“Down on your heels,” Peter Lawford instructed, “up on your toes,” and went into a triple step. Alis, holding a remote, ff’d past the song and stopped where the dance started, and watched it, her face intent, counting the steps. She rew’d to the end of the song. She punched a button and everyone froze in midstep.
She walked rapidly in the silly high-heeled shoes to the rear of the skids, out of reach of the frame, and pressed a button. Peter Lawford sang, “—that’s how it goes.”
Alis set the remote down on the floor, her full-skirted dress rustling as she knelt, and then hurried back to her mark and stood, obscuring June Allyson except for one hand and a tail of the pink skirt, waiting for her cue.
It came, Alis went down on her heels, up on her toes, and into a Charleston, with June behind her from this angle like a twin, a shadow. I moved over to where I could see her from the same angle as the Digimatte’s processor. June Allyson disappeared, and there was only Alis.
I had expected June Allyson to be wiped from the screen the way Princess Leia had been for the tourates’ scene at A Star Is Born, but Alis wasn’t making vids for the folks back home or even trying to project her image on the screen. She was simply rehearsing, and she had only hooked the Digimatte up to feed the fibe-op loop through the processor because that was the way she’d been taught to use it at work. I could see, even from here, that the “record” light wasn’t on.
I retreated to the half-open door. She was taller than June Allyson, and her dress was a brighter pink than June’s, but the image the Digimatte was feeding back into the fibe-op loop was the corrected version, adjusted for color and focus and lighting. And on some of these routines, practiced for hours and hours in these shut-off sections of the skids, done and redone and done again, that corrected image had been so close to the original that the ID-locks didn’t catch it, so close Alis’s image had gotten past the guards and onto the fibe-op source. And Alis had managed the impossible.
She flubbed a turn, stopped, clattered over to the remote in her pompomed heels, rew’d to the middle section just before the flub, and froze it. She glanced at the Digimatte’s clock, and then punched a button and hurried back to her mark.
She only had another half hour, if that, and then she would have to dismantle this equipment and take it back to Hollywood Boulevard, set it up, open up shop. I should let her. I could show her the opdisk another time, and I had found out what I wanted to know. I should shut the door and leave her to rehearse. But I didn’t. I leaned against the door, and stood there, watching her dance.
She went through the middle section three more times, working the clumsiness out of the turn, and then rew’d to the end of the song and went through the whole thing. Her face was intent, alert, the way it had been that night watching the Continental, but it lacked the delight, the rapt, abandoned quality of the Beguine.
I wondered if it was because she was still learning the routine, or if she would ever have it. The smile June Allyson turned on Peter Lawford was pleased, not joyful, and the “Varsity Drag” number itself was only so-so. Hardly Cole Porter.
It came to me then, watching her patiently go over the same steps again and again, as Fred must have done, all alone in a rehearsal hall before the movie had even begun filming, that I had been wrong about her.
I had thought that she believed, like Ruby Keeler and ILMGM, that anything was possible. I had tried to tell her it wasn’t, that just because you want something doesn’t mean you can have it. But she had already known that, long before I met her, long before she came to Hollywood. Fred Astaire had died the year she was born, and she could never, never, never, in spite of VR and computer graphics and copyrights, dance the Beguine with him.
And all this, the costumes and the classes and the rehearsing, was simply a substitute, something to do instead. Like fighting in the Resistance. Compared to the impossibility of what Alis was unfortunate enough to want, breaking into a Hollywood populated by puppets and pimps must have seemed a snap.
Peter Lawford took June Allyson’s hand, and Alis misjudged the turn and crashed into empty air. She picked up the remote to rew, glanced toward the station sign, and saw me. She stood looking at me for a long moment, and then walked over and shut off the Digimatte.
“Don’t—” I said.
