by Linda Nagata
The gleam in Sibilia’s eyes is as bright as the fireflies in her scarf.
“The only existing copy of The Ginger Star,” she says, handing me a thinsheet.
The Ginger Star! The Holy Grail in the Greek pantheon of science fiction films, or some mixed metaphor like that. The thinsheet plays a grainy video clip of a spaceship zooming over a planet. It has the look of a 1970s science fiction movie, but it could easily be fake, too.
I ask, “What? Someone just happened to find a copy in a cardboard box in her basement?”
“Not just someone,” Sibilia says. “The granddaughter of Sir Finlay Vancott, winner of three Academy Awards as well as the editor’s guild Lifetime Achievement Award. She says he left behind a vault of film stock and vintage equipment in his old house. She’s getting rid of everything. She asked for you specifically because she saw how you fixed Blade Runner.”
That was one of my favorite projects: Rachel, a private eye in the dystopian future, fights to save her cybersisters Pris and Zhora from the deranged policeman trying to kill them.
“No one’s ever proved Finlay Vancott edited The Ginger Star,” I say.
“No one’s ever proved he didn’t. Just as no one has ever proved that Irving Kershner directed it and Doug Trumbull did the special effects and Leigh Brackett wrote the script herself. Any contemporary records were lost in the big flood of ’19. All we’ve got now are a bunch of legends and rumors and this one little old lady in her decline. Minervadiane, you have to go check this out. Get her to sell it to us.”
“How much can we offer?”
“As little as possible.”
I’m really not interested in swindling some dotty old widow. “What about The Matrix? I just can’t stop—”
“Use the intern! She can handle small things until you get back.”
End of act one: I’m on my way to something big.
Of course no one travels by daylight anymore, and everyone lives on mountaintops, so it’s not until the next night that my plane descends vertically into the thin trees of the Blue Ridge Forest and I stagger out on the launch pad. So much for that motion-sickness pill. Ms. Amelia Corinne Rawley lives far enough way that I’ve had to arrange for a private car. When I get to the parking lot, I see that the automated driver is on the fritz. That’s the only possible explanation for the open hatch and the man leaning beside it with an insufferable grin on his face.
“Nice to see you, Minnie,” he says.
I drop my suitcase close enough to his feet that he flinches. “What are you doing here, Samueldarrin?”
“She invited Ringo Cross,” he says. “Says she’s got The Ginger Star and wants the best person to carry on her old grandpa’s legacy.”
This is beyond appalling. I’d turn around and march right back onto that plane if I thought I could keep my lunch down and my job afterward. Samueldarrin keeps grinning like a little kid on Christmas morning instead of a handsome, irritating, smart, smug bastard who calls himself Ringo Cross instead of the perfectly good name his mother gave him.
“As if your work is any way legitimate,” I retort.
He oozes faux surprise. “You can’t still be mad about The Handman’s Tale.”
“You desecrated Atwood’s story!”
“The same way you desecrate films every day, darling.” That’s an argument he’s tried before, as if what he does out of spite can in any way compare to what the government does to correct injustice. Samueldarrin pats the hatch. “Come on, let’s go. Don’t you want to get there before sunrise?”
“This is my car, all paid for. Find your own.”
“This is Ms. Rawley’s car that she sent herself. Yours got a virus and called in sick.”
This is probably true. East Coast cars are notoriously unreliable. I grab my suitcase and slide past him onto the fake leather seat. “Fine. Just don’t try to amuse me with news of your latest exploits.”
“I wouldn’t,” he says, and then for the next ten miles that’s all he does.
We met in college. It wasn’t an auspicious start: he was sneaking out of the men’s dorm past curfew and I was coming up the path, exhilarated from an all-night editing spree on my senior project, Heroines of the Reel Revolution. After he fell off the trellis and landed on me and campus security got called in, I learned that he was a first year student in my own program. He was lucky the school didn’t expel him for nearly killing me, or for his numerous unorthodox views, or for associating with dubious characters in the outlaw film community.
