by Linda Nagata
“We need popcorn,” I say.
Samueldarrin pulls out a silver flask and two paper cups. “Here’s something better. A toast to The Ginger Star!”
Whiskey. It burns, but in a good way.
Above us, shimmering dust motes. The movie’s story is unremarkable: a hero, a quest, an alien planet, adversity, obstacles, failures, triumphs. But after ten minutes it’s obvious why the studio balked. Against what had to be enormous social pressure, Kershner was faithful to Brackett’s vision of a dark-skinned hero. There he is on the screen, Eric John Stark, steely-eyed and the same color as I am.
Samueldarrin leans forward. “That’s Cleavon Little! He bulked up a lot.”
“Who?”
“Starred in Blazing Saddles.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s on the Red List.”
It figures that Samueldarrin would have seen a film specifically banned for unforgivable misogyny. “Was he any good?”
“He was great. But only one major success, really. He died when he was fifty or so.” Samueldarrin rummages through one of the boxes of notes. “Where’s that cast list?”
Stark’s adventure takes place on the planet Pax, which unsurprisingly looks like California’s Santa Monica mountains. The heroine is a priestess named Gerrith, who in the original work had “bronzy” skin. Here, that means a white woman with a lot of paint on her. Samueldarrin comes up with the actor’s name: Jenny Harris. Neither of us has ever heard of her. She’s wearing a skimpy outfit, as most science fiction priestesses did, and a ridiculous hairstyle. In scene after scene, she gazes adoringly at Stark like a lovestruck puppy.
The rough cut ends before the climactic sequence where Stark faces down the enormous fanged beasts known as Northhounds and becomes their leader. Given the limits of 1970s technology, I can’t imagine how Kershner filmed the Northhounds. Green screen? Cloth puppets? Maybe little pieces of clay in stop-animation. How sad those days were.
“Let’s watch it again,” Samueldarrin says. “Another toast!”
More whiskey doesn’t improve the viewing. The sound is untreated and entirely missing in some scenes, with chunks of dialogue absent. There are no titles, composites, or graphics. There are some crude special effects, including plastic models dangling by wires. Some scenes are too long and others too short. But there’s potential here. Once the cut is digitized, I can rework it into the story of Gerrith, a mercenary-priestess who agrees to help a handsome but inept offworlder. She’ll defeat the Northhounds through feminine wisdom instead of brute strength. The original was limited by analog editing and masculine prejudice. My reconstruction will make Gerrith shine.
“Damn straight,” Samueldarrin says, after I blurt out my best ideas. “Here, have another drink.”
Toasting to the future success of The Ginger Star is the last thing I remember.
I wake up several hours later to a strange humming-clacking noise. My tongue is all fuzzy, my neck hurts from hours of being cricked, and there’s a pounding in my skull that I blame entirely on Samueldarrin.
“She lives!” he says when I emerge from the home theater. He’s bent over the KEM, cheerfully and completely destroying the film stock. I might hyperventilate. Sixty-year-old celluloid in little curled snips on the floor—
I flip off the power switch. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Editing!”
“Are you crazy? You can’t just cut it up without giving me a chance, too!”
He gives me a hurt look. “You think I’m completely unethical? Vancott made two extra sets of everything. You’ll get your own chance to play.”
Play. As if The Ginger Star is a toy. And maybe to him and other men, stories are just toys that you pick up and play with and disregard when they’re no longer amusing. But to Sibilia and me, stories mean more than that. Stories taught women courage when we felt isolated and alone, when we were told we were inconsequential and incompetent. Stories helped us unite and grab the power that men wouldn’t give us. Stories teach us not only how the world is, but how it should be.
I glower at him. “You got me drunk on purpose so you could get a jump start.”
“Don’t blame me if you can’t hold your booze,” he says sharply. “You’re a grown woman capable of making your own decisions. I’m not your father or patriarch or oppressor just because I shared my whiskey with you.”
