Before I had fully taken myself in, the camera jumped back to the Home Guard, just as Ranger turned his head with a rueful glance. It looked for all the world as though he’d spotted me over by the fence. The Home Guard marched out of sight and the film came to an end.
Ranger jumped up, pulled the light cord, and attacked the cameraman, pounding him on the back. “You sly dog, you! That was bully! You cut those scenes together as slick as butter. But how’d you get past your old man?”
That was my question. Had Sam escaped from his house in the dark of night, developed all the film, and stuck the pieces together all by himself?
“Didn’t have to get past the old man,” he explained while rewinding the film. “He helped me do it. And one of those shots—the one looking down on the helmets? That was cut from a picture he worked on last winter. He gave it to me.”
Ranger and I gulped in unison. The little room was stifling by then, so I turned on the ceiling fan. As we stood in the scissored light, Sam explained:
“Sure, he was mad—he yelled himself hoarse once we got home.”
“Where did that bruise on your face come from?” I asked.
“This?” Same touched it and shrugged. “Got in the way of a fist, I guess.”
“So how did you get him to come around?” Ranger asked.
“Well…once he was through yelling about the camera, he started yelling about me stealing the tripod. So I yelled back, ‘I didn’t steal it! I made it!’”
“You did?” It never occurred to me that the tripod hadn’t come with the camera.
“Sure he did, right down to the panning crank,” Ranger said proudly. “Sam can make anything.”
“Shook the old man up a little,” Sam remarked. “Had to take another look at the tripod. Then he finally got around to asking what the Sam Hill I thought I was doing with all this, so I what the Sam Hill told him.”
Ranger jumped. “You what?”
“Don’t get in a lather. Your secret’s safe. He wanted to see the film, is all.”
And once seeing, Sam went on to tell us, Mr. Service was rather taken with our efforts, especially the ingenious shot of marching feet that his son got by lying on the corner curb of Hollywood and Main.
“Did you tell him who you were working with?” Ranger asked, making it sound as though R. A. Bell were an up-and-coming Hollywood figure.
“Nope—just ‘some friends.’”
Ranger punched the air. “Terrific! The mind reels!”
My mind was revolving in circles too. I’d spent the previous weekend viewing Sam as a tragic figure, a motherless, misunderstood boy with a heartless father who drank too much. He didn’t stay in the miserable hole I’d dug for him. But neither did his father—a few hours with noxious chemicals and film, and all was forgiven.
I’ll never understand boys—or men either, for that matter.
“Speaking of reels,” Sam remarked, “I’ve got another one here.”
Piecing together military scenes wasn’t all that occupied his time over the last few days. It seemed that father and son had collaborated on a picture project featuring Jimmy Service himself, which Sam now mounted on the projector and set rolling.
It didn’t amount to much, in my opinion: a man goes to an outdoor café where he’s greeted by his chums, flirts with his bosom pal’s best girl, and exchanges a few stagy, fake-looking punches with the pal. The flirtatious female brought hostilities to an end by pouring two mugs of beer on their heads—a twist that didn’t seem to be part of the scenario. The image became very jumpy for a few seconds.
“Couldn’t help it,” Sam admitted. “Laughing too hard.”
While I tried to imagine what Sam’s laugh would sound like, he hurried on. “But here’s the beauty part.” He rolled the film back and stopped it at a point before the punch-trading and beer-dousing, with Mr. Service cheerfully lifting his mug while seated at a table. He had a long bony face, a little like Sam’s, that didn’t seem to go with a short torso and the restless legs of a boxer.
“I changed reels and rolled the film camera for a few minutes longer after he combed out his hair and called for another beer. He didn’t notice I’d put a half-mask over the lens. Wasn’t noticing much of anything by then. Before we develop it—”
Ranger caught his drift. Unable to contain himself any longer, he leaped up and pulled the overhead light cord. “A double exposure—you genius!” He attacked the genius again, with an embrace instead of a pounding. “Do you know what I’m thinking right now?”
They stared at each other with an identical gleam in their eyes, that precipitous look just before someone yells Eureka!
“Let me guess,” Sam drawled, and together they shouted:
“We’ve got our villain!”
It took me somewhat longer to understand what had lit such a fire under them. Sam had—very cleverly—taken advantage of the father-son project to solve one of our most persistent problems. With Jimmy Service on the left side of the frame, the undeveloped film could be shot again with his part masked and Sylvie and me on the right side. That would turn Good-time Jimmy into a heartless father mocking his poor daughters who are pleading with him to come home. There might even be enough film for Ranger to confront the old man, in a manner stern but just.
Ranger jumped up and threw some gleeful punches at that idea. “We’re back in business!”
I suddenly remembered we were supposed to bring Sylvie home from her friend’s house an hour ago. Before leaving, Ranger could not resist throwing his arms around Sam once more. “I’ll say it again: you’re a genius. But this is going to take lots of camera time. Is the old man good for—”
“He thinks the picture’s finished, because that’s sorta what I told him.” Sam looked less than smug for the first time that day. “And he didn’t exactly say I couldn’t use it, but…better not take a chance on his mood next time. It’s kind of…unpredictable.”
