McPherson said, “We caught a couple of breaks. One of them was Valentino here.”
Poll shook a finger at Valentino. “I know what you’d like, and it’s yours. When The Day the Earth Stood Still is in the can, UCLA will have exclusive distribution rights to the original. Mind, I don’t know when that will be. We have to find a new director, and when a major studio is forced to stop production for an entire day, there’s no telling how long it will take to get back up to speed.”
“Congratulations, Franklin. Looks like you’re back in charge.”
“I’m a survivor. So’s Quincy, in a way. The new film will be dedicated to him, of course, and there’s talk of naming a special award for him at the Academy.”
That was it. Valentino had been aware that there was something different about Poll’s office. He’d thought it was the mood of its occupant, but now he knew. “Where is your Oscar, by the way?” The desk was empty of everything but the telephone and intercom.
“I took it home. It seemed disrespectful to keep it on display after what happened to Quincy.” Poll spoke quickly.
“Maybe it just needs cleaning.”
“Cleaning? No.” The producer looked away.
Valentino said, “Sizemore’s a demolitions expert. When it came to shutting down the studio, he’d go to his strength. Bludgeoning a director to death is an amateur play. Something a desperate producer might do when he sees all his authority passing into the hands of a punk who ought to be shooting dog-food commercials.”
“Sergeant McPherson, has anyone from a studio asked you about becoming a technical advisor? It pays well, and you won’t have to give up your job with the city.”
McPherson was wide awake. “I think I’d like a look at that Oscar. The M.E. found traces of gold in Dundrear’s skull.”
For a moment it looked as if Poll were undecided whether to call his receptionist or bolt for the door. The sergeant drew his pistol.
Valentino went over and put a hand on the producer’s shoulder. “It’s bad casting, Franklin. You can’t bring it off.”
A string seemed to snap inside Poll, then. Valentino caught his weight and maneuvered him into the Eames chair.
“Get that bottle!” McPherson shouted.
The producer had taken a plastic prescription container from an inside pocket. Valentino clawed it out of his fist and read the label. “Valium.” He put it in his own pocket.
“I’m an old fool.” Poll was sitting now with his head tilted back, gripping the arms of the chair tightly as if to avoid slipping to the floor. “I took the Oscar with me to his office. I thought I could shame him into doing honor to a project that would bear my name as producer. It didn’t mean anything to him.”
“How could it?” Valentino asked. “He didn’t pay his dues, like you.”
“He said he knew a shop on Sunset where he could have one made for twenty bucks and put any name he wanted on the plaque. ‘Deep Throat,’ he said. ‘Best Performance by an Orifice.’ I didn’t even know I was hitting him until the statue got so slippery it slid out of my hands. I picked it up and walked out of his office. It’s there, in the bottom drawer of my desk. I didn’t even try to clean it.”
Valentino stepped that way and opened the drawer. He looked at McPherson and nodded.
“Call headquarters,” the sergeant said. “Ask for Lieutenant Carl Decker. Tell him I need a couple of uniforms.”
Poll’s eyes rolled Valentino’s way. He looked old behind the granny glasses. “I’m sorry, Val.”
“You shouldn’t meddle outside your sphere.” Valentino lifted the receiver.
Greed
MAX FINK’S VERY PUBLIC DREAM of 1927 turned into a hangover in 1929, but by then everyone else was too busy taking aspirins to notice.
Fink had lucked into millions in 1912, when he rented out his candy store in Brooklyn evenings and weekends for the exhibition of silent motion-picture shorts. When he came by one night after closing and saw how many people had lined up to pay to see painted Indians chasing a train across the New Jersey countryside, he evicted his tenants, bought a projector, struck a deal with a local distributor, and went into show business.
The movie colony migrated to southern California. Fink followed, pausing at choice locations across the continent to purchase vaudeville theaters in trouble and convert them into movie houses. Fifteen years after he stopped selling candy, he invested his profits in the stock market and used his credit to build a chain of motion picture palaces from coast to coast, saving the jewel in the crown for Los Angeles.