We may have slept together once or twice. Maybe the night before graduation. Maybe the week after. But that was before I saw his term project that re-edited Margaret Atwood’s classic story of female oppression into a feel-good story celebrating the patriarchy.
“—and then we went to the after-party and saw Edwardson, you remember him, and it was almost noon and we were still drunk—”
I grit my teeth. He knows that the proper re-name is Edwardheir, and he knows that it will annoy me. His first goal in life is to irritate people, and his second goal is to make money off that irritation.
“Do the women you date find your blathering at all interesting?” I ask.
“They find it fascinating. Do the men you date find your incessant frowns beautiful?”
“Not just beautiful, but gorgeous.”
He arches a carefully plucked eyebrow. “You would never abandon your misguided quest long enough to even have dinner with a guy.”
“You would never cease your self-promotion long enough to even look at a woman,” I reply.
The grin is back. “Oh, I look. I look a lot. Chicks dig rogue media celebrities.”
Chicks. Warn him that he could be arrested for discriminatory language, and he’ll just come up with something worse: babes, bitches, sluts—
I’m getting a headache. I could blame motion sickness and the scenery sliding by in the darkness outside, but I’d rather blame him. “In no way are you a celebrity.”
“I know that you keep track of my achievements. Wasn’t that you who left a blistering note after my award for Captain Chokotay Saves the Universe?”
“No one could possibly award that.”
“You should see what I’m doing now to Aliens.”
I gasp. “You wouldn’t!”
“Corporal Hicks and the Facehugger.” He wriggles those perfectly shaped eyebrows at me and then peers out the window. “Oh, look, we’re here.”
Ms. Rawley lives in a long, sprawling ranch house with dark windows and extensive xeriscaping. She answers the door herself—tall, skinny, with long gray hair and an aquamarine jumpsuit dusted with sawdust. She’s eighty years old and as dark as I am, although Finlay Vancott was as fair-skinned as anyone could be.
“I’m so glad you’re here!” she says. “Come on in and ignore the burning smell. I was cutting the head off a finishing nail.”
Stepping into her house is like stepping into a museum that has suffered a collision with a junk heap. Vintage movie posters from the 1990s and 2000s hang on the living room walls, each beautifully framed, but you can barely see them through stacks of books (paperbacks, very obsolete) and piles of decorative cardboard and plastic boxes. The ceiling is painted gold, and there’s a gilded animal cage, very tall, against one wall. The cage door is open.
“My boys are around here somewhere,” Ms. Rawley says, as proud as any mom. “Mike and Ike. They don’t bite.”
“And Mike and Ike are. . . ?” Samueldarrin asks.
“Flying squirrels,” she says. “Go on into the sunroom and I’ll get us some hot tea.”
The sunroom is less cluttered, but you still wouldn’t want the fire department inspecting it. The windows are heavily screened, of course. The furniture is bamboo and there’s a ceiling fan spinning overhead. Samueldarrin settles into a chair and stretches out his long legs. He’s wearing vintage blue jeans. Completely unfashionable and ridiculously tight.
He asks, “You don’t think she lets those squirrels run aro
und all day, do you?”
“Maybe they’ll nibble some sense into you,” I reply. “Corporal Hicks, indeed! Why don’t you just call it White Guys Save the Universe Again?”
He perks up. “Do you think that’ll sell more copies?”
No one buys his movies. No one with taste, that is. He doesn’t have access to real technology, so he resorts to making his own parodies with live actors (they work for the “exposure”) and live film crews (more expensive) and relies on guerilla marketing to the misogynists. His version of Kill Bill has a PMS-crazed assassin trying to kill a peaceful monk played by David Carradine. He remade The Hunger Games so that Peeta wins instead of Katniss. His Twilight is about a vampire stalked by a sulky teenager who will stop at nothing to bear his demon spawn.
Actually, that one was much better than the original.