I stomp upstairs. The flying squirrels give me a baleful look from their perches above their cage. Being male, of course they’re taking Samueldarrin’s side. Ms. Rawley is on the kitchen floor again, sawdust clinging to her skin, mouth set in a purposeful line. About half of the new boards are in place, while the rest are propped against the counters.
“Ah, there you are, Adeline Lynn,” she says, glancing upward.
“It’s me, Ms. Rawley. Minervadiane.”
She doesn’t even blink. “Of course you are. There’s leftover chili and biscuits in the oven. Help yourself.”
Adeline Lynn Fagins was part of my senior project, Heroines of the Reel Revolution. She was the first female director to break through the Hollywood gender ceiling into blockbuster success. Sure, there’d been pioneers like Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, and Kathryn Bigelow. But Adeline came along with her vision and imagination and brought millions of people back to the public theaters they’d long ago abandoned. She scored success after success until finally the male-dominated Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences could ignore her no longer. Finlay Vancott was her editor on several early projects. It’s possible that Adeline visited this house and that Ms. Rawley met her as a child. That Adeline walked this floor that Ms. Rawley is ripping up and replacing.
Or maybe Adeline is another flying squirrel. It’s hard to tell.
I crouch down. “I wish you’d let me help you.”
She leans back for a brief rest. “Young lady, I’ve been fixing this house since before you were born. What do I need help for? My father taught me everything I needed to know. These are his tools and his nails. When I’m too old to swing this hammer, I’ll be too old to breathe.”
I sit down beside her. “May I ask you something? Do you remember what I do?”
She gazes at me for a long moment, making mental guesses. Finally she comes up with the correct answer. “You edit films. I remember that movie you redid. Sweet young Drew Barrymore and her friend E.T.”
“And you want me to edit your grandfather’s movie. But you know that I’d have to reshape it in a way that he might never approve of, right?”
Ms. Rawley picks up a nail and turns it over between her wrinkled fingers. “I know that if you did it for your agency, you’d surely have to make Gerrith the star of the story. But I don’t intend to sell it to the government.”
“You don’t?” I can just imagine what Sibilia’s going to say about that. “Then why am I here?”
“Because your work is lovely, Minervadiane,” Ms. Rawlings says. “You show a great understanding of character and scene, and how to bring a story together. My grandfather would have loved your work. If you follow your heart, you can make The Ginger Star the film he hoped it would be.”
I’m flummoxed. “But I can’t afford to buy it from you.”
“I trust you to do it right,” she says. “And if you do, I’ll give it to you free and clear. To you, not the government.”
She slides a nail into a pre-drilled hole and begins hammering again. “Of course, if that boy Ringo does it better, I’ll give it to him instead.”
The heroine faces a crisis of conscience and ethics: it’s part of every good story.
During the middle of the day, when all reasonable people are sleeping and avoiding the sun, I knock on Sameuldarrin’s door.
“I’m asleep,” he calls out.
“You just came upstairs,” I reply, trying to keep my voice quiet. Ms. Rawley’s room is only a few doors away. “Open up.”
After a moment, he cracks the door open. He’s got dark circles under his eyes and is r
ubbing one shoulder, all stiff from hunching over the KEM for so long. Behind him is a bedroom as overstuffed with furniture as mine: there’s a wooden four-poster bed, two cherry bureaus, an oak secretary desk with a matching chair, a grandfather clock that doesn’t tick, and a freestanding wardrobe overflowing with clothes.
“What do you want?” Samueldarrin asks.
Sometimes it’s best to rip the bandage off the wound without preamble. “I apologize for implying you got me drunk.”
“It wasn’t an implication. Implications are subtle and veiled. You flat out accused me—”
“I apologize for accusing you,” I say, quickly, before he starts a long lecture. “I was wrong.”
He leans against the doorframe. In the low light from an Oriental lamp, with his bangs unruly on his forehead and dimples in both cheeks, he looks just like he did back when he won the Golden Doorknob Award. Every Film 101 student at Ithaca College was and still is required to write, shoot, and edit a three-minute film about how a doorknob kills a person. It’s a test of imagination and wit. His project was the best I’d ever seen, or have ever seen since.