The Oracle was designed as a Balinese-Turkish-Grecian temple, with a slight Polynesian influence. Seating was planned for 5000, with space in the pit for a 100-piece orchestra. Fink commissioned a four-manual Wurlitzer pipe organ, a half-ton crystal chandelier, and plaster Pegasuses to flank the grand staircase leading to the mezzanine. When word reached H. L. Mencken, he said it showed what God could do if He had bad taste.
Then The Jazz Singer opened to delirious throngs at Grauman’s, and overnight Hollywood shut down all its silent productions, built sound stages, and wired its sets so audiences could hear their favorite matinee idols speaking lines instead of having to read them on title cards. All this retooling sparked a recession in California. Reluctantly, Fink told his contractor to reduce the size of the orchestra pit and reconfigure the auditorium to seat only 1,800. Construction in six cities was postponed until the industry caught its second wind.
In spite of the cutbacks, the completed Oracle was a wonder. Its marquee towered forty feet into the sky, lit by 16,000 electric bulbs, with colored searchbeams swiveling and crossing far above the rooftops. The attendance at the premiere of The Hollywood Review of 1929 shattered every record set since Ben Hur in 1926. But six months later, Max Fink was broke.
After Wall Street crashed in ’29, Fink was forced to sell his theater chain to avoid bankruptcy. It was a temporary reprieve. In 1933 he shot himself to death in a dollar-a-week hotel room within sight of a line waiting to get in to see Mae West in a personal appearance at the Oracle. Nearly seventy years later, it was rumored Max Fink’s ghost still roamed the aisles of his beloved picture palace.
If so, the dust and mold spores must have kept him too busy sneezing to rattle his chains.
This time, when Valentino stepped onto the sidewalk before the theater, there were no crowds, no colored lights, no bulky cops in double-breasted tunics to hold back hysterical women. Partly it was because this Valentino was not the star of The Sheik; mostly it was because the Oracle was a wreck. Time and competing forms of entertainment had not been kind to the place. The fabulous marquee was long gone, the Deco fluting and baroque flourishes that had decorated the building’s facade chipped and pigeon-stained and blackened with soot. Plywood covered the box-office windows and a palimpsest of spray-painted gang signs coated the sandstone to a height of eight feet all around. When he entered the lobby, Valentino left footprints an inch deep in the dust on the linoleum that covered the marble floor. Nothing remained of the friezes and statuary. Insulation hung like entrails from a ceiling ten feet lower than the original.
“It’s what you’d call a fixer-upper,” said the real-estate agent, Anita Somebody. She was a carefully preserved blonde in her forties, and Valentino knew her story without asking: She’d come out from Des Moines or someplace like that twenty years ago, hoping for a shot at Dallas, and when that missed the mark and she couldn’t get work in commercials, it was either realty or prostitution. Prostitution didn’t come with a health plan. She looked obscenely well pressed in her agency blazer and tailored skirt among the rat droppings.
“I barely know one end of a hammer from the other,” Valentino said. “Why are you showing me this place again? I’m looking for a place to live.”
“It’s the closest we can come to your budget, unless you want to commute from Oxnard. The neighborhood’s zoned commercial and residential. No one’s sure where the break is. You could put in twenty years before they figure it
out.”
“I can’t afford it. I don’t mean the purchase price. If I bought this place, I’d feel obligated to restore it to its original grandeur. Did I mention I’m on salary at UCLA?”
Her lipstick smile told him she hadn’t capped her teeth. “Why don’t you postpone your decision until you’ve seen the projection booth?”
But he was in trouble long before he got there. The path led through the auditorium, crushed red velvet seats and gilt sconces, strung with cobwebs but no less charming for the neglect than Egyptian treasures half-buried in Sahara sand. He felt the same tingle he’d felt when his mother took his hand and led him into a movie theater for the first time. But that had been only a square blockhouse in Fox Forage, Indiana. This was Max Fink’s fabled Oracle, home of Hell’s Angels, 42nd Street, and Anna Christie. He could almost hear Garbo’s smoky voice, saying—
“There’s a hidden staircase here.”
