Dream Factories and Radio Pictures

by Howard Waldrop

  Some of them got to make a few shorts in the mid-fifties. Suddenly studios and producers handed them cameras and money. Go out and make movies, they said: Talk is cheap.

  Truffaut. Resnais. Godard. Rivette. Roehmer. Chris Marker. Alain Robbe-Grillet.

  The Four Hundred Blows. Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Breathless. La Jetée. Trans-Europe Express.

  They blew moviemaking wide open.

  And why I love them is that for the first time, underneath the surface of them, even the comedies, was a sense of tragedy; that we were all frail human beings and not celluloid heroes and heroines.

  It took the French to remind us of that.

  * * *

  The main thing guys like Godard and Truffaut had going for them was that they didn’t understand English very well.

  Like in Riot in Cell Block 11, when Neville Brand gets shot at by the prison guard with a Thompson, he yells:

  “Look out, Monty! They got a chopper! Back inside!”

  What the Cahiers people heard was:

  “Steady, mon frère! Let us leave this place of wasted dreams.”

  And they watched a lot of undubbed, unsubtitled films in those dingy theaters. They learned from them, but not necessarily what the films had to teach.

  It’s like seeing D. W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance and listening to an old Leonard Cohen album at the same time. What you’re seeing doesn’t get in the way of what you’re thinking. The words and images made for cultures half a century apart mesh in a way that makes for sleepless nights and new ideas.

  And, of course, every one of the New Wave filmmakers was in love, one way or another, with Jeanne Moreau.

  * * *

  I’m playing Guy. Or my image is, anyway. For one thing, composition, sequencing, and specs on a real person take only about fifteen minutes’ easy work.

  I stepped up on the sequencer platform. Johnny Rizzuli pushed in a standard scan program. The matrix analyzer, which is about the size of an old iron lung, flew around me on its yokes and gimbals like the runaway merry-go-round in Strangers on a Train. Then it flew over my head like the crop duster in North by Northwest.

  After it stopped the platform moved back and forth. I was bathed in light like a sheet of paper on an old office copier.

  Johnny gave me the thumbs-up.

  I ran the imaging a day later. It’s always ugly the first time you watch yourself tie your shoelaces, roll your eyes, scratch your head, and belch. As close, as far away, from whatever angle in whatever lighting you want. And when you talk, you never sound like you think you do. I’m going to put a little more whine in my voice; just a quarter-turn on the old Nicholson knob.

  The movie will be in English, of course, with subtitles. English subtitles.

  * * *

  (The screen starts to fade out.)

  Director (voice off): Hold it. That’s not right.

  Cameraman (off): What?

  Director (also me, with a mustache and jodhpurs, walking on-screen): I don’t want a dissolve here. (He looks around.) Well?

  Cameraman (off): You’ll have to call the Optical Effects man.

  Director: Call him! (Puts hands on hips.)

  Voices (off): Optical Effects! Optical Effects! Hey!

  (Sounds of clanking and jangling. Man in coveralls ((Jean-Paul Belmondo)) walks on carrying a huge workbag marked Optical Effects. He has a hunk of bread in one hand.)

  Belmondo: Yeah, Boss?

  Director: I don’t want a dissolve here.

  Belmondo (shrugs): Okay. (He takes out a stovepipe, walks toward the camera p.o.v., jams the end of the stovepipe over the lens. Camera shudders. The circular image on the screen irises in. Camera swings wildly, trying to get away. Screen irises to black. Sound of labored breathing, then asphyxiation.)

  Director’s voice: No! It can’t breathe! I don’t want an iris, either!

  Belmondo’s voice: Suit yourself, Boss. (Sound of tearing. Camera p.o.v. Belmondo pulls off stovepipe. Camera quits moving. Breathing returns to normal.)

  Director: What kind of effects you have in there?

  Belmondo: All kinds. I can do anything.

  Director: Like what?

  Belmondo: Hey, cameraman. Pan down to his feet. (Camera pans down onto shoes.) Hold still, Monsieur Le Director! (Sound of jet taking off.) There! Now pan up.

  (Camera pans up. Director is standing where he was, back to us, but now his head is on backwards. He looks down his back.)

  Director: Hey! Ow! Fix me!

  Belmondo: Soon as I get this effect you want.

