* * *
One question keeps coming to me. Why only films of the 1950s?
Am I the only one who remembers? Have I been left alone because I’m the only one who remembers and knows what I’m doing? Am I the only one with a purpose, not just running around like a chicken with its head cut off?
* * *
The radio stations are going off one by one as I drive from the crater to Alamogordo. Emergency broadcast stations, something out of Arkansas, an Ohio station. Tonight, I’m not going to be stopped. I’ve got the thirty-round magazine in the carbine and the forty-five-round drum in the Thompson. I wish I had some grenades, or even tear gas, but I have no mask (I lost it in the battle against the grasshopper). Besides, I’m not sure tear gas will be effective for what I have in mind.
On the dying radio stations and in my mind’s eye, this is what I see and hear:
The locusts reach Chicago and feast till dawn, while metal robots roam the streets looking for men to kill.
The giant lizard goes past Coney Island with no resistance.
The huge mantis, after pillaging the Arctic, reduces Washington to shambles. It has to dodge flying saucers while it pulls apart monuments, looking for goodies. The statue of Abraham Lincoln looks toward Betelgeuse and realizes that the War Between the States was fought in vain.
The sky is filled with meteors, saucers, a giant flying bird. Two new points of light hang in the sky: a dead star and a planet which will crash to earth in a few days. The night is beginning to be bathed in a dim bloody light.
An amorphous thing sludges its way through a movie theater, alternately flattening, thickening, devouring anything left.
The Martian fighting machines have gone up and down both coasts, moving in a crescent pivotal motion.
The octopus has been driven underwater by heat from the burning of San Francisco.
So much for the rest of the country.
Here in the Southwest, a million-eyed monster has taken over the cattle and dogs for hundreds of miles.
A giant spider eats cattle and people and grows. The last Air Force fighters have given up and are looking for a place to land. Maybe one or two pilots, like me, will get away. Maybe saucers will get them. It won’t be long now.
The Gila monsters roam, tongues moving, seeking the heat of people, cars, dogs.
Beings with a broken spaceship are repairing it, taking over the bodies of those not eaten by other monsters. Soon they will be back up in the sky. Benevolent monsters.
Giant columns of stone grow, break, fall, crushing all in their paths. Miles wide now, and moving toward the Colorado River, the Gulf, and infinite growing bliss. No doubt they have crushed giant Gila monsters and spiders along with people, towns, and mountains.
A stranded spaceman makes it to Palomar and spends his last seconds turning the telescope toward his home star; he has already killed nineteen people in his effort to communicate.
A monster grows, feeding on the atoms of the air.
A robot cuts its way through a government installation fence, off on its own path of rampage. The two MPs fire until their .45s click dry. Bullets ricochet off the metal being. Soon a saucer will fly over and hover. They will fire at the saucer with no effect; the saucer will fire and the MPs will drift away on the wind.
(There may be none of our bones to dig up in a million years.)
All this as I drive toward the dawn, racing at me and the Southwest like the avenging eye of God. No headlights. I saw a large meteor hit back in the direction of Flagstaff; there’ll be hell to pay there soon. Meanwhile, I haven’t slept in two days. The car sometimes swerves toward the road edge. No time for a crack-up, so close now.
The last radio station went off at 0417.
Nothing on the dial but mother earth’s own radio music, and perhaps stellar noises which left somewhere five hundred million years ago, about the time our friend the Diplovertebron slithered through the mud. The east is graying. I’m almost there.
* * *
The car motor pops and groans as it cools. The wind blows steadily toward the deeper desert. Not far from here, the first A-bomb went off. Perhaps that was the challenge to the universe, and it waited thirty years to get back at us. This is where it started.
This is where it ends.
I’m drinking a hot Coke. It tastes better than any I’ve ever had. No uppers, downers, hash, horse, or grass for me. I’m on a natural high.
I’ve set my things in order. All the empty bottles are filled with gasoline and the blanket’s been torn up for fuses. My lighter and matches are laid out, with some cigarettes for punks. With the carbine slung over my shoulder, I wait with the Thompson in my right hand, round chambered, selector on rock and roll.