“I accept your apology,” he says.
And maybe it’s been a while since my last relationship, or maybe I still admire his work, or maybe he’s just so ridiculously handsome that any woman my age would invite him to sex, but suddenly I’m imagining us in that four-poster bed. If we’re quiet we won’t wake Ms. Rawley or the squirrels. I can forgive, or at least temporarily forget, that he’s the face and voice of the patriarchy, and that he mocks my life’s work, and that if he had his way, every movie would end with a male hero carrying a woman up a staircase despite her protests.
He tilts his head and says, “You know, that’s the first time you’ve ever apologized to me for anything, Minnie. A guy could get used to that.”
We do not end up in bed together.
In classic films, action progresses either through scenes or montages. A scene puts the action in front of the viewer in more or less “real time.” A montage condenses several action points into a sequence edited for maximum impact, usually to music. If I were to use a montage to represent the work that Samueldarrin and I did over the next few days, I’d put it to a classic song of the revolution by the iconic Annie Oakley: “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.” The montage might look like this:
Shot of Samueldarrin confidently splicing film.
Shot of Minervadiane studying the storyboards thoughtfully.
Shot of Samueldarrin congratulating himself on another excellent splice.
Shot of Minervadiane studying Vancott’s cut again, frowning.
Shot of Samueldarrin giving himself a fist pump for another great splice. Such a dork.
Shot of Minervadiane in bed, pulling her pillow over her head.
When I call the office, Ann tells me that Ms. Rawley has no living relatives. The actors in the film died childless, and Kershner’s descendants have gone missing in the floods.
“How’s The Ginger Star coming?” she asks. “Everyone here is really excited to see it.”
“It’s fine,” I lie. “What have you been doing to The Matrix?”
“Nothing you won’t like,” she says, but in the background the Oracle is telling Trinity there’s a difference between knowing a path and walking it.
I hang up and blame all my current woes on Cleavon Little.
Alone in my room, I’d downloaded and watched Blazing Saddles. No wonder it’s on the Red List! Rape jokes. More rape jokes. The completely unrealistic portrayal of a frontier entertainer’s life in the Old West. Poor Madeline Kahn, forced to strut around in corsets and follow the dictates of Harvey Korman. But there’s Cleavon Little, bringing wit and panache to his role as the first black sheriff of Rock Ridge, just as he exudes power and strength as Eric John Stark.
If I rebuild The Ginger Star with Gerrith as the lead, Cleavon Little will never be recognized as the first black man to star as the lead of a science fiction film. History will instead continue to give that honor to Will Smith, even though Independence Day is now the story of a stripper and a First Lady teaming up to defeat alien invaders.
Surely I’m tough enough to rob a dead man of his legacy, but even with the Steenbeck threaded and the celluloid waiting for its razor cuts, I can’t do it.
“You going to edit that film or just keep staring at it?” Samueldarrin asks at midnight, as one of his spools runs out.
“I’m editing it in my head.”
“Excellent plan. Tell me when you invent a telepathic projector.” He leans back confidently. “Want to see my cut?”
“No.”
“I’d love your feedback.”
“Why would I give you feedback?”
“Because we’re both in it for the love of movies,” he says. “So what if you mangle great classics to appease your feminist dictators and I write appallingly bad parodies just for the attention? We’ve both got the Hollywood bug.”
“Hollywood has been underwater for decades,” I remind him.
“Come on, Min,” he wheedles. “Watch my movie and tell me how wrong I am.”
He loads up the projector and we sit in those velvet seats and damn if he hasn’t done something brilliant. The sound is still splotchy and the dialogue will need to be looped, but Stark’s search for his mentor is now a mythic quest. Yes, it’s the story of a man exhibiting all of the stubborn, violent, pigheaded tendencies of men, but beneath the stoicism lurks sorrow and loss. Gerrith is no longer the token woman, but instead a fully-fledged character. Jenny Harris fills the screen with a calm wisdom. She is truly a goddess: smart, sensual, powerful. The Northhounds are as crude as I feared, but Samueldarrin establishes fear and it takes both Gerrith and Stark to defeat them. Partners.
