by Jürgen Fauth
“You helped him,” Mina said, nodding to herself. Kino had spoken fondly of Marty.
“Penny wanted him to get a job, anything but the movies, to live anywhere but in Hollywood, but Kino wouldn't quit. I've never seen anyone so stubborn in my life. So I did what I could, but the mimeographed pages always came back from the front office with unequivocal notes: too melodramatic, too absurd, too violent. They were forever complaining about plot holes. ‘Plot holes?’ he'd shout. ‘Miserable accountant souls! Life is filled with plot holes!’ But he kept writing. Every Tuesday, he turned in a new draft. When he finally came up with an idea they liked, Penny made sure it went nowhere. I'll never forget the time we were all invited to a party at Marlon Brando's house. She threw a marble ashtray at Orson Welles.”
Mina laughed at the thought; she was quietly proud of the old bat. “I can believe that,” she said, but Marty shook his head. It wasn't an amusing anecdote to him but a painful memory. It seemed to her that Schnark was shaking his head, too.
“I had no choice but to fire him,” Marty said. “After that, I didn't see them for decades, but there were rumors: drugs, suicide attempts, infidelity, you name it. Later, he made TV commercials. Didn't last there, either. By ‘63, they were nonentities. I'd completely forgotten about old Kino until I stepped into his taxi.”
“I read about that in his journal,” Mina said, glad to know this part of it was true. “You gave him another chance.”
“I was at Paramount at the time, and there had been disaster after disaster. Cleopatra almost bankrupted Fox, TV was taking over. We were desperate. We were willing to try anything. Cinerama, 3-D, Smell-O-Vision–why not Kino? There hadn't been a major pirate epic since The Buccaneer, and Kino's script was good, a reworked version of the movie Goebbels shut down in 1933. It had melodrama, adventure, wenches in costumes, and it would look splendid in Technicolor. Hell, we'd shoot it in Cinemascope. I saw the potential, but Katz had misgivings from the start. He wanted someone else to direct. I knew what Kino was capable of behind the camera, and I got the go-ahead. The hard part was getting him to sign.”
“Because of Penny.”
“I'd never seen anything like it. Here I was, offering him the chance of a lifetime, a comeback with a major Hollywood studio, and Penny screened his phone calls and threw my letters in the trash! I mean, sure, we lowballed him on his fee, but money wasn't the problem. Penny was determined that Klaus would never make another movie again. When I finally got through to him, she had him committed and pumped full of downers.”
“She thought making the movie would kill him.”
“And she was right.” Marty gave Mina a long, sad look. “They were both drunks, addicted to God knows what else, and they were smacking each other around. The kid, your father, had been shipped off to some school on the East Coast. I thought she was out of her mind, and I pulled some strings to get him released. Hushed up the whole thing.”
“You believed in him,” Mina said.
“I did. Now, this was not long after Dr. King's march on Washington, Kennedy was still president, and there was hope in the air. ’I have a dream, too,‘ Kino would say. I got a thrill being around him again, sharing his enthusiasm. Kino admired those kids in France who were breaking all the rules–so why shouldn't we be able to make a movie that was popular entertainment and art at the same time? Yes, I believed in Kino, all the things he said. Most of it, anyway. Pirates should have been his masterpiece.”
“But that's not what happened,” Mina said.
Marty didn't answer. His cigar had gone out, and it took him several fumbling attempts to relight it. There was no sign that Schnark was even in the room except for the occasional red flare from the end of his cigar.
“We shot on the back lot,” Marty finally went on. “I was to keep an eye on Kino. He dried out, showed up on time, and was in control of cast and crew. It was marvelous. I'd seen him do amazing work with far less talent and money. The dailies looked great, and I was sure we had a quality picture on our hands. We were under budget and on schedule when the entire production went to Mexico for the location shoot.”
“Did Penny go?”
“Oh no. I made sure of that.” Marty grinned to himself but didn't explain. “We took over a remote bay in the Yucatan, with a pristine beach and a town set dressed up as Mulberry Island. The location would really make this picture. The Buccaneer was all done on studio sets, and we'd blow it out of the water.”