They won’t die easy, but I envision a stack of them ringing my body, my bones, the car: some scorched and blackened, some shot all away, some with mandibles still working long after I’m dead.
I open the twenty-kilo bag of sugar and shake it onto the wind. It sifts into a pile a few feet away. The scent should carry right to them.
I took basic at Fort Ord. There was a tunnel we had to double-time through to get to the range. In cadence. Weird shadows on the wall as we ran. No matter how tired I was, I thought of the soldiers going into the storm drains after the giant ants in a movie I’d seen when I was six. They started here, near the first A-blast. They had to be here. The sugar would bring them.
A sound floats back up the wind like the keening of an off-angle buzz saw. Ah. They’re coming. They’ll be here soon, first one, then many. Maybe the whole nest will turn out. They’ll rise from behind that dune, or maybe that one.
* * *
Closer now, still not in sight.
It’s all over for man, but there are still some things left. Like choices, there’s still that. A choice of personal monsters.
Closer now, and more sounds. Maybe ten or twenty of them, maybe more.
End of movie soon. No chance to be James Arness and get the girl. But plenty of time to be the best James Whitmore ever. No kids to throw to safety. But a Thompson and a carbine. And Molotov cocktails.
Aha. An antenna waves in the middle distance. And—
Bigger than I thought. Take your head right off.
Eat leaden death, Hymenopterae! The Thompson blasts to life.
Screams of confusion. A flash of 100 octane and glass. High keening like an off-angle buzz saw.
I laugh. Formic acid. Cordite.
Hell of a life.
Dream Factories: The Future
TWO SORTS OF STABS AT WHAT MIGHT BE, and both look back to an earlier era of the movies as a starting point.
History is not a straight-line thing. As Gardner Dozois once said: SF-type guys and ladies looked around in the 1910s and said, “By 1980, we will have night baseball!” They were right, just wrong about the date.
People have predicted revolutions in technology before; they were approximately right; their dates were too pessimistic AND by the time their predictions came true, so had lots of others. No straight-line thinking ever turns out just like it was planned.
To very widely paraphrase Asimov in an early essay: First-order thinking, 1880: Tom Oakheart looks around, tinkers, invents the horseless carriage. Second-order thinking, 1880: Tom Oakheart invents horseless carriage, he and Teddy use it to race to the sawmill faster than a horse could carry them, to rescue Pearl from Oil Can Harry. Third-order thinking, 1880: Tom Oakheart, Pearl, and Teddy are caught in a traffic jam in his horseless carriage, on the way to a drive-in movie (where Oil Can Harry is going to rob the concession stand). (The thinking is Asimov’s; the examples are from my W/S u-plotter.)
Lots of people predicted movies in your house. TV (radio pictures) fulfilled part of that need (selling you oats when Mr. Ed wasn’t); then (and there should have been video discs before tape, but everyone was waiting for a stylus-less system; by the time they got that, tape had stolen the march) videotape in your home, two formats locked in a Texas-style barbed-w
ire death match; laserdiscs; DVD; etc. (I’ll buy the new stuff when they can guarantee it’s the only system I’ll ever need.) Home video recapitulates the ontogeny of recorded music: cylinders to shellac 78s to 45s to 33 ⅓rd albums to eight-track to cassette to compact disc to DAT to DVD and audio chips.
Here (he said) in the early 21st Century: All the people who predicted movies in your house ignored all the other stuff that would be grab-assing for your time and your increasingly limited attention: video games, computers and computer games, palm pilots, cell phones, walkmans, watchmen, VR glasses and gloves, paintball for gods’ sakes, rock climbing, inline skates, snowboards, fly fishing, and beds and breakfasts, the whole thing.
Now movies may or may not go digital. (The idea of film or music or anything using up brainpower when there are perfectly good mechanical means of producing exactly the same results, seems to be multiplying entities retrogradely. It uses less power, you say. I say: You’re forgetting the power that was used to make the chip in the first place, which is why Silicon Valley’s running out of water and steam.)
