distraction and cunning. What he saw now was a man trying very hard to look occupied with glassware. Hal looked back at the bookkeeper and said, Who knows? Maybe someday they’ll find out who killed him. He got off his stool and walked toward the front door. From behind him, he heard Alroy’s steady voice saying I wouldn’t hold your breath, and he felt the force of it between his shoulder blades.
* * *
Between May and October each year, they filmed scenes and scenarios along the Hudson. Cliffside rescues of a distressed Sabine, or Chip Spalding, doubled as an actor, leaping from the prow of a sinking ketch. There were lynchings, barroom brawls between Mexicans and Indians, kidnapped wives taken to remote cabins, vengeful grand finales in stockades and stone quarries.
* * *
Their first narratives were disjointed and unedited; they exposed a single reel for each sequence, filmed until they had five sections, each under two minutes, then Claude spliced them all together. A new set of reels drew paying customers at the Bender Bijoux for a week, but then the audience tapered off and the films had to be swapped out. In the early days, Claude made positives of the longer reels so that Hal could sell the copies in Pittsburgh and Boston and Chicago, to operators who weren’t competing for the same actors and audiences.
* * *
This ad hoc arrangement continued until 1908. Since Claude, Chip, and Sabine were all foreigners, Hal had to ensure that they left the country twice a year to avoid complications with immigration. Sabine wintered back in Paris most years, while Chip and Claude made three-day trips to Montreal or Toronto to appease the officials. Meanwhile, Hal saw that moviegoers were losing their appetite for slapstick and spectacle. They wanted stories of intricate peril and promise, not just pratfalls and pranks. He also saw that his makeshift production company was wearing itself ragged. Every summer was a dash for scenarios and locations. In the papers, Edison was offering fifteen dollars per story treatment and receiving thousands of submissions a week. Americans, especially the workaday crowd, were film crazed. Anyone with a dime in his pockets could wade onto those nitrate shoals. The boom wouldn’t last forever, though, so Hal began to explore his options for boosting production by building a permanent studio across the Hudson.
* * *
They had filmed many times in Fort Lee, New Jersey, a small town with hotels, saloons, and livery stables that catered to summer tourists. Rambo’s Hotel rented out its upstairs as dressing rooms and the actors were allowed to eat out back, at wooden picnic tables under the apple trees. Magistrates and Comanche braves and cigar girls sat eating corned beef and cabbage, drinking mugs of ale and smoking cigarettes between scenes. Surrounded by woods and fields and the dramatic Palisades vistas over the Hudson, Fort Lee was a moviemaking idyll. You could film a dry goods merchant coming out of a hotel or bank on Main Street, move a few minutes away, and capture a bloody Indian standing over a wounded soldier on a cliff top. The Wild West could be improvised on rocky bluffs and down in sunless ravines. Chip, who’d grown up wrangling and droving, stabled a few trick horses on Main Street and had easy access to them throughout a summer of daylong shoots.
* * *
One Sunday in the summer of 1908, Hal invited Sabine, Chip, and Claude to go scouting for a permanent moviemaking home. They rode the ferry across the Hudson to Edgewater, where a real-estate agent met them with a touring motorcar. They took in Fort Lee, Coytesville, and Shadyville in a single day. Offhandedly, the agent mentioned that he’d recently taken another group out on a similar tour. They were going to build a film studio on a dead-end street in Coytesville. Some nickelodeon men sick of paying Edison hand over fist, said the man.
* * *
That summer, Edison was in the midst of forming the Motion Picture Patents Company, a group of ten producers and distributors who wanted to control how films looped and projected, which celluloid was used (Eastman Kodak with Edison-style perforations), even how a movie theater could obtain their reels (sales replaced by rentals). But a small band of independent operators were braced to defy Edison’s cinematic land grab and Hal Bender wanted to be among them.
* * *
The agent took them out to a twenty-acre ruin on the edge of the Palisades, overlooking the Hudson. It was upriver from the Palisades Amusement Park, a crowded summer destination that featured a midway freak show, high divers, and dirigible rides over the river. No one had lived on the property for twenty years.
* * *
There was a big, dilapidated clapboard house that needed to be demolished but the old stone stables were still in working order. There were cabins where day actors could bunk down, fields and woods and exposed cliff faces for filming. Hal saw the blueprint of the future etched into the terrain and outbuildings. They would rent out horses to the other production studios, build a film lab where they could import uncut French celluloid, make their own perforations, develop their own negatives, and bypass the Edison system entirely.
* * *
And in the rusting hothouse of iron and glass, Claude saw the hotel’s rooftop conservatory where he’d first captured Sabine bathing, or the trussed, transparent ceiling of the Strand Arcade back in Sydney, and he imagined a new prototype for a production stage. By filming under glass he could keep out the elements while minimizing shadow and reducing lighting costs. He watched Sabine standing at the edge of the cliffs, imagined her moving through pools of glassy sunlight.
* * *
Hal asked Sabine if she would consider spending her summers at the studio. She stood with a parasol shielding her from the sun, looking across the river at the Manhattan skyline. She turned from the shining blue slate of the river to look at him squarely. Claude and Chip stood on either side of Hal, their faces shadowed under hat brims, and the real-estate agent stood in the background, holding his straw boater, awaiting a verdict.
* * *
It was midday, Sabine realized, and she’d been lured out to the cliffs in the best possible weather and light for a noonday seduction.
—On two conditions. First, my name must appear prominently at the beginning of each filmstrip. Second, I will need my own little cottage, not too far from the cliffs and the river. Is it possible? Nothing lavish, perhaps made from local stone, and you must promise to situate the actors’ bunkhouses as far away as possible.
By Hal’s reckoning, that was three conditions, but he was just relieved she didn’t need more convincing. He’d prepared a speech in case she wavered, an account of his own cinematic baptism in the Union Square theater, of his vision of a vertically integrated factory of images.
—I think the cottage should have a front porch, don’t you, Hal said, so you can sit out here in the evenings?
This made her smile under her parasol. Hal turned to Claude and Chip.
—And you, gentlemen?
—It’s got everything I need, said Chip. Stables, open fields, cliffs to jump from … I’ll build a living space above the stables, if that’s all right. The smell of horses has always been a
comfort to me.
* * *
Claude, who now wore a camera lens on a lanyard wherever he went, held Sabine’s refracted image inside a cubic inch of glass. She looked away, folded her arms. When they were out filming in a ravine or on a cliff top, she was often tender and warm, but then there were days of aloofness he felt as a chill in his bones. He turned the peephole back toward the old house in a wide sweeping shot that made him dizzy. He lowered the lens, steadied himself.
—When they demolish the house, Hal, have them burn it down instead of using a wrecking ball. I’d like to film the blaze and use it for a future film.
* * *
Hal Bender ran the studio like the benevolent owner of a piano factory or a glassworks. He devised schemes to increase efficiency and cut costs, but he never took his eye off the beauty of the end product. The indoor scenes were shot in the glasshouse, its roof constructed like a cantilevered bridge to minimize the shadowy interference of columns and trusses. There was a raised steel walkway, where the camera could be positioned on a trolley that glided on ball bearings.
The Electric Hotel: A Novel Page 11