“Don’t what?” she said, unhooking connections. She shrugged a white lab coat on over the pink dress. “Don’t waste your time trying to find a dancing teacher because there aren’t any?” She buttoned up the coat, and went over to the input and disconnected the feed. “As you can see, I’ve already figured that out. Nobody in Hollywood knows how to dance. Or if they do, they’re splatted on chooch, trying to forget.” She began looping the feed into a coil. “Are you?”
She glanced up at the station sign, and then laid the coiled feed on top of the Digimatte and knelt next to the compositor, skirt rustling. “Because if you are, I don’t have time to take you home and keep you from falling off the skids and fend off your advances. I have to get this stuff back.” She slid the pixar into its case and snapped it shut.
“I’m not splatted,” I said. “And I’m not drunk. I’ve been looking for you for six weeks.”
She lifted the Digimatte down and into its case and began stowing wires. “Why? So you can convince me I’m not Ruby Keeler? That the musical’s dead and anything I can do, comps can do better? Fine. I’m convinced.”
She sat down on the case and unbuckled the pompomed heels. “You win,” she said. “I can’t dance in the movies.” She looked over at the mirrored wall, shoe in hand. “It’s impossible.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t come to tell you that.”
She stuck the heels in one of the pockets of the lab coat. “Then what did you come to tell me? That you want your list of accesses back? Fine.” She slid her feet into a pair of slip-ons and stood up. “I’ve learned just about all the chorus numbers and solos anyway, and this isn’t going to work for partnered dancing. I’m going to have to find something else.”
“I don’t want the accesses back,” I said.
She pulled off the blond pageboy and shook out her beautiful backlit hair. “Then what do you want?”
You, I thought. I want you.
She stood up abruptly and jammed the wig in her other pocket. “Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait.” She slung the coil of feed over her shoulder. “I’ve got a job to go to.” She bent to pick up the cases.
“Let me help you,” I said, starting toward her.
“No, thanks,” she said, shouldering the pixar and hoisting the Digimatte. “I can do it myself.”
“Then I’ll hold the door for you,” I said, and opened it.
She pushed through.
Rush hour. Packed mirror to mirror with Ray Milland and Rosalind Russell on their way to work, none of whom turned to look at Alis. They were all looking at the walls, which were going full blast: ILMGM, More Copyrights Than There Are in Heaven. A promo for Beverly Hills Cop 15, a promo for a remake of The Three Musketeers.
I pulled the door shut behind me, and a River Phoenix, squatting on the yellow warning strip, looked up from a razor blade and a palmful of powder, but he was too splatted to register what he was seeing. His eyes didn’t even focus.
Alis was already halfway to the front of the skids, her eyes on the station sign. It blinked Hollywood Boulevard, and she pushed her way toward the exit, with me following in her wake, and out onto the boulevard.
It was still as dark as it gets, but everything was open. And there were still (or maybe already) tourates around. Two old guys in Bermuda shorts and vidcams were at the Happily Ever After booth, watching Ryan O’Neal save Ali MacGraw’s life.
Alis stopped at the gated grille of A Star Is Born and fumbled with her key, trying to insert the card without putting any of her stuff down. The two tourates wandered over.
“Here,
” I said, taking the key. I opened the gate and took the Digimatte from her.
“Do you have Charles Bronson?” one of the oldates said.
“We’re not open yet,” I said. “I have something I have to show you,” I said to Alis.
“What? The latest puppet show? An automatic rehearsal program?” She started setting up the Digimatte, plugging in the cables and fibe-op feed, shoving the Digimatte into position.
“I always wanted to be in Death Wish,” the oldate said. “Do you have that?”
“We’re not open,” I said.
“Here’s the menu,” Alis said, switching it on for the oldate. “We don’t have Charles Bronson, but we have got a scene from The Magnificent Seven.” She pointed to it.
“You have to see this, Alis,” I said, and shoved in the opdisk, glad I’d preset it and didn’t have to call anything up. On the Town came up on the screen.
“I have customers to—” Alis said, and stopped.