There’s a future for the movies (on the way to videotape and TV): What it is neither you nor I nor anyone else knows. That movies will still be made (and most get worse and worse, pretested, safe, delivering their dull shocks as regular as clockwork, by people who make them to as narrow a formula as any ever devised, including me and Sennett) is certain. That some great stuff will be made, and slip through, by plan or accident, like it always has, is probable, too.
So enjoy these stories; one pretty speculative; one rather elegiac (if I must say so, and I must).
Introduction: French Scenes
ALREADY, SINCE THIS WAS WRITTEN (1986) there have been some amazing technical advances in film.
If I were in the stunt persons’ union, I’d be running scared (this is barely touched on in the story). I envision that guild, ten years from now, as just another featherbed outfit, like locomotive firemen; there, maybe, in some advisory capacity or other, with no members ever jumping off a burning building or crashing a car, or doing anything, except pushing a few buttons, or nodding their heads yes or no. (That their families will sleep lots better is just an added union benefit.)
The story was cutting-edge, in its way, when it was written. Some of it even now has been surpassed; there are lots more technical wonders to come. (That many computer-generated images are in ads, TV, and film where they’re not needed is just one of those byproducts of technology—they can do it, so they do—“Oooh. Neat!”)
No more junkets to the Barbados for supermodels, no more small-town location shooting, no more delays due to weather or the fargin’ sun being in the wrong place for the shot. No more waiting, an astounding idea in filmmaking—more than half the time shooting a movie is nothing happening. Call it up—hey! Presto! (Sort of like Méliès in reverse, isn’t it?) There you are in Faulkner’s bedroom at Rowan Oak with the plot outline of A Fable written across three walls; there you are Gump-like being slapped by Patton; there you are whenever and wherever you want to be, wherever and whenever you want to shoot.
Such is the future: maybe. What I wanted to say here is that anytime new stuff comes along, it’s almost like a geologic discontinuity, a Cretaceous/Cenozoic divide. There’s movies before A Trip to the Moon (1902) and after; Birth of A Nation (1915); The Jazz Singer (1927); Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (both 1939, the year they got Technicolor right); Citizen Kane (1941); Bwana Devil (1952) and The Robe (1953) for 3-D and Cinemascope; movies before Hiroshima, Mon Amour and The 400 Blows (both 1959), and after.
All these films were important, either technically, or narratively in terms of film grammar; movies could no longer be made like they had been before them, or if so, only at the filmmaker’s peril. Whatever one felt about them, they couldn’t be ignored, Birth of A Nation is about editing, not its politics (Tom Oakheart = the KKK). The Jazz Singer stopped movies cold for about three years (the whole grammar of film was there by 1925; confronted with sound and a stationary microphone, the movies forgot everything they’d learned in the first thirty-two years of filmmaking. Don’t take my word for it, go see Murnau’s Sunrise [also 1927]. Movies didn’t move and tell stories like that again until about 1932 . . .). Citizen Kane is just, well, Citizen Kane. Nothing had ever looked that way before or told a story like that. Bwana Devil and The Robe (art they’re not) in their fight against the One-Eyed Living-Room Monster taught directors you couldn’t 1.) ignore the depth of field, front to back, of what the camera sees; 2.) ignore the left and right sides of the screen, which all but the best filmmakers had always done. The movie screen went from being a sheet on the wall to being a moving box in the air.
The Frenchies reshuffled the ol’ narrative deck as effectively as Griffith and Welles had done, in an even more with-it way. Why show a guy getting out of bed, cleaning up, going downtown, standing on a corner with a newspaper till the armored car pulls up at the bank, then show him folding his newspaper, walking across the street, and, five minutes into the movie, an insert shot of him reaching into his pocket, pulling out a gun on the security guard? Blip guy in bed blip guy brushes teeth blip corner with newspaper blip dead guard on ground, scattered moneybags, newspaper lying in street blip Jean-Louis Tritingnant driving an Alfa Romeo on the road above Monaco, forty-nine seconds into film!