“What?” He had to put on the brakes to keep from colliding with Anita the realtor. She’d stopped to pry with her fingers at a seam in the drywall. A six-foot-tall rectangular section came away, revolving on parched hinges. Dusty light lay on a flight of steep narrow steps leading upward.
“They seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to keep the customers from finding the projection booth,” she said.
“Illusion.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“They called Hollywood the Dream Factory,” Valentino said. “A dream won’t work if you know where it’s coming from. They cared about that kind of thing back then.”
“Before my time, I guess. I just like to pop a tape into the VCR and veg out on the sofa in my sweats.”
He smiled. “Bet you liked There’s Something About Mary.”
“Oh, yes. It was hilarious! Now, follow me carefully. I’m sure these steps aren’t up to code.”
In the stairwell he thought he smelled stale popcorn and Moxie. It was probably dry rot, or else phantom Fink having a snack. Valentino had to turn sideways to avoid rubbing the walls with his shoulders.
The booth was actually a spacious loft, with a square opening overlooking the screen, or what remained of it behind a burlap-colored fire curtain. He remembered the Oracle had been one of the last L.A. theaters to show 3-D films back in the fifties. That required twin Bell & Howell projectors, each the size of a VW Beetle. They’d have needed plenty of room, but not this much. He could have put all the furniture in his present quarters into this space.
Anita sensed his curiosity. “There used to be a wall there. On the other side was a sort of lumber room where they stored posters and props. They had live shows onstage during the Depression, to entice people who wouldn’t ordinarily spend the money on a ticket. In the sixties this was a hippie commune.” She was chanting like a tour guide. “There’s a bathroom through that door, which the projectionist used. It’s a comfortable bachelor arrangement.”
“What’s behind that door?” He pointed. This one had curved corners, set into a gasketlike frame. It had a broom handle.
“Believe it or not, it’s a vault. We’re supposed to keep it locked so kids can’t get in and suffocate. That’s where they kept the films. There’s nothing in there now, just empty cans.”
He asked to look. She produced a ring of keys and undid the deadbolt. The enclosure was four feet wide and six feet deep. Anita held the door while he stepped inside. He was glad he hadn’t said what he thought of There’s Something About Mary.
The air was stale but dry and cool. There was no light fixture. He peered through the dimness, groping at built-in racks holding jumbles of flat film cans that made a tinny empty sound when he moved them. A built-in bench allowed him to sit while he tugged at one of a row of cans standing on edge on the bottom rack. Something thumped inside. He rattled the next three or four in line. He was sure they contained reels of film.
Many disappointments encountered in his years with UCLA’s Film Preservation Department had taught him not to get excited. He’d probably stumbled on someone’s long-forgotten pornographic library. He lifted a can off the rack and turned it toward the light outside, squinting at the yellowed label.
He returned the can to the rack—his hand didn’t even shake—and stepped outside, dusting off his palms. “If I buy this place, everything comes with it, right?”
Anita frowned prettily. “You mean mineral rights? I’m—”
“No, I mean all the contents of the building.”
“Of course. A sale is a sale.”
Valentino smiled. “Where do I sign?”
“Greed? You ought to open a window in your screening room. You’ve been breathing acetate.”
Kyle Broadhead pronounced Valentino intoxicated in the ringing tone he used in his classroom to declare Robert Altman a hack. The Film Studies professor lay almost supine in his ergonomic office chair with his feet propped on the drawleaf of his desk, unscrewing and screwing back together the pieces of his favorite pipe, which he was no longer allowed to smoke on campus. With his eyelids at half-mast and his chin drawn into the loose flesh around his neck, he resembled a trimmed-down Alfred Hitchcock; a director he admired up to a point.
“I don’t blame you for thinking that,” Valentino said. “You’ve forgotten more about cinema history than I’ll ever know.”
“Flattering, but inaccurate. I’ve forgotten nothing.”
