Final Cuts
Page 31
Maria went back to Williamsburg and became an accountant like she told Emil she would. She was good at it. At least that’s what I heard. We haven’t talked since.
Emil shot up a convenience store two weeks later in Berkeley, screaming about ghosts.
I went home.
Home to small-town nowhere, working in a salon, away from Hollywood and its dreams of faceless hungry girls with bright red mouths.
That was it.
You have to believe us.
We have nothing else left.
CUT FRAME
Gemma Files
Old movies are the dreams of dead people.
—NIALL QUENT to BARRY JENKINSON, CanCon on CanCon (1995, First Hand Waving Press)
Transcript of file recorded 12/05/18 by R. Puget / T. Jankiewicz
Filed under Case #C23-1972, Freihoeven Parapsychological Institute, Toronto
Reported: Intern L. Jankiewicz 11/17/18
Cross-saved at www.noetichealth.org/interviews/torcdusk.mp3
RP: —test, test, test. Excellent. This is Ross Puget for Noetic Health, here with Dr. Tadeusz Jankiewicz of Toronto, who’s consented to be interviewed at the encouragement of his granddaughter Lily, our favourite intern. Say a few words into the mike, Doc?
TJ: Like this?
RP: Perfect. I don’t suppose you had a chance to sign the paperwork we sent you yet?
TJ: Yes, all done. I’ll admit I was surprised at the amount of releases you require. Lily made this sound very much a…hmmm, what? Hobby, I think is how she put it.
RP: I’d use the word “vocation,” myself.
TJ: Have you had legal troubles before?
RP: (PAUSE) Nothing significant.
TJ: And you’d like to keep it that way, right? It’s okay, Mr. Puget. I’ve had patients minded to be—unpleasant, from time to time; a little posterior-covering never goes amiss, eh?
RP: You’re very understanding.
TJ: Well, this isn’t a story I would have told if I was still practicing. I should also warn you, the material I can show you doesn’t offer much proof of…anything. Not as much as I’m guessing you’d prefer to have.
RP: Well, we’ll get to that when we get to it.
Supplementary Notes
Subject: Dr. Tadeusz Jankiewicz
(Photograph attached: 5'8", 172 lb., Polish Caucasian, white hair, blue eyes)
Bio: DOB 2/15/1941, Morges, Switzerland
Immigrated to Toronto with family August 1943
Graduated U of T Faculty of Dentistry June 1965
Retired April 2008
Location: Subject’s residence, 132 Fermanagh Avenue, Toronto, Ontario
Notes: (Transcript of voice recording, R. Puget)
Home looks like it was built in the ’20s, but really well maintained. Floors mostly hardwood. Front parlour’s been converted into a single-patient dental treatment suite, apparently no longer used. Wall decor’s very much film-buff paradise: instead of paintings or photos, framed lobby cards, posters, alternate artwork—the classic concept art poster for Star Wars is here, some modern Hitchcock reworkings, looks like a complete run of Cronenberg’s ’70s and ’80s stuff…one bookshelf’s full of film reference stuff, too—books by Ebert, Kael, all three of Danny Peary’s Cult Movies—wow, he’s even got Weird Sex and Snowshoes. Bet it’s been a while since anyone took that down. Oh. Just noticed—one spot on the wall outside the dental suite looks like a frame’s been removed. Remember to ask what that was.
Transcript torcdusk.mp3 continued:
RP: We should probably start with the basics. You’re the primary investor and only currently living producer credited on IMDb for The Torc, directed by Niall Quent and released in 1973.
TJ: Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? All it meant was that I signed cheques and got to visit the set, wherever it was that week.
RP: How did you become an investor?
TJ: One of my patients at the time was a producer, a real one, and he’d worked with Quent before. My practice was becoming successful enough that I was thinking about tax-protective investments, and Oleg told me the film industry was an excellent place to park my money.
RP: This was the beginning of the tax-shelter era of Canadian film, of course. I saw your collection, in the living room.
