The Other Side of Midnight

by Kim Newman

  Oja was the woman with the clipboard: Oja Kodar, Welles’s companion and collaborator. She was from Yugoslavia, another refugee washed up on this California shore.

  Welles seemed to float out of the swimming pool, easily hauling his enormous girth up the ladder by the strength of his own meaty arms. She was surprised at how light he was on his feet.

  He pulled off his putty nose and hugged her.

  “Geneviève, Geneviève, you are welcome.”

  The rest of the crew came up, one by one, carrying bits of equipment.

  “I thought I’d get Van Helsing’s mad scene in the can,” explained Welles.

  “Neat trick with the girls.”

  The twinkle in his eye was almost Santa Clausian. He gestured hypnotically.

  “Elementary movie magic,” he said. “Georges Méliès could have managed it in 1897.”

  “Has it ever been done before? I don’t recall seeing a film with the device.”

  “As a matter of fact, I think it’s an invention of my own. There are still tricks to be teased out of the cinema. Even after so many years-a single breath for you, my dear-the talkies are not quite perfected. My little vampires may have careers as puppeteers, animators. You’d never see their hands. I should shoot a short film, for children.”

  “You’ve been working on this for a long time?”

  “I had the idea at about seven o’clock this evening,” he said with a modest chuckle. “This is Hollywood, my dear, and you can get anything with a phone call. I got my vampires by ordering out, like pizza.”

  Geneviève guessed the invisible girls were hookers, a traditional career option for those who couldn’t make a showing in the movies. Some studio execs paid good money to be roughed up by girls they’d pass over with contempt at cattle calls. And vampires, properly trained, could venture into areas of pain and pleasure a warm girl would find uncomfortable, unappetising, or unhealthy.

  She noticed Nico had latched on to a young, male assistant and was alternately flirting with him and wheedling at him for some favour. Welles was right: she could have a career as a puppet mistress.

  “Come through into the house, Geneviève,” said Welles. “We must talk.”

  The crew and the girls bundled together. Oja, as production manager, arranged for them to pool up in several cars and be returned to their homes or-in the case of Nico, Mink, and Vampi-to a new club where there were hours to be spent before the dawn. Gary, the cameraman, wanted to get the film to the lab and hurried off on his own to an all-night facility. Many movie people kept vampire hours without being undead.

  There was an after buzz in the air. Geneviève wondered if it was genius, or had some of the crew been sniffing drac to keep going. She had heard it was better than speed. She assumed she would be immune to it; even as a blood drinker-like all of her kind, she had turned by drinking vampire blood-she found the idea of dosing her system with another vampire’s powdered blood, diluted with the devil knew what, disgusting.

  Welles went ahead of her, into the nondescript bungalow, turning on lights as he went. She looked back for a moment at the cast-off nose by the pool.

  Van Helsing’s mad scene?

  She knew the subject of Welles’s current project. He had mentioned to her that he had always wanted to make Dracula. Now, it seemed, he was acting on the impulse. It shouldn’t have, but it frightened her a little. She was in two minds about how often that story should be told.

  Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1939, having negotiated a two-picture deal as producer-director-writer-actor with George Schaefer of RKO Pictures. Drawing on an entourage of colleagues from the New York theatre and radio, he established Mercury Productions as a filmmaking entity. Before embarking on Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Welles developed other properties: Nicholas Blake’s just-published anti-Fascist thriller The Smiler with a Knife (1939), Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Like the Conrad, Dracula was a novel Welles had already done for the Mercury Theatre on the Air radio series (July 11,1938). A script was prepared (by Welles, Herman Mankiewicz and, uncredited, John Houseman), sets were designed, the film cast, and “tests”-the extent of which have never been revealed-shot, but the project was dropped.

  The reasons for the abandonment of Count Dracula remain

  obscure. It has been speculated that RKO was nervous about Welles’s stated intention to film most of the story with a first-person camera, adopting the viewpoints of the various characters as Stoker does in his might-have-been fictional history. Houseman, in his memoir Run-Through (1972), alleges that Welles’s enthusiasm for this device was at least partly due to the fact that it would keep the fearless vampire slayers-Harker, Van Helsing, Quincey, Holmwood-mostly off screen, while Dracula, object of their attention, would always be in view.

  Houseman, long estranged from Welles at the time of writing, needlessly adds that Welles would have played Dracula. He toyed with the idea of playing Harker as well, before deciding William Alland could do it if kept to the shadows and occasionally dubbed by Welles.

  The rapidly changing political situation in Europe, already forcing the Roosevelt administration to reassess its policies about vampirism and the very real Count Dracula, may have prompted certain factions to bring pressure to bear on RKO that such a film was “inadvisable” for 1940.