Ms. Rawley returns with a tea tray. Samueldarrin looks entirely too pleased to be served by a woman. Once our cups are filled, she says, “It was one of my grandfather’s lifelong regrets that The Ginger Star was never finished and distributed. So groundbreaking, he said, and so sadly abandoned. He was such a fan of Leigh Brackett, you see. And Kershner! He never forgave him. The bad blood persisted until both of them died.”
Samueldarrin leans forward, elbows on his knees, almost sloshing tea on himself. “So the rumor of the feud is true?”
“Feud, indeed,” she says. “My grandfather never forgave Kershner for quitting the project to go make a James Bond movie.”
“Surely Kershner had his own reasons,” I put in.
“Of course!” Ms. Rawley brushes sawdust from her overalls. “The movie had already consumed several years of his life. He’d had to turn down George Lucas’s offer to direct The Empire Strikes Back. Turnbull couldn’t nail down the special effects, Vangelis felt his music was all wrong, and the studio kept wanting to insert a clunky narration to explain the plot. My grandfather tried to finish it on his own, but eventually he too had to move on.”
“Ms. Rawley, what would you like to see happen with this film?” I ask.
She gazes at us squarely. “I want an end to this story. People should remember and celebrate my grandfather’s achievements. And Brackett’s story, and Kershner’s direction, and of course the actors. I will entrust it to the person with the best plan to ensure its legacy.”
“That’ll be me,” Samueldarrin says instantly.
“It’ll be me,” I say, just as quickly.
She smiles. “If you’ll excuse me, I forgot the honey.”
Ms. Rawley leaves us alone. Samueldarrin says, with a narrow gaze, “I can’t believe you just lied to that lovely old lady.”
“What lie?” I demand.
“If you get your whitewashing feminist mitts on it, who knows what irreversible damage you’ll do?”
“Two words,” I say. “Margaret Atwood.”
We fume at each other for several minutes before I realize Ms. Rawley hasn’t come back. I hope she hasn’t fallen down or gotten sick. I follow the faint burning smell to a large, outdated kitchen in the messy process of renovation. Ms. Rawley is on her hands and knees on the floor, painstakingly slotting together new, honey-colored wooden boards. Rags and other supplies are spread on the countertops.
“Ms. Rawley, can I help you with that?” I ask.
She looks up, startled. “Who are you?”
I’d say she was kidding, except for the abject fear in her eyes.
“It’s me, Minervadiane. I’m here about the movie, remember?”
For a moment, no, she doesn’t remember at all. She’s wide-eyed and tense, her hand tight on that hammer. Slowly, though, memory creeps back into her expression. She laughs a tiny bit, forcefully.
“Of course you are,” she says. “I thought you and your boyfriend went to bed. Didn’t we already say good night?”
Alzheimer’s disease is what we call a plot complication.
Leigh Brackett was a pioneering female writer who wrote during the Golden Age of science fiction. Stories like hers promised a future full of interstellar adventure. My generation hasn’t even reached Mars yet. Brackett and her peers lived in awe of new scientific achievements such as computers, nuclear power, and rocket ships. They didn’t have to cower inside each day, afraid of the blistering light of the sun. She was a good writer, but science fiction didn’t pay nearly as much as screenwriting, and most of her later life was spent working in film and television.
Sometime in the mid-1970s, she adapted her own novel The Ginger Star into a movie script. It’s about a mercenary named Eric John Stark in search of his missing mentor. No one was interested. Then Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind proved that sci-fi could make tons of money selling tickets to people who had no interest in SF literature. At some point Kershner came onboard, along with his favorite editor Finlay Vancott. Brackett died. The script got rewritten. It got rewritten again, some say by Harlan Ellison™. It went into production, but the shooting was hampered by cost overruns, bad weather, and studio meddling. It was never finished and never released.
Now it’s right in front of me. Several cannisters of 35mm celluloid film, which would have disintegrated into nothingness by now if Vancott hadn’t built a climate-controlled vault down here in the bedrock of the mountain. The film smells faintly of vinegar and I’m afraid to touch it, even with cotton gloves on. According to the typewritten notes (typewritten!), the movie was shot in VistaVision, a format completely obsolete today. Three enormous boxes hold the storyboards, shooting script, production schedules, dailies logs, Kershner’s notes, and just about anything else Vancott could scavenge from the shoot.