TJ: Ah, well, that’s all 20/20 hindsight, isn’t it? I have to admit, even at the beginning, Oleg was telling me all about the ways I could hide even more money if I’d wanted to, at a hundred percent return, so it didn’t surprise me when it all came crashing down in the ’80s. Did you know that of the sixty-six feature films officially produced in Canada in 1979, more than half of them were never released at all? And this was the year before their internally notorious “Canada Can and Does” campaign, at Cannes—the one that Lawrence O’Toole wrote about in Maclean’s (article referenced can be found by searching under June 2, 1980, at http://archive.macleans.ca), under the headline “Canada Can’t.” A hundred percent became fifty, and all the Hollywood North types ran back home like their, eh…
RP: Asses were on fire? Wow, no, I did not know all that. This Oleg sounds like he was a real, um—
TJ: Oh, he was a sleazebucket, without question. Not that my own motives were more honourable, I suppose.
RP: The tax returns.
TJ: Only partly. The rest…that was for her. Tamar.
RP: Tamar Dusk. (BEAT) Did you ever get to meet her? Maybe on set?
TJ: Once. But I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s important that you understand things as I came to understand them. The—situation. Have you ever seen The Torc?
RP: Yes, actually. I probably didn’t have the intended audience reaction; I just remember that booming narration, and the catchphrase—“Don’t! Put! On! The Torc!” (LAUGHS)
TJ: (LAUGHS) Well, don’t feel too bad. I’m not sure even Quent knew what reaction he was going for. That wasn’t his, what’s the word, his process. Oleg once told me Quent’s method was simply to film as much as possible with “any recognizable American,” as he said it, and then to do the pickup shooting afterward—and only then would he figure out what the film was “about.” Sometimes, Quent wouldn’t even have much more than a title, or even a poster—nothing so coherent as a script.
RP: And this didn’t put you off? It sounded like a good idea?
TJ: It was the only film I’d ever been personally involved with. It still is. I wasn’t a director, I was a dentist. And a fan.
RP: Of Niall Quent?
TJ: Of Tamar Dusk.
Supplementary Notes: Tamar Dusk
Tamar Dusk
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tamar Dusk, born[?? confirm] Tamar Janika Duzhneskaya (January 6, 1917–????), is a Slavic American actress best known for her “exotic” roles in several noir and horror B movies between 1936 and 1960, all directed by Nicholas Ryback, as well for the controversies surrounding her personal history that emerged during the era of the Hollywood blacklist and, in latter years, apocryphal rumours about the “Dusk Curse.” This controversy has continued in part into the modern day following Dusk’s last appearance in the little-known Canadian horror film The Torc (dir. Niall Quent, 1973), after which Dusk and her husband began an extended campaign to render Dusk’s personal information as legally inaccessible as possible, to the extent that even Dusk’s date of death cannot presently be verified. Her most well-known roles include Mara in Under the Bridge (1937), “The Woman” in Woman without a Name (1940), Ingrid in Kiss of the Succubus (1945), Eriska in Blood Mirror (1953), and Mrs. Larkwood in The Whispering Widow (1957), all directed by Nicholas Ryback.
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From IMDb.com:
“I never had the opportunity to work with Tamar myself; there is no doubt that her refusal to work with anyone other than Nicholas Ryback did her career no favors. I was lucky enough to meet her once or twice, and if there is any substance to the ‘Dusk Curse’ rumors, it only proves how any beautiful yet remote woman can provoke destructive obsession in others simply by existing. She had the remarkable gift of making you feel as if merely by joining her company you had rescued her from some great sadness, yet when you left her, you took some of that sadness with you—and it seemed a gift. Had she chosen to work with any other director, she would have been one of the great tragic actresses of her generation.” —Alfred Hitchcock
“Dusk had talent. Can’t argue with that. Her problem was, she never really stopped performing. That’s nothing unusual in Hollywood, but she took it over the top. The whole business with only shooting at night, hiding her real name, her home country—she let the press make too much out of it, probably to get the publicity, and it shot her in the foot. She was no more a Communist than my cat. But between all the questions she wouldn’t answer and her lack of friends, it didn’t surprise me how it ended. She put all her eggs in Nicky Ryback’s basket. Once his eyes were gone, so was she.” —Elia Kazan
“I do not talk about myself, because I do not consider it a subject of appropriate interest. The audience is here to watch the characters I create. My task is to disappear.” —Tamar Dusk
Transcript torcdusk.mp3 continued:
RP: Tell me about the first time you saw Tamar Dusk.