  In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, published in This Is Orson Welles (1992) but held well before Francis Ford Coppola’s controversial Dracula (1979), Welles said: “Dracula would make a marvellous movie. In fact, nobody has ever made it; they’ve never paid any attention to the book, which is the most hair-raising, marvellous book in the world. It’s told by four people, and must be done with four narrations, as we did on the radio. There’s one scene in London where he throws a heavy bag into the corner of a cellar and it’s full of screaming babies! They can go that far out now.”

  Jonathan Gates, “Welles’s Lost Draculas.”

  Video Watchdog No. 23 May-July 1994

  Welles did not so much live in the bungalow as occupy it. She recognised the signs of high-end, temporary tenancy. Pieces of extremely valuable antique furniture, imported from Spain, stood among ugly, functional, modern sticks that had come with the let. The den, largest space in the building, was made aesthetically bearable by a hanging she put at sixteenth century, nailed up over the open fireplace like a curtain. The tapestry depicted a knight trotting in full armour through forest greenery, with black-faced, red-eyed-and-tongued devils peeping from behind tall, straight trees. The piece was marred by a bad burn that had caught at one corner and spread evil fingers upwards. All around were stacks of books, square-bound antique volumes and bright modern paperbacks, and rickety towers of film cans.

  Geneviève wondered why Welles would have cases of good sherry and boxes of potato chips stacked together in a corner, then realised he must have been partly paid in goods for his commercial work. He offered her sherry, and she surprised him by accepting.

  “I do sometimes drink wine, Orson. Dracula wasn’t speaking for us all.”

  He arched an eyebrow and made a flourish of pouring sherry into a paper cup.

  “My glassware hasn’t arrived from Madrid,” he apologised.

  She sipped the stuff, which she couldn’t really taste, and sat on a straight-backed gothic chair. It gave her a memory flash, of hours spent in churches when she was a warm girl. She wanted to fidget.

  Welles plopped himself down with a Falstaffian rumble and strain on a low couch that had a velvet curtain draped over it. He was broad enough in the beam to make it seem like a throne.

  Oja joined them and silently hovered. Her hair was covered by a bright head scarf.

  A pause.

  Welles grinned expansively. Geneviève realised he was protracting the moment, relishing a role.

  She even knew who he was doing, Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. The ambiguous mastermind enjoying himself by matching wits with the perplexed priv
ate eye. If Hollywood ever remade Falcon, which would be a sacrilege, Welles would be in the ring for Gutman. Too many of his acting jobs were like that, replacing another big personality in an inferior retread of something already got right.

  “I’ll be wondering why you asked me here tonight,” she prompted.

  “Yes,” he said, amused.

  “It’ll be a long story.”

  “I’m rather afraid so.”

  “There are hours before dawn.”

  “Indeed.”

  Welles was comfortable now. She understood he had been switching off from the shoot, coming down not only from his on-screen character but from his position as backyard God.

  “You know I’ve been playing with Dracula for years? I wanted to make it at RKO in ‘40, did a script, designed sets, cast everybody. Then it was dropped.”

  She nodded.

  “We even shot some scenes. I’d love to steal in some night and rescue the footage from the vaults. Maybe for use in the current project. But the studio has the rights. Imagine if paintings belonged to whoever mixed the paints and wove the canvas. I’ll have to abase myself, as usual. The children who inherited RKO after Hughes ran it aground barely know who I am, but they’ll enjoy the spectacle of my contrition, my pleading, my total dejection. I may even get my way in the end.”

  “Hasn’t Dracula been made? I understand that Francis-“

  “I haven’t seen that. It doesn’t matter to me or the world. I didn’t do the first stage productions of Macbeth or Caesar, merely the best. The same goes for the Stoker. A marvellous piece, you know.”

  “Funnily enough, I have read it,” she put in.

  “Of course you have.”

  “And I met Dracula.”

  Welles raised his eyes, as if that were news to him. Was this all about picking her brain? She had spent all of fifteen minutes in the Royal Presence, nearly a hundred years ago, but was quizzed about that (admittedly dramatic) occasion more than the entire rest of her five hundred and sixty-five years.

  She’d seen the Count again, after his true death-as had Welles, she remembered-and been at his last funeral, seen his ashes scattered. She supposed she had wanted to be sure he was really finally dead.

  “I’ve started Dracula several times. It seems like a cursed property. This time, maybe, I’ll finish it.

  I believe it has to be done.”