“Tulpendiebe was shot on a sound stage.”
“Right. I don't know what would have happened if we'd stayed inside, but once we got down there, things quickly spiraled out of control. Kino now commanded the biggest production of his career, and when he found himself on location, he lost his bearings. He was like an addict on a binge.”
“And you were there to supervise him?”
“Ach Gott, ja. I was.” Marty took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, scratched his beard. Mina was touched by how embarrassed he looked. “I don't know what I was thinking–the best I can say in my defense was that we were all swept away by Kino's vision. He certainly knew how to rouse the crowd. He gave an impassioned speech about Lang's dragon, about how we had a chance to make something great and lasting. We were all seduced by this man who had been broken and beaten again and again but still believed in his art before anything else–even those of us who had never thought of the movies as art in the first place. In that tropical paradise, all seemed possible, and the crazier Kino acted, the more we wanted to believe that we were making something special. A cathedral of light, that's what he called it, and we all cheered. He stirred something in me that I'd long forgotten. I wanted him to succeed, no matter what.”
Mina bit her lip. She wondered if Pirates ever stood a chance at all. There must have been a moment when everything still hung in the balance, when things still might have worked out. She knew better than to wish for a different ending to the story. She reminded herself that she already knew how it ended.
“It was disastrous, and I should have seen it coming. I was a fool. Instead of betting a few million on a decent adventure movie, I staked my career on Kino's masterpiece. Within days, Klaus was manic. He'd gone off schedule and off script, rewriting scenes in the middle of the night, presenting his actors with new dialogue each morning. I don't think he slept at all. He was improvising again. There was a new drug making the rounds, something a friend of Cary Grant's had brought down in a little vial. It wasn't like the opium we used to smoke, cushy and cheerful. It was acid, and it made everything more real rather than less. Everybody got high on it. The actors were afraid of their own shadows, hiding behind the set, jumping in the surf naked, dancing all night, banging on drums and drinking tequila. We all felt like we were teetering on the edge of revelation. Kino got rid of his hand-crafted prosthetic leg and strapped on a crude prop peg leg.”
Mina couldn't help but laugh at the image. She thought of her own burst of anarchy at her wedding reception, but this was on an entirely different scale. Marty furrowed his brow, and she caught herself. “Please,” she said, suppressing another chuckle. “Go on.”
Marty hesitated. None of this was funny to him. “People stayed in costume at all times, and even the crew started wearing pirate outfits. The camera always seemed to be on, and we wasted a shameful amount of stock. The budget ballooned, and still, I didn't see what I had to do. ’Trust me, Marty,‘ Kino would say to me, ’trust me! It's all going to come together in the editing room!‘ And I wanted to believe him so much, I let the madness go on. Kino was gripped by a vision, and he would not compromise. ’Only at play are we open to our full potential!‘ he would shout. ‘Art is pleasure! If it's not fun, why bother?’ I'm lucky nobody died. He even wrote a part for himself and he acted in a few scenes–the ghost of Grapefruit Silko. It was ludicrous.”
Marty had talked himself into a state, and Mina squirmed on her stool. It wasn't her fault that her grandfather had been out of control, but somehow she felt complicit. She knew tha
t if she had been there, she wouldn't have stopped Kino either.
“He came into my room one night, woke me from a deep sleep, and told me he changed the title of the movie. Now he wanted to call it Twenty-Twelve, Or The Hair-Raising Adventures of Captain Darius Silko, Heir of Mulberry Island and Leader of His Legendary Crew of Anti-Corporate Pirates of the Gaia II and Their Friends and Protectors, the Noble Mayan Nation of Xunantanich and Their Spiritual Descendents.”
Marty paused, waiting for a response. “That'd be hard to fit on a poster,” Mina said. Marty nodded, satisfied.
“Maybe he could get away with that shit at Ufa,” he said, “but it was career suicide in Hollywood. He dressed up crew members in white robes and gave them roles. He was banging Katz's girlfriend. I didn't wake up until I realized he was preparing to torch the entire set on the last day of shooting. The pirate wedding was supposed to be the film's happy ending, but Kino wanted mayhem instead: a riot, a battle, and a fire that would destroy the buildings. Now, a shoot like that wants to be carefully planned, but Kino just wanted to keep the cameras rolling and see what was going to happen.”