• • •
On our way back to Hollywood, Ranger was over the moon. “I’m going to finish this picture, and D. W. is going to see it, and it’ll be so brilliant that he’ll take me under his wing. Bobby Harron wasn’t much older than me when he started as a messenger boy for Fine Arts. After a few years, Mr. G put him in front of the camera. So he can put me behind one. Sooner or later.”
His plan seemed as far-fetched as ever, but still I was rather glad to see the old Ranger back—and even gladder that we wouldn’t have to give up the picture. Though for the life of me I couldn’t say why.
When we reached the Coopers’ house, Sylvie was hustled out with her hat and coat and satchel in hand, as though her hosts had been eagerly watching for our arrival and didn’t intend to waste a minute. This made me suspect Little Sister had outstayed her welcome, but I didn’t ask. And she did not tell—all she wanted to know was how late we’d stayed up the night before, and did Mr. Fairbanks sword fight with anybody.
“Not much happened,” Ranger kept saying. “A dull party, really.”
His thoughts were elsewhere. I’d almost forgotten the party myself, in light of this new frontier in picture-making that Sam had opened up, but I was abruptly reminded of it as a light tan roadster approached us on the drive. I didn’t recognize the auto, but Ranger did, snapping his head around as the vehicle passed with a half wave from the driver. “That’s Chaplin’s Pierce-Arrow. Wonder what he’s up to?”
I didn’t wonder at the way my heart seemed to tighten, as though someone were pulling its corset strings.
The ladies were having tea under the grape arbor in the courtyard. “What was Chaplin doing here?” Ranger asked first thing.
“My, you’re abrupt,” Aunt Buzzy remarked, busily waving a palm-leaf fan. “He came to see your father—about money, of course. Oh, and he dropped off a scenario for your aunt Mattie to look at.”
My mother was elaborately not l
ooking at the large, white envelope lying on a corner of the glass-topped table. “A scenario?” I repeated.
Mother waved a careless hand. “He has an idea about a part in his next picture. He thinks I have the perfect maternal quality.”
“Which is a silly notion, of course,” Aunt Buzzy said.
“Well, it may be, and it may not,” Mother countered. “I haven’t looked at it yet.”
The stress they were putting on certain words made me think of rival boys drawing lines in the sand. Was there some sort of falling-out between them over Charlie’s silly notion?
“You aren’t going to do it, are you?” I blurted out.
“For heaven’s sake.” Mother sighed. “Will everyone stop behaving as though I’m about to run off to Cuba with the encyclopedia salesman? All is well, whether I decide to do it or not. How was your night, Sylvie? Did you have a good time?” Thus, by sticking an elbow in the conversation (Sylvie being the elbow), she turned it away from herself and a certain most-famous-man-in-the-world.
Chapter 12
The Rescue
It was almost a week before circumstances converged to allow the kind of shooting Ranger wanted to do for Sam’s innovation—“circumstances” meaning Jimmy Service’s mood (or job), Mother’s plans, Sam’s work, the streetcar schedules, and the sun’s disposition. In anticipation of which, Ranger explained to me how the double-exposure technique would work. We would shoot three scenes: one of Sylvie pleading with the villainous father to come home, one of me likewise pleading, and one of Ranger manfully confronting.
Villainous Father’s part would be played unknowingly by Jimmy Service on the left side of the frame, which Sam would cover with a half-circle of black cardboard. Matching the action would not be difficult for the first two scenes, since the father was supposed to be ignoring us anyway. But Ranger’s confrontation would be extremely tricky, because Mr. Service would have to show some response to the young man threatening to paste his ears back. Sam had taken note of his father’s reactions as he shot them, and marked where they were on the film counter. Ranger would try to match them, and of course we would only be allowed one take of each scene.
But if all went well, when the film was developed it would appear that Jimmy Service had joined our company. “And what do you think his mood will be when he discovers that?” I asked.
“Who says he will?” Ranger replied, innocent-eyed.
Finally, on Wednesday afternoon the stars converged and we boarded the streetcar for Daisy Dell, where Sam was to meet us.
The boys had worked out when the light would best approximate the half of film that was already shot (four thirty) and planned to arrive early so we could find a spot as similar as possible to the beer garden. The stand of juniper that surrounded our shack would do.
While Sam peered through the viewfinder, Ranger marked the sandy ground with a carpenter’s chalk line. “What’s that for?” I asked him, as he snapped the string.
“That’s the line we can’t cross,” he replied, “or we’ll disappear into the left side of the frame.” After winding up the string and putting the marker away, he coached Sylvie in how to plead with empty space, an idea she found difficult to grasp.
“Never mind,” Ranger said at last. “I’ll stand in for the old man.” He hauled a rickety homemade stool from our props corner while Sam carefully fitted his cardboard mask over the left side of the lens, covering the half of film that was already exposed.
When he nodded, Ranger called, “Roll it!” Sam turned the crank, and Sylvie played to the hilt, wringing her hands and squinching up her eyes. Her vocabulary was limited: “Please come home, Papa. Please, please, please come home…” After about a minute, Sam reached around to close the shutter and cranked a few more turns while watching the counter. “Looks good.”