  Director: Ow! Quick! Anything! Something from the old Fieullade serials!

  Belmondo: How about this? (He reaches into the bag, brings out a Jacob’s Ladder, crackling and humming.)

  Director: Great. Anything! Just fix my head!

  (Belmondo sticks the Jacob’s Ladder into the camera’s p.o.v. Jagged lightning bolt wipe to the next scene of a roadway down which Guy ((me)) is walking.)

  Belmondo (v.o.): We aim to please, Boss.

  Director (v.o.): Great. Now could you fix my head?

  Belmondo (v.o.): Hold still. (Three Stooges’ sound of nail being pried from a dry board.)

  Director (v.o.): Thanks.

  Belmondo (v.o.): Think nothing of it. (Sound of clanking bag being dragged away. Voice now in distance.) Anybody seen my wine?

  (Guy ((me)) continues to walk down the road. Camera pans with him, stops as he continues offscreen left. Camera is focused on a road sign:)

  Nevers 32 km

  Alphaville 60 km

  Marienbad 347 km

  Hiroshima 14497 km

  Guyville 2 km

  * * *

  To get my mind off the work on the movie, I went to one of the usual parties, with the usual types there, and on the many screens in the house were the usual undergrounds.

  On one, Erich von Stroheim was doing Carmen Miranda’s dance from The Gang’s All Here in full banana regalia, a three-minute loop that drew your eyes from anywhere in line of sight.

  On another, John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe tore up a bed in Room 12 of the Bates Motel.

  In the living room, on the biggest screen, Laurel and Hardy were doing things with Wallace Beery and Clark Gable they had never thought of doing in real life. I watched for a moment. At one point a tired and puffy Hardy turned to a drunk and besmeared Laurel and said: “Why don’t you do something to help me?”

  Enough, enough. I moved to another room. There was a TV there, too. Something seemed wrong—the screen too fuzzy, sound bad, acting unnatural. It took me a few seconds to realize that they had the set tuned to a local low-power TV station and were watching an old movie, King Vidor’s 1934 Our Daily Bread. It was the story of a bunch of Depression-era idealistic have-nots making a working, dynamic, corny, and totally American commune out of a few acres of land by sheer dint of will.

  I had seen it before. The Cahiers du Cinema people always wrote about it when they talked about what real Marxist movies should be like, back in those dim pre-Four Hundred Blows days when all they had were typewriters and theories.

  The house smelled of butyl nitrate and uglier things. There were a dozen built-in aerosol dispensers placed strategically about the room. The air was a stale mix of vasopressins, pheromones, and endorphins which floated in a blue mist a couple of meters off the floors. A drunken jerk stood at one of the dispensers and punched its button repeatedly, like a laboratory animal wired to stimulate its pleasure center.

  I said my goodbyes to the hostess, the host having gone upstairs to show some new arrivals “some really interesting stuff.”

  I walked the ten blocks home to my place. My head slowly cleared on the way, the quiet buzzing left. After a while, all the parties run together into one big Jell-O-wiggly image of people watching movies, people talking about them.

  * * *

  The grocer (Pierre Brasseur) turns to Marie (Jeanne Moreau) and Guy (me).

  “I assure you the brussels sprouts are very fine,” he says.r />
  “They don’t look it to me,” says Marie.

  “Look,” says Guy (me) stepping between them. “Why not artichokes?”

  “This time of year?” asks the grocer.

  “Who asked you?” says Marie to Guy (me). She plants her feet. “I want brussels sprouts, but not these vile disgusting things.”

  “How dare you say that!” says the grocer. “Leave my shop. I won’t have my vegetables insulted.”

  “Easy, mac,” I (Guy) say.

  “Who asked you?” he says and reaches behind the counter for a baseball bat.

  “Don’t threaten him,” says Marie.

  “Nobody’s threatening me,” Guy (I) say to her.

  “He is,” says Marie. “He’s going to hit you!”

  “No, I’m not,” says the grocer to Marie. “I’m going to hit you. Get out of my shop. I didn’t fight in the maquis to have some chi-chi tramp disparage me.”

  “Easy, mac,” Guy (I) say to him.

  “And now, I am going to hit you!” says the grocer.

  “I’ll take these brussels sprouts after all,” says Marie, running her hand through her hair.