“He had a thing for fire.”
“I don't care. Lives were at stake. There was no excuse for this. I might've been able to ignore the orgies, the improvised whims, the wasted stock, but when I saw the crew dousing the set in gasoline, something in me snapped. I was done fronting for Kino. I tried talking sense into him but there was no arguing with him. He threatened to have ‘the shamans’ take care of me. He'd completely lost touch with reality. The whole thing was ridiculous, and yes, I called the front office and let them know that the production had gone off the rails.”
Mina couldn't contain her disappointment. “You ratted him out!” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Schnark stirred and shook his head.
Marty held her gaze. “I betrayed him, yes. I had given him this opportunity, and then I took it away. Kino had his assistants lock me into a trailer while he set fire to the set. The crew torched everything and Kino filmed his grand finale. It was a miracle no one got hurt. A few hours later, Katz himself arrived by water plane. He found a stoned debauch on the beach, his set destroyed, and his producer locked up. He stopped the production immediately, ordered everybody back to L.A., and demanded to see dailies.”
“Wow,” Mina said. “Busted.”
“Yes, wow. Kino was furious. ‘I had my film shut down before, and I will never allow it to happen again, you money-grubbing dilettantes! At least Goebbels had taste!’ and so on. In the end, he had no choice but to relent. He realized that screening an unfinished answer print for Katz was his only chance to save his movie. He refused to talk to me, but I was there, two weeks later, when the top brass at Paramount gathered at Katz's mansion to screen the rough cut of Twenty-Twelve. Your grandfather was still wearing his goddamn peg leg.”
“Penny thought that Kino was at his best in the editing room,” Mina said. “She said that's where he worked his magic.”
“Maybe. But what he had cobbled together for Katz that day was a three-and-a-half-hour long disaster. The picture I had approved was a swashbuckling romance: sea battles and a grand love story and so on. I knew things had gone crazy in Mexico, but I had hoped he'd be able to salvage the footage. What he showed us was entirely different.”
“No good?” Mina asked. “None of it?”
“We expected missing scenes and rough editing, that would have been acceptable. But Kino had changed the story. In this version, the handsome pirate captain had turned into a villain. Silko kidnapped Bonnie and took her to his mist-shrouded hideout, and he showed a taste for retribution and violence that certainly wasn't in the original script. There was talk about ‘destabilizing the financial system,’ and brand-new scenes about a below-deck conspiracy against Silko. Once the Gaia landed on the island, Bonnie was drawn into increasingly tangled pirate council politics, with long discussions about Silko's greed for power and treasure, and what was to be done to defend the constitution of Mulberry Island. It barely resembled the script Kino had handed me in the cab, and it didn't work. My heart sank deeper every time Katz shifted in his seat. It was ponderous and boring. And then it got weirder: on an excursion into the wilderness, Bonnie discovered that the Indians living on the island were descendants of a lost Mayan civilization. They were a tribe of shamans whose prophecies and drug-induced dreams took up a big part of the narrative.”
“And that's not what you signed on for,” Mina said.
“Damned tootin‘. As the movie went on, editing, storytelling, and direction got more and more haphazard. Kino's methods had gotten the better of him. Worst of all, there was no ending. The last half hour barely made sense, a jumbled mess of incoherent scenes intercut with shots from the fire and mayhem he shot that last day, along with scenes he seemed to have swiped from other movies, bits and pieces from assembled newsreels, loose ends he found around the editing room. He even put the Cuban Missile Crisis into the film.”
“No shit?” Mina said.
“Language, Mädchen,” Schnark said. It was the first time he'd spoken since they sat down.
Marty ignored them both. “From what I could gather, Silko's own men attempt to assassinate him during the pirate wedding and Mulberry Cove is burnt to the ground. There was an incomprehensible voice-over by one of the Mayans, and I have no idea what happened to his bride, Bonnie. She disappeared. It was a mess.”