The film runs out. I don’t know what to say.
“Do you like it?” Samueldarrin asks softly. “I made it for you.”
I turn to him. There’s nothing fake about his expression in the glow from the screen. Nothing that reminds me how maddening and ridiculous he can be, or how he’s the same man who turned Buffy the Vampire Slayer into Xander Harris, Superhero.
Cue the romantic music.
“I guess it’s good,” I admit. “Maybe your best work ever, Ringo.”
Close up on the impending kiss. Our hero and heroine grow closer, gazes locked, mouths parting slightly, as all the wasted years evaporate and love blooms again.
“Call me Samueldarrin,” he says as our lips meet.
Then, a sound effect: a shrieking fire alarm.
The house is on fire.
“It was the toaster,” a purple-headed firefighter says to a police officer. “Someone put it under the broiler.”
The fire’s out, though thin gray smoke continues to waft toward the nighttime sky. Ms. Rawley is sitting on a bench, entirely unharmed but enjoying the attention of a handsome young paramedic. I’m waiting, stomach and fist clenched, on news of Samueldarrin. After the alarm went off, he and I rushed upstairs to help Ms. Rawley evacuate. All three of us made it outside safely. But then she said, “My babies, my babies!” and he dashed back inside to save the flying squirrels.
“Excuse me,” I say to the firefighter with purple hair. “What about Mr. Cross?”
“Ringo Cross?” she asks. “The filmmaker? I love his work.”
“He went back inside for her pet squirrels.”
Another firefighter says, “The squirrels are on the back lawn.”
I go investigate for myself. Mike and Ike look grumpy in their cage but have no singes or burns. Goosebumps rising, I step past the lingering emergency personnel into the house. In the days when firefighters used water, there’d have been flooding everywhere. The film stock would have been destroyed, along with everything else we’d taken out of the vault. As it is, the suppression foam has already dried out and Vancott’s memorabilia is unharmed.
But The Ginger Star is missing. Every single reel.
My phone beeps with a message. It says, “D
ear Min, she gave the film to me. Come to the premiere! You’ll be my red carpet guest.”
When I burst back outside, ready to kill him, the purple-haired firefighter says, “You just missed your friend,” and Ms. Rawley’s car is gone.
“Don’t take it too hard,” Ms. Rawley says, patting the bench beside her. “He’s an exceptionally gifted editor.”
“You saw the movie?” I demand.
“He finished it this morning, but he was nervous about asking you to watch it.”
I slump on the bench. “He’s a big giant jerk.”
“Maybe,” she says. “But I don’t think your story’s over just yet.”
Here’s another fact about classic filmmaking: studios back then were appallingly reliant on sequels. So far I’ve had to fix Women in Black I, II, III, and IV. I’ll be busy for years rebuilding all the Superwoman, Spider-Woman, and X-Women movies. Let’s not even get started on the years of my life the Transformers franchise will suck away. But the point is, people in those days loved to see familiar characters and situations over and over. They filled theater seats and then bought home copies and then went to see the next sequel, even if it was terrible.
But that was then and this is now. Today it takes a lot more to hook an audience.
“I don’t think Samueldarrin and I have a sequel in our future,” I tell Ms. Rawley.
“Let me tell you about the other movie footage my grandfather saved,” she replies, and I’m hooked.
The Governess and the Lobster
Margaret Ronald
Dear Matron Jenkins,
For the record, I want you to know that the mechanical lobster is not my fault. I had only the best intentions when I asked the Cromwell children to deliver my initial report to the mail depot, and I did not learn about their addition to my package until recently.
I am sending this note by express post in hopes that it reaches you in time—though at this point, I’m not sure what would qualify as “in time.” Before the regular post arrives? Before the lobster winds down? Before we had ever received M. Eutropius’ misleading request? I do not know, and I fear that I will go mad long before I can make a guess.