Idle braggadocio, in anyone but the author of The Persistence of Vision, the bible of film preservation. The book chronicled Broadhead’s thirty-year quest for the original 1912 version of Quo Vadis? produced in Italy; a quest interrupted by the three years he spent in a prison in Yugoslavia, accused of spying. He was Valentino’s only mentor.
“I thought I was a buccaneer,” Broadhead continued. “I never signed an agreement to buy a house on the evidence of a label on a film can I didn’t open.”
“I didn’t want to open one under those conditions. You know how unstable that old nitrate stock is. For all I knew, the next person she showed the place to might have been with MCA or Turner. Or worse, some real-estate developer who wouldn’t know Stroheim from Streisand and threw it all out. I had to jump.”
Broadhead pursed his lips, Hitchcock fashion. “You’ve been day-dreaming for years about buying one of these broken-down picture palaces and fixing it up. You just wanted an excuse.”
“Partly. I didn’t imagine seeing that label. And there were enough cans on the rack to suggest it’s a complete print.”
Valentino let him ponder while he breathed in the cramped academic atmosphere. Books crowded the floor in careless stacks, an arrangement that contrasted sharply with the orderly shelves of videotapes, DVDs, and sixteen-millimeter prints in dustproof cases. He knew he was coming off faintly ridiculous, like a tourist waving a map he’d bought from a street hustler, thinking he possessed the key to the Lost Dutchman. Preservationists and silent-film buffs had been looking for Erich von Stroheim’s directorial masterpiece since 1925, when his horrified superiors at MGM slashed its twenty-four reel, four-hour running time by more than half and, apparently, threw away the deleted footage. Valentino calculated that over time he’d wasted an amount equal to the department’s annual budget chasing rumors of fragments and entire reels awaiting rescue from junk shops in Vienna, Alaskan landfills, and the cellars of eccentric private collectors.
“Everything’s against it, including timing,” Broadhead said. “The film was four years old when the Oracle opened. By then you couldn’t give away tickets to a silent feature, so what was it doing in the vault? I think your realtor salted the mine. She probably did her homework on you after you made the appointment.”
“That’s diabolical, even for California.”
“Von Stroheim chose the title Greed for a reason.”
“Anyway, it can’t hurt to check it out. I have to fly to San Francisco this afternoon to look at B trailers. Also I’m nervous about handling eighty-year-old stock. Can you take a look?”
The professor blew through his pipe
. “Maybe it’s time we laid this grail to rest. It’s consumed too much money and far too many careers, starting with von Stroheim’s.”
“In other words, you don’t want any part of it.”
“Who said that? My God, man, it’s Greed. Give me the keys.”
In San Francisco, Valentino was working for the enemy. A retired RKO flack had died there of complications from a broken hip, leaving fifty thousand feet of promotional trailers from 1940s programmers to his daughter, and Viacom wanted an expert evaluation before buying them to dress up some re-releases on video. The company’s pockets were so deep its board of directors didn’t realize it had been in competition with UCLA for the world’s dwindling supply of classic films for years. But in return for Valentino’s advice, the megacorporation had promised to donate a percentage of the profits to the Film Preservation Department.
The department could use the cash, and after his impulsive action that morning, the archivist needed the job security. The mortgage on the Oracle would eat up everything he stood to gain from the sale of the house he’d outgrown in West Hollywood, and he was looking at a couple of hundred thousand dollars’ worth of renovations that would take years to complete. What had he been thinking?
His elegant room at the Drake—courtesy of his temporary employers—helped him forget for a time his commitment to a steady diet of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and the trailers, which were in pristine condition, allowed him to lose himself in the era of snap-brim hats and mink stoles. But the trolley-car trip back downtown after the screening only reminded him of the location shots for Greed. Von Stroheim, mad genius that he was, had insisted upon filming every line of Frank Norris’s novel, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, tracing the descent of a good-natured, slow-witted dentist into insanity and murder, all for a cache of money his wife had hidden from him. Valentino had been appalled and fascinated by the butchered version he had seen, and was obsessed with the opportunity to experience the director’s original vision.
Valentino: Film Detective Page 10