Mina wished that she could have seen that movie. Maybe it was the effect of jumping into the pool, or the jetlag, or the lingering effect of the red pills and the coffee, but what Marty described did not sound like the disaster he was making it out to be. She didn't say anything though, and Marty went on.
“Katz was outraged. He stormed out of the screening room before the lights had come back on, cursing like a Schiffschaukelbremser. And that was the end of my career, too.”
“I am sorry,” Mina said. Somehow, she felt responsible. “So sorry.”
Marty sighed. “Katz took Kino off the picture and fired me. After that night, I never worked in movies again. Thirty years in the industry, over. They had some hack write a new script, reshot a few scenes, and went with the original title. The Pirates of Mulberry Island was released in the summer of 1963, and let me tell you, it was a piece of shit.”
“The beginning seemed pretty good,” Mina said.
“It was shit,” Marty repeated. “I'd given Kino a stellar opportunity, and he thanked me by ruining my career. He'd blown it for both of us. Now he'd truly lost everything–even hope.”
Mina remembered what Penny had told her about Kino's brains on the movie screen. She was surprised Kino had even gone to the premiere. That they had let him.
“What gets me,” Marty continued, “is that he must have known what was going to happen. I don't know why he ruined the movie the way he did, why he stopped caring about success. It wasn't the shotgun blast that killed him, it was the movie–and I gave him the movie. I despised myself.”
Mina wasn't sure what to say. Marty had gotten Kino into Pirates, let him do as he pleased, and then betrayed him. How different would things have turned out if he hadn't called Katz down to Mexico on the last day of shooting?
Marty was waiting for her to say something, but when she didn't, he made a grimace and went on. “I spent a lot of time replaying Kino's final film in my head–not the botched Pirates, but Twenty-Twelve, the rough cut he screened for us. I know now that he'd done the only thing he could have. Back behind a camera for the first time in twenty years, he tried to pack everything into this one film, all of his disappointed hopes, his accumulated grief, his wildest ambitions. He turned it into something we weren't ready for, using every trick he had learned, from the expressionists, from the Nazi masters of propaganda, from the commercials, from decades of obsessive viewing. Twenty-Twelve contained bits and pieces from earlier stories, scenes pilfered from his other movies, and a strange private mythology. It was reality-warping and prophetic.”
“Tell
her about the assassination,” Schnark said.
Marty gave a sigh. “You want to bring that up?”
“Tell the girl the whole story. That's why we are here.”
“In one of the final scenes of the cut Kino screened for us that night, Silko and Bonnie are riding through Mulberry Cove in a horse-drawn carriage. The mutineers send a sharpshooter who tries to pick him off with a musket.” He paused. “Do you see?”
Mina shook her head no.
“This was months before Dallas, and it was shot from exactly the same angle as the Zapruder film.”
Now Mina understood. “Wait,” she said. “You're saying Twenty-Twelve predicted the Kennedy assassination? That's just crazy. Besides, in here–” she petted the journal “–he does talk about another murder, in the 1920 s, that happened the same way. Somebody was shot in a convertible. It's just a coincidence. Movies can't predict the future.”
“You're thinking of Walter Rathenau,” Marty said testily. He didn't like being contradicted. “He was killed point-blank from another car, and there was a hand grenade.”
Schnark leaned forward in his armchair. “Have you noticed anything since you watched Tulpendiebe?” he asked. “Moments of…overlap?”
“I haven't had a good night's sleep in I don't know how long,” Mina said. “I couldn't tell you what's real and what isn't if my life depended on it.”
“Maybe we can agree that movies can be mind-altering,” Schnark said, “and Kino was a visionary, one of the greats.”
Mina nodded. Movies like drugs–who had said that to her? She didn't know what to believe anymore. The Zapruder film? It was all getting more absurd and more intriguing by the minute. She wished Sam could have been there with her, just so she could hear how serious these men were. Dr. Hanno, Penny, they all agreed that there had been something extraordinary about Kino. Mina was surprised by how proud Schnark seemed. She wished she could watch Tulpendiebe again.