  “Very good. How much?”

  “Half a kilo,” she says. She turns to me (Guy). “Perhaps we can make it to the bakery before it closes.”

  “Is shopping here always like this?” I (Guy) ask.

  “I wouldn’t know,” she says. “I just got off the bus.”

  * * *

  It was the perfect ending for the scene. I liked it a lot. It was much better than what I had programmed.

  Because from the time Marie decided to take the sprouts, none of the scene was as I had written it.

  * * *

  “You look tired,” said Lois, leaning against my office doorjamb, arms crossed like Bacall in To Have and Have Not.

  “I am tired. I haven’t been sleeping.”

  “I take a couple of dexadryl a day,” she said. “I’m in this last push on the movie, so I’m making it a point to get at least two hours’ sleep a night.”

  “Uh, Lois . . .” I said. “Have you ever programmed a scene one way and had it come out another?”

  “That’s what that little red reset button is for,” she said. She looked at me with her gray-blue eyes.

  “Then it’s happened to you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you let the scene play all the way through?”

  “Of course not. As soon as anything deviated from the program, I’d kill it and start over.”

  “Wouldn’t you be interested in letting them go and see what happens?”

  “And have a mess on my hands? That was what was wrong with the old way of making movies. I treat it as a glitch, start again, and get it right.” She tilted her head. “Why do you ask?”

  “Lot of stuff’s been . . . well, getting off track. I don’t know how or why.”

  “And you’re letting them run on?”

  “Some,” I said, not meeting her gaze.

  “I’d hate to see your studio timeshare bill. You must be way over budget.”

  “I try not to imagine it. But I’m sure I’ve got a better movie for it.”

  She took my hand for a second, but only a second. She was wearing a blue rib-knit sweater. Blue was definitely her color.

  “That way lies madness,” she said. “Call Maintenance and get them to blow out the low-level format of your ramdisk a couple of times. Got to run,” she said, her tone changing instantly. “Got a monster to kill.”

  “Thanks a lot. Really,” I say. She stops at the door.

  “They put a lot of stuff in the GAX,” she said. “No telling what kind of garbage is floating around in there, unused, that can leak out. If you want to play around, you might as well put in a bunch of fractals and watch the pretty pictures.

  “If you want to make a movie, you’ve got to tell it what to do and sit on its head while it’s doing it.”

  She looked directly at me. “It’s just points of light fixed on a plane, Scott.”

  She left.

  * * *

  Delphine Seyrig is giving Guy (me) trouble.

  She was supposed to be the woman who asks Guy to help her get a new chest of drawers up the steps of her house. We’d seen her pushing it down the street in the background of the scene before with Marie and Guy (me) in the bakery.

  While Marie (Moreau) is in the vintner’s, Seyrig asks Guy (me) for help.

  Now she’s arguing about her part.

  “I suppose I’m here just to be a tumble in the hay for you?” she asks.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady. Do you want help with the bureau, or what?”

  “Bureau? Do you mean FBI?” asks a voice behind Guy (me). Guy (me) turns. Eddy Constantine, dressed as Lemmy Caution in a cheap trench coat and a bad hat, stares at Guy (me) with his cue-ball eyes.

  “No! Chest-of-drawers,” says Seyrig.

  “Chester Gould? Dick Tracy?” asks Constantine.

  Guy (me) wanders away, leaving them to argue semantics on the steps. As he turns the corner the sound of three quick shots comes from the street he has just left. He heads toward the wine shop where Marie stands, smoking.

  * * *

  I almost forgot about the screening of Monster Without A Meaning. There was a note on my screen from Lois. I didn’t know she was through or anywhere near it, but then, I didn’t even know what day it was.

  I took my cup of bad black coffee into the packed screening room. Lois wasn’t there—she said she’d never attend a showing of one of her movies. There were the usual reps, a few critics, some of her friends, a couple of sequencer operators and a dense crowd of the usual bit-part unknowns.

  Boris, Lois’s boyfriend, got up to speak. (Boris had been working off and on for five years on his own movie, The Beast with Two Backs.) He said something redundant and sat down, and the movie started, with the obligatory GAX-600 logo.

  Even the credits were right—they slimed down the screen and formed shaded hairy letters in deep perspective, like those from a flat print of an old 3-D movie.