TJ: On-screen? It was 1955, I was twelve. One of my friends had persuaded his big brother to act as the “accompanying adult” so we could all go to a late-night showing of Blood Mirror at a repertory theatre. I remember the smell of the popcorn—too much fake butter—the feel of the velvet cushions on the seats. If I close my eyes, I can still see all her scenes.
RP: Do you remember which version of Blood Mirror you saw?
TJ: You’re thinking about the lost final scene, aren’t you?* No, I’d never heard about any of that; like I said, I was a fan, not a film student. Not that it would have made a difference. Young men are never put off by stories like that, are they? Rather the reverse.
RP: Some of the books say Nick Ryback deliberately spread the rumour about a lost ending, to make up for the fact he didn’t really have an ending. The blacklist was into full swing by then, he was already getting pressure over working with Tamar at all, and since he was a Russian émigré himself, he wasn’t in any place to protect anyone else.
TJ: But better bad publicity than no publicity? That sounds much more like Quent, to be honest.
RP: You know, some people believe Tamar Dusk literally never worked with anybody but Nick Ryback in her entire career. The idea that she’d come up here and make some crappy CanCon project, with Niall Quent of all people…
TJ: Well, she did only work with Ryback, in Hollywood. But this was Hollywood North, one time, for one picture. Quent counted himself a very lucky man, in that respect.
RP: And what was he like, to work with?
TJ: Hmmm. Well, I didn’t speak with him a great deal, on set or off, but he didn’t strike me as, let’s say, the most organized of men. At the time, I thought he was just as starstruck as the rest of us. I remember being quite angry about it, in fact—he was hogging Tamar, her presence. Getting the chance to meet her was the entire reason I became involved, but whenever I brought it up, Quent always had a reason why it wasn’t a good time. She was feeling under the weather, she had a meeting and had to leave the moment shooting was done, they had to review script changes…
RP: You thought he was bullshitting you? Pardon my French.
TJ: Well, I didn’t have proof. It was all very plausible. She was not a young woman; she’d gone through her share of tragedy. Her career had mostly ended around 1960, when her director friend, Ryback, contracted retinal cancer and had to have his eyes removed, and then her first husband died—supposedly due to alcoholism, they say, but…
RP: Yeah, the rumours were all that it was suicide via OD. Pathological jealousy.
TJ: Indeed. And her second marriage wasn’t exactly…oh, let’s tell the truth and shame the devil, why don’t we? She married for money. He was a decade her senior, a financier who owned a chain of fur and leather coat warehouse outlets throughout Ontario—I don’t remember the name, I think they’re out of business now. That was how she came to live up here. He built her a private cabin of her own somewhere in Muskoka, the size of a mansion, fully staffed, all the luxuries. Even an in-house movie theatre. Though…I don’t think she ever watched anything there. (PAUSE) I don’t think she could have.
RP: What do you mean?
TJ: We’ll come to that. This has to be in the right order, Mr. Puget.
(PAUSE)
RP: So…what was it about her, exactly? Back in the day?
TJ: Huh. (LAUGHS) Have you seen her?
RP: In pictures, sure. Photos, stills…
TJ: But the films?
RP: I’ve seen clips.