Ranger sat back with a heavy sigh, then jumped up and wrapped Sylvie in his arms.
“What about the ground?” I asked Sam, after he had stopped the film. “Will you have to tint out the floor too?”
He shook his head. “Won’t show in a three-quarter shot. Camera’s only got you from the knees up.”
Ranger called my name, and I trotted obediently out to perform my turn with “Papa.” He trusted I could do it without him standing proxy: “And you’d better keep a straight face while you’re at it. Sylvie almost laughed a couple of times.”
“I did not!” she protested.
My pleading was more sedate, with good use made of a handkerchief twisted in my fingers and dabbed at my eyes. That take also seemed to go well, so Ranger was feeling confident when setting up for his confrontation scene. He rehearsed it a couple of times as Sam stood in for his father, self-consciously copying the actions he remembered.
When the shooting began, Ranger quickly worked up an air of indignation. In fact, it seemed to me he was overdoing it. But soon it didn’t matter, for Sylvie found a half-grown kitten lurking among the trees and gave chase, and the feral feline led her diagonally right across the camera lens.
“Cut!” Ranger yelled, followed by a few words I didn’t even know.
Sylvie was devastated at her speedy fall from grace and tried to make it up to him by presenting the cat she’d managed to capture. But Kitty just scratched Ranger’s face, and the situation was not improved until I had an idea.
“Why not shoot another scene in the house, where the youth comes to call, and Sylvie introduces him to the cat and it scratches him and… I tend to the cut on his face and we look at each other and…” My inspiration dried up at that point.
But Ranger calmed down enough to consider it. “What do you think, Sam?”
The cameraman, who had been taking some deep breaths to regain his composure after the shot was ruined, just tightened his lips and nodded shortly.
We shot two takes of the scene, and Ranger cheered up, even after getting a scratch on the other side of his face. No one seemed to notice that I had made my first original contribution to the picture—no one but me, that is—and I couldn’t explain my inner glow on the way home.
A couple of days later Sam reported via telephone that the father-and-daughter scenes didn’t look too bad, if something could be done to blend the backgrounds together. On Saturday afternoon Ranger disappeared until well after bedtime. Since he wasn’t speaking to his father, he told Aunt Buzzy that he was helping a friend with a project. But I knew he was in the editing room at Vitagraph, hand-tinting frames with Sam until he was cross-eyed. I was the one who knocked on his bedroom door this time, after hearing him stumble down the hall.
“How does it look?” I asked.
“I have no idea.” He yawned, not otherwise moving from a sprawled position on his bed. “Couldn’t see anything but dots. That’s how we filled the space in between people and trees: lots ’n lots o’ dots. Dots everywhere. But say, since you give a darn now and my brain is fried, help me figure out a way to save Sylvie’s life.”
“Save her life? Is Sam still furious at her?”
“In the picture. Good night, Irene—hit that light on your way out, wouldja?”
• • •
Since our botched attempt at Santa Monica Beach, Ranger had given up the idea of rescuing Sylvie from drowning. Still, one of us had to be rescued from something. “What about a train?” he suggested the next morning. “Sylvie’s playing on the tracks and doesn’t see the locomotive thundering up, and I throw myself—”
“No,” I said. “A locomotive wouldn’t allow for retakes. And neither would getting hit by one.”
Automobiles and other large moving objects had the same drawback, as did falling from great heights and plunging over waterfalls. Ranger came almost to his wit’s end before hitting on a workable peril: “Sundance,” he told me a day later.
“Your horse? What about him?”
“That’s how I’ll rescue Sylvie.”
“O
h no,” I began. “You’re not going to subject my little sister to…” But not quite sure to what Sylvie would be subject, I could not complete the sentence.
“See? You don’t even know what I have in mind. You just know you’re against it.”
“All right,” I conceded. “What do you have in mind?”
His eyes snapped with their usual combustiveness. “We can use the film Sam already shot of me on the horse. Here’s how it goes: you and Sylvie are taking a walk in the pasture behind our house, and Sylvie’s attacked by Bone.”
“Bone?” Sylvie was tighter with Ranger’s dog than Ranger was himself. “He’s her best friend!”
“I can fix that. Anyway, I’m riding my horse not far away and hear your bloodcurdling screams and ride to the rescue, leaping over obstacles—we’ve already got that on film, remember—and snatch her from the vicious creature’s foaming jaws.”
“Can we use the part where you fall off?”
“Ha-ha. Say what you will, it’s surefire, with no public places and perfectly safe.”
“But I thought you weren’t allowed to ride yet.”
He rolled his eyes. “When did that ever stop Michelangelo?”
Surprisingly, Sylvie was the one with objections. She would have cheerfully posed in front of a roaring locomotive or floated to the edge of Thunder Falls—“But Bone’s my friend! I don’t want to make him mad at me.”
“You won’t,” Ranger assured her. “The way I’m going to make him act mad is with catnip. The smell drives him crazy. We’ll put some in your pocket—better make sure it’s an old dress—and he’ll be all over you. Mad with joy, really, but if you scream and act scared it’ll look like he’s mauling you.”
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