I had set the disk to “Next, please” after fifteen seconds. On the Town disappeared, and Singin’ in the Rain came up.
Alis turned angrily to me. “Why did you—”
“I didn’t,” I said. “You did.” I pointed at the screen. Tea for Two came up, and Alis, in red curls, Charlestoned her way toward the front of the screen.
“It’s not a paste-up,” I said. “Look at them. They’re the movies you’ve been rehearsing, aren’t they? Aren’t they?”
On the screen, Alis was high-stepping with her blue parasol.
“You talked about Singin’ in the Rain that night I met you. And I could have guessed some of the others. They’re all full-length shot and in one continuous take.” I pointed at her in her blue bustle. “But I didn’t even know what movie that was from.”
Hats Off came up. “And I’d never seen some of these.”
“I didn’t—” she said, looking at the screen.
“The Digimatte does a superimpose on the fibe-op image coming in and puts it on disk,” I said, showing her. “That image goes back through the loop, too, and the fibe-op source randomly checks the pattern of pixels and automatically rejects any image that’s been changed. Only you weren’t trying to change the image. You were trying to duplicate it. And you succeeded. You matched the moves perfectly, so perfectly the Brownian check thought it was the same image, so perfectly it didn’t reject it, and the image made it onto the fibe-op source.” I waved my hand at the screen, where she was dancing to “42nd Street.”
Behind us, the oldate said, “Who’s in this Magnificent Seven scene?” but Alis didn’t answer him. She was watching the shifting routines, her face intent. I couldn’t read her expression.
“How many are there?” she said, still looking at the screen.
“I’ve found fourteen,” I said. “You rehearsed more than that, right? The ones that got past the ID-locks are almost all dancers with the same shape of face and features you have. Did you do any Ann Millers?”
“Kiss Me, Kate,” she said.
“I thought you might have,” I said. “Her face is too round. Your features wouldn’t match closely enough to get past the ID-lock. It only works where there’s already a resemblance.” I pointed at the screen. “There are two others I found that aren’t on the disk because they’re in litigation. White Christmas and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”
She turned to look at me. “Seven Brides? Are you sure?”
“You’re right there in the barnraising scene,” I said. “Why?”
She had turned back to the screen, frowning at Shirley Temple, who was dancing with Alis and Jack Haley in military uniforms. “Maybe—” she said to herself.
“I told you dancing in the movies was impossible,” I said. “I was wrong. There you are.”
As I said it, the screen went blank, and the oldate said loudly, “How about that guy who says, ‘Make my day!’ Do you have him?”
I reached to start the disk again, but Alis had already turned away.
“I’m afraid we don’t have Clint Eastwood either. The scene from Magnificent Seven has Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner,” she said. “Would you like to see it?” and busied herself punching in the access.
“Does he have to shave his head?” his friend said.
“No,” Alis said, reaching for a black shirt and pants, a black hat. “The Digimatte takes care of that.” She started setting up the tape equipment, showing the oldate where to stand and what to do, oblivious of his friend, who was still talking about Charles Bronson, oblivious of me.
Well, what had I expected? That she’d be overjoyed to see herself up there, that she’d fling her arms around me like Natalie Wood in The Searchers? I hadn’t done anything. Except tell her she’d accomplished something she hadn’t been trying to do, something she’d turned down standing on this very boulevard.
“Yul Brynner,” the oldate’s friend said disgustedly, “and no Charles Bronson.”
On the Town was on the screen again. Alis switched it off without a glance and called up The Magnificent Seven.
“You want Charles Bronson and they give you Steve McQueen,” the oldate grumbled. “They always make you settle for second best.”
That’s what I love about the movies. There’s always some minor character standing around to tell you the moral, just in case you’re too dumb to figure it out for yourself.
“You never get what you want,” the oldate said.
“Yeah,” I said, “ ‘there’s no place like home,’ ” and headed for the skids.