TJ: Not enough. You had to see her in motion, but, um—also everything around her, all the rest? Ryback built his whole film to show her off, like a…jewel case. A stage. You needed to see how other people looked at her, how they reacted when she wasn’t there anymore. Even all the empty places where she might eventually be—it was a kind of suspense. She might turn up anywhere, any moment. It was like, eh…scratching a raw place just after the scab comes off, so sensitive, a memory of pain. All the nerves on fire, half-healed but still wounded. Like an itch. You were always looking for her, desperately, even after the movie stopped.
Besides which, she was sexy. I didn’t even know that word, the first time, but I felt it. In Blood Mirror, she was that first figure of complete, untrammeled eroticism every young boy encounters, sooner or later—the person, the face and body you can’t even think about without, ah…reaction, decades later. Will you think less of me if I admit that every woman I’ve ever been with, even Lily’s grandmother, looked like her, to some extent?
RP: Well, uh—I guess everyone has a type.
TJ: I’ve made you uncomfortable; I apologize. But please believe me, this isn’t just prurience; I was far from the only man to have that reaction.
One of the elements of the so-called Dusk Curse was the fact that Tamar had so many, they call them “stalkers” now, I think—far more than a comparatively minor B-list actress should have had. Security on her movie sets was eventually something like twice the industry norm. Which you’d think would make for good headlines, but most producers recognized the increased expense and insurance risk as counterproductive—only one mistake, one mad fan, and they’d have a disaster on their hands. That was the real reason she worked exclusively with Ryback: he was the only one willing to underwrite her costs. Which most people never think about, but when your own funds are at stake, that sort of research becomes critical. Film runs on cash. Once you’ve seen for yourself how money affects literally every decision in the process, you learn how to follow it.
RP: Is that why she married the rich Canadian guy? For money, security?
TJ: Difficult to say. I think he did make her feel safe…safer. She needed that.
RP: Because of her stalkers.
TJ: (SIGHS) We think we understand how bad things can get, because we lived through the 1960s, the 1970s…I remember someone inviting me and Lily’s grandmother out to Deep Throat, you know? Dinner and a movie, like a double date; “high-toned,” mainstream pornography. We sat there holding hands, trying to look anywhere but at the screen, as our hosts dry-humped each other next to us. Or your generation, growing up with the Internet—every one of you saturated in blatantly sexual imagery, from childhood on. But, neverthel
ess…
…try to imagine being Tamar Dusk, as a young woman, in 1936. To be, without effort or even intent, a figure of such raw attractiveness that more than half the people you speak to become stupid with it, while far too many of the rest turn vicious, jealous, petty, spiteful, suspicious, resentful. You think things might get better if you go to a place so full of other beautiful people, surely some of them can perhaps see past that glamour and be friends with who you are, instead of obsessed with what you look like; it doesn’t, though. Because the people there still just want to use you, to package you like a drug and sell you to addicts. So what you thought would be your salvation becomes, instead, just another marketplace, another pit full of dogs eating each other for the same scraps. Another hell.
RP: Doesn’t sound all that unusual so far, for Hollywood.
TJ: No. Most people on the same track, though—Greta Garbo, Hedy Lamarr, Rita Hayworth, Merle Oberon, Dorothy Dandridge…no, not even poor Marlene Dietrich, fleeing Germany one step ahead of her biggest fan—
RP: Hitler, right?
TJ: That was the rumour. And Garbo liked girls, and Lamarr swam nude but wanted to practice science; Merle could pass but Dandridge couldn’t, and Rita was a Mexican dancer too young to drink alone, who had to have her hairline raised with electrolysis so no one would know she wasn’t Irish. But none of them had to deal with what Tamar Dusk had to deal with, for which I’m sure they thanked their various versions of God. Or should have thanked Him.
RP: Wait a minute. Are you telling me the Dusk Curse was real?
TJ: What everybody thought was “the Dusk Curse” was only a side effect, essentially. The truth of it, the full phenomenon, is what I promised Lily to tell about you today.