In the low, long room outside the vault there are also some large console devices that look like they come from a spaceship set.
“Oh, baby,” Samueldarrin says, running his hands over the nearest one. “Come to daddy.”
“Since when do you have a fetish for props?” I ask.
He shakes his head sadly. “You don’t even know what this is, do you? Never seen one. Never touched it. Never known the pleasure of a razor and tape. This is a KEM flatbed editor. That’s a Steenbeck over there. And that upright one, a Moviola.”
It’s one thing to know from history class that people had to actually cut and splice film together. It’s quite another to see the machines themselves. The process is crude, laborious, and so much less flexible than what we do today. You might as well operate on the human body with a scalpel.
“Ms. Rawley says she wants us to use these machines to edit our own workprints, as her grandfather would have done,” Samueldarrin adds.
“She did not.”
“She did. You were on the phone. You know, her memory’s not nearly as bad as you think it is. Sure, she put the toaster in the oven and keeps forgetting my name. But who doesn’t have momentary lapses now and then?”
I turn away and go back to examining the film. “I’d like to forget your name, too.”
“How was your call with that soul-sucking boss of yours? Is Sibilia satisfied with global domination yet?”
The conversation had not gone well. First I’d talked with Ann, who reassured me she was not messing up my project and then made an offhand comment about using the Oracle in the dojo scene. I admonished her sternly and then put her to work seeing if Ms. Rawley had any living descendents. When I talked to Sibilia, she was completely against releasing any special “Vancott” version of The Ginger Star, because obviously he was steeped in the male twentieth-century social construct and his vision would automatically include severe gender oppression.
“Say whatever you need to appease her,” Sibilia said, “and then we’ll make our own cut.”
“I don’t want to be unethical—” I started.
That was the completely wrong thing to say, of course, and earned me an unnecessary fifteen minute lecture about Hollywood’s history of female repression and subjugation, as if I were an idiot who’d never seen a Michael Bay movie or any installment of Harry Potter. Meanwhile
Samueldarrin was having breakfast with Ms. Rawley, no doubt charming her in that ridiculous easy smiling way of his.
He plops down on the stool in front of the KEM and says, “I came knocking on your door today.”
“Really? I thought that was the squirrels.”
“I thought maybe you’d want to get reacquainted.”
I smile sweetly. “I’d rather kiss a rodent.”
Ms. Rawley descends the stairs behind us. She’s back in her dirty coveralls, with a tool belt around her waist and a pencil tucked behind one ear. Maybe I should make a documentary series about elderly women tackling their own home renovations. It’d be a hit on HHGTV, Her Home and Garden Television.
She asks, “Do you two have everything you need?”
“Absolutely not,” Samueldarrin says. “We need you here with us to help interpret your grandfather’s vision.”
She blushes. “I’m not a cinematic visionary like you two are. The home theater is down that hall. Enjoy!”
For all his smugness, Samueldarrin hasn’t actually ever handled celluloid. Neither have I. We can’t afford to scratch, tear, or damage the film, but Vancott’s workprint has to be mounted and threaded through a projector that looks ready to mangle our fingers. After two hours and some serious online research we get the movie running. For one brief, shining moment, the frames and images flicker against the screen. For the first time in sixty years, The Ginger Star lives.
The bulb pops and goes dark.
“I hope he packed a spare,” Samueldarrin mutters.
Up above us, Ms. Rawley bangs away with her hammer.
It takes us until midnight to change the bulb (glass!), get the film loaded properly (somehow we mounted it upside down), and the sound synched (because I’m sure the actors are not supposed to be speaking backward). After that, we sit in Vancott’s little home theater (oversized velvet chairs, surprisingly comfortable) that still smells, all these years later, of cigarette smoke.