VERA MILES: [Running out to corral, where RANDOLPH SCOTT is saddling horse] You were going to leave, just like that? Without even saying good-bye?
RANDOLPH SCOTT: [Cinching girth on horse] I got a score to settle. And you got a young man to tend to. I got the bullet out of that arm of his, but it needs bandaging. [RANDOLPH SCOTT steps in stirrup and swings up on horse]
VERA MILES: Will I see you again? How will I know you’re all right?
RANDOLPH SCOTT: I reckon I’ll be all right. [Tips hat] You take care, ma’am. [Wheels horse around and rides off into sunset]
VERA MILES: [Calling after him] I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me! Never!
I went home and started work. I did the ones that mattered first—restoring the double cigarette-lighting in Now, Voyager, putting the uranium back in the wine bottle in Notorious, reinebriating Lee Marvin’s horse in Cat Ballou. And the ones I liked: Ninotchka and Rio Bravo and Double Indemnity. And Seven Brides, which came out of litigation the day after I saw Alis. It was beeping at me when I woke up. I put Howard Keel’s drink and whiskey bottle back in the opening scene, and then ff’d to the barnraising and turned the pan of cornbread back into a jug before I watched Alis.
It was too bad I couldn’t have shown it to her; she’d seemed so surprised the number had made it onto film. She must have had trouble with it, and no wonder. All those lifts and no partner—I wondered what equipment she’d had to lug down Hollywood Boulevard and onto the skids to make it look like she was in the air. It would have been nice if she could see how happy she looked doing those lifts.
I put the barnraising dance on the disk with the others, in case Russ Tamblyn’s estate or Warner appealed, and then erased all my transaction records, in case Mayer yanked the Cray.
I figured I had two weeks, maybe three if the Columbia takeover really went through. Mayer’d be so busy trying to make up his mind which way to jump he wouldn’t have time to worry about AS’s, and neither would Arthurton. I thought about calling Heada—she’d know what was happening—and then decided that was probably a bad idea. Anyway, she was probably busy scrambling to keep her job.
A week anyway. Enough time to give Myrna Loy back her hangover and watch the rest of the musicals. I’d already found most of them, except for Good News and The Birds and the Bees. I put the dulce de lech
e back in Guys and Dolls while I was at it, and the brandy back in My Fair Lady and made Frank Morgan in Summer Holiday back into a drunk. It went slower than I wanted it to, and after a week and a half, I stopped and put everything Alis had done on disk and tape, expecting Mayer to knock on the door any minute, and started in on Casablanca.
There was a knock on the door. I ff’d to the end where Rick’s bar was still full of lemonade, took the disk of Alis’s dancing and stuck it down the side of my shoe, and opened the door.
It was Alis.
The hall behind her was dark, but her hair, pulled into a bun, caught the light from somewhere. She looked tired, like she had just come from practicing. She still had on her lab coat. I could see white stockings and Mary Janes below it, and an inch or so of pink ruffle. I wondered what she’d been doing—the “Abba-Dabba Honeymoon” number from Two Weeks with Love? Or something from By the Light of the Silvery Moon?
She reached into the pocket of the lab coat and held out the opdisk I’d given her. “I came to bring this back to you.”
“Keep it,” I said.
She looked at it a minute and then stuck it in her pocket. “Thanks,” she said, and pulled it out again. “I’m surprised so many of the routines made it on. I wasn’t very good when I started,” she said, turning it over. “I’m still not very good.”
“You’re as good as Ruby Keeler,” I said.
She grinned. “She was somebody’s girlfriend.”
“You’re as good as Vera-Ellen. And Debbie Reynolds. And Virginia Gibson.”
She frowned, and looked at the disk again and then at me, as if trying to decide whether to tell me something. “Heada told me about her job,” she said, and that wasn’t it. “Location assistant. That’s great.” She looked over at the array, where Bogart was toasting Ingrid. “She said you were putting the movies back the way they were.”
Terra Incognita Page 25