The pace of life and perception was changing; they saw it first. (It’s accelerated even more, here forty years on, but now people are just quicker to be dumber.) They knew we knew how movies worked, there in the audience. They just showed us the good stuff; we filled in the boring parts. (Except for Godard, who reversed the process, but which still shows he knew what he was doing. . . .)
So—this story looks forward, to the wonders that might come, at the same time it’s looking back at the last time somebody shook the place up.
And no matter what technologies come, it’s still going to take somebody doing something new with it, or using it just right (for example, the use of the Steadicam: Kubrick’s The Shining vs. the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona. Don’t make me decide) to tell the story. Miracle technology is just another (this time Kubrick: the distal end of an antelope bone blip HAL) tool—once you see it and go “Oooh. Neat!” it damn well’d better do something. (Star Wars just sits there on the screen for the first while, until Harrison Ford puts the pedal to the metal and the Falcon goes into hyperdrive—the audience has waited eighty-two years for that two seconds; after that the spectators are merely a painted audience in a painted auditorium; they can be told any story.)
Come with me, then, on a two-way voyage. Janus-like, I wanted to look both ways at once.
French Scenes
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves . . .
—Julius Caesar act 1, sc. 2, ln. 1–2
THERE WAS A TIME, YOU READ, when making movies took so many people. Actors, cameramen, technicians, screenwriters, costumers, editors, producers, and directors. I can believe it.
That was before computer animation, before the National Likeness Act, before the Noe’s Fludde of Marvels.
Back in that time they still used laboratories to make prints; sometimes there would be a year between the completion of a film and its release to theaters.
Back then they used actual pieces of film, with holes down the sides for the projector. I’ve even handled some of it; it is cold, heavy, and shiny.
Now there’s none of that. No doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs between the idea and substance. There’s only one person (with maybe a couple of hackers for the dogs’ work) who makes movies: the moviemaker.
There’s only one piece of equipment, the GAX-600.
There’s one true law: Clean your mainframe and have a full set of specs.
I have to keep that in mind, all the time.
* * *
Lois was yelling from the next room where she was working on her movie Monster Without a Meaning.
“We’ve got it!” she said,
storming in. “The bottoms of Morris Ankrum’s feet!”
“Where?”
“Querytioup,” she said. It was an image-research place across the city run by a seventeen-year-old who must have seen every movie and TV show ever made. “It’s from an unlikely source,” said Lois, reading from the hard copy. “Tennessee Johnson. Ankrum played Jefferson Davis. There’s a scene where he steps on a platform to give a secession speech.
“Imagine, Morris Ankrum, alive and kicking, 360°, top and bottom. Top was easy—there’s an overhead shot in Invaders from Mars when the guys in the fuzzy suits stick the ruby hatpin-thing in his neck.”
“Is that your last holdup? I wish this thing were that goddamn easy,” I said.
“No. Legal,” she said.
Since the National Fair Likeness Act passed, you had to pay the person (or the estate) of anyone even remotely famous, anyone recognizable from a movie, anywhere. (In the early days after passage, some moviemakers tried to get around it by using parts of people. Say you wanted a prissy hotel clerk—you’d use Franklin Pangborn’s hair, Grady Sutton’s chin, Eric Blore’s eyes. Sounded great in theory but what they got looked like a walking police composite sketch; nobody liked them and they scared little kids. You might as well pay and make Rondo Hatton the bellboy.)
“What’s the problem now?” I asked.
“Ever tried to find the heirs of Olin Howlin’s estate?” Lois asked.
* * *
What I’m doing is called This Guy Goes to Town . . . It’s a nouvelle vague movie; it stars everybody in France in 1962.
You remember the French New Wave? A bunch of film critics who wrote for a magazine, Cahiers du Cinema? They burned to make films, lived, slept, ate films in the 1950s. Bad American movies even their directors had forgotten, B Westerns, German silent Expressionistic bores, French cliffhangers from 1916 starring the Kaiser as a gorilla, things like that. Anything they could find to show at midnight when everybody else had gone home, in theaters where one of their cousins worked as an usher.
Dream Factories and Radio Pictures Page 19