  John Agar was the scientist on vacation (he was catching a goddamn mackerel out of what purported to be a high Sierra-Nevada lake; he used his fly rod with all the grace of a longshoreman handling a pitchfork for the first time) when the decayed-orbit satellite hits the experimental laboratory of the twin hermit mad scientists (Les Tremayne and Leo G. Carroll).

  An Air Force major (Kenneth Tobey) searching for the satellite meets up with both Agar and the women (Mara Corday, Julie Adams) who were on their way to take jobs with the mad doctors when the shock wave of the explosion blew their car into a ditch. Agar had stopped to help them, and the jeep with Tobey and the comic relief (Sgt. Joe Sawyer, Cpl. Sid Melton) drives up.

  Cut to the Webb farmhouse—Gramps (Olin Howlin), Patricia (Florida Friebus), Aunt Sophonsiba (Kathleen Freeman) and Little Jimmy (George “Foghorn” Winslow) were listening to the radio when the wave of static swept over it. They hear the explosion, and Gramps and Little Jimmy jump into the woodie and drive over to the The Old Science Place.

  It goes just like you imagine from there, except for the monster. It’s all done subjective camera—the monster sneaks up (you’ve always seen something moving in the background of the long master shot before, in the direction from which the monster comes). It was originally a guy (Robert Clarke) coming in to get treated for a rare nerve disorder. He was on Les Tremayne’s gurney when the satellite hit, dousing him with experimental chemicals and “space virus” from the newly discovered Van Allen belt.

  The monster gets closer and closer to the victims—they see something in a mirror, or hear a twig snap, and they turn around—they start to scream, their eyeballs go white like fried marbles, blood squirts out their ears and nose, their gums dissolve, their hair chars away, then the whole face; the clothes evaporate, wind rushes toward their radioactive burning—it’s all over in a second, but it’s all there, every detail perfect.

 
; The scene where Florida Friebus melts is a real shocker. From the way the camera lingers over it, you know the monster’s enjoying it.

  By the time General Morris Ankrum, Colonel R. G. Armstrong and Secretary of State Henry Hull wise up, things are bad.

  At one point the monster turns and stares back over its shoulder. There’s an actual charred trail of destruction stretching behind it; burning houses like Christmas tree lights in the far mountains, the small town a few miles back looking like the ones they built for the Project Ivy A-bomb tests in Nevada. Turning its head the monster looks down at the quiet nighttime city before it. All the power and wonder of death are in that shot.

  (Power and wonder are in me, too, in the form of a giant headache. One of my eyes isn’t focusing anymore. A bad sign, and rubbing doesn’t help.)

  I get up to go—the movie’s great but the light is hurting my eyes too much.

  Suddenly here come three F-84 Thunderjets flown by Cpt. Clint Eastwood, 1st Lt. Leonard Nimoy, and Colonel James Whitmore.

  “The Reds didn’t like the regular stuff in Korea. This thing shouldn’t like this atomic napalm, either,” says Whitmore. “Let’s go in and spread a little honey around, boys.”

  The jets peel off.

  Cut to the monster’s p.o.v. The jets come in with a roar. Under-wing tanks come off as they power back up into a climb. The bombs tumble lazily toward the screen. One whistles harmlessly by, two are dropping short, three keep getting bigger and bigger, then blam—woosh. You’re the monster and you’re being burned to death in a radioactive napalm firestorm.

  Screaming doesn’t help; one hand comes up just before the eyes melt away like lumps of lard on a floor furnace—the hand crisps to paper, curls, blood starts to shoot out and evaporates like verga over the Mojave. The last thing the monster hears is its auditory canals boiling away with a screeching hiss.

  Cut to Agar, inventor of the atomic napalm, holding Mara Corday on a hill above the burning city and the charring monster. He’s breathing hard, his hair is singed; her skirt is torn off one side, exposing her long legs.

  Up above, Whitmore, oxygen mask off, smiles down and wags the jet’s wings.

  Pull back to a panorama of the countryside; Corday and Agar grow smaller; the scene lifts, takes in jets, county, then state; miles up now the curve of the earth appears, grows larger, continue to pull back, whole of U.S., North and Central America appears. Beeping on soundtrack. We are moving along with a white luminescence which is revealed to be a Sputnik-type satellite.