  Oja laid hands on his shoulders and squeezed. There was an almost imperial quality to Welles, but he was an emperor in exile, booted off his throne and cast out, retaining only the most loyal and long-suffering of his attendants.

  “Does the name Alucard mean anything to you?” he asked. “John Alucard?”

  “This may come as a shock to you, Orson, but ‘Alucard’ is ‘Dracula’ spelled backwards.”

  He gave out a good-humoured version of his Shadow laugh.

  “I had noticed. He is a vampire, of course.”

  “Central and Eastern European nosferatu love anagrams as much as they love changing their names,” she explained. “It’s a real quirk. My late friend Carmilla Karnstein ran through at least a half dozen scramblings of her name before running out. Millarca, Marcilla, Allimarc…”

  “My name used to be Olga Palinkas,” put in Oja. “Until Orson thought up ‘Oja Kodar’ for me, to sound Hungarian.”

  “The promising sculptor ‘Vladimir Zagdrov’ is my darling Oja, too. You are right about the undead predilection for noms de plume, alter egos, secret identities, anagrams, and palindromes and acrostics. Just like actors. A holdover from the Byzantine mind-set, I believe. It says something about the way the creatures think. Tricky but obvious, as it were. The back spelling might also be a compensation: a reflection on parchment for those who have none in the glass.”

  “This Alucard? Who is he?”

  “That’s the exact question I’d like answered,” said Welles. “And you, my dear Mademoiselle Dieudonné, are the person I should like to provide that answer.”

  “Alucard says he’s an independent producer,” said Oja. “With deals all over town.”

  “But no credits,” said Welles.

  Geneviève could imagine.

  “He has money, though,” said Welles. “No credits, but a line of credit. Cold cash and the Yankee dollar banish all doubt. That seems unarguable.”

  “Seems?”

  “Sharp little word, isn’t it? Seems and is, syllables on either side of a chasm of meaning. This Mr.

  Alucard, a nosferatu, wishes to finance my Dracula. He has offered me a deal the likes of which I haven’t had since RKO and Kane. An unlimited budget, major studio facilities, right of final cut, control over everything from casting to publicity. The only condition he imposes is that I must make this subject. He wants not my Don Quixote or my Around the World in 80 Days, but my Dracula only.”

  “The Coppola-” a glare from Welles made her rephrase “-that other film, with Brando as the Count? That broke even in the end, didn’t it? Made back its budget. Dracula is a box-office subject.

  There’s probably room for another version. Not to mention sequels, a spin-off TV series and imitations. Your Mr. Alucard makes sense. Especially if he has deep pockets and no credits. Being attached to a good, to a great, film would do him no harm. Perhaps he wants the acclaim?”

  Welles rolled the idea around his head.

  “No,” he concluded, almost sadly. “Gené, I have never been accused of lack of ego. My largeness of spirit, my sense of self-worth, is part of my act, as it were. The armour I must needs haul on to do my daily battles. But I am not blind to my situation. No producer in his right mind would bankroll me to such an extent, would offer me such a deal. Not even these kids, this Spielberg and that Lucas, could get such a sweetheart deal. I am as responsible for that as anyone. The studios of today may be owned by oil companies and hotel magnates, but there’s a trace memory of that contract I signed when I was twenty-four and of how it all went wrong, for me and for everyone.

  When I was kicked off the lot in 1943, RKO took out ads in the trades announcing their new motto:

  ‘Showmanship, not genius!’ Hollywood doesn’t want to have me around. I remind the town of its mistakes, its crimes.”

  “Alucard is an independent producer, you say. Perhaps he’s a fan?”

  “I don’t think he’s seen any of my pictures.”

  “Do you think this is a cruel prank?”

  Welles shrugged, raising huge hands. Oja was more guarded, more worried. Geneviève wondered whether she was the one who had insisted on calling in an investigator.

  “The first cheques have cleared,” said Welles. “The rent is paid on this place.”

  “You are familiar with the expression…”

  “The one about equine dentistry? Yes.”

  “But it bothers you? The mystery?”

  “The Mystery of Mr. Alucard. That is so. If it blows up in my face, I can stand that. I’ve come to that pass before, and I shall venture there again. But I should like some presentiment, either way. I want you to make some discreet inquiries about our Mr. Alucard. At the very least, I’d like to know his real name and where he comes from. He seems very American at the moment, but I don’t think that was always the case. Most of all, I want to know what he is up to. Can you help me, Mademoiselle Dieudonné?”

  “You know, Gené,” said Jack Martin wistfully, contemplating the melting ice in his empty glass through the wisps of cigarette smoke that always haloed his head, “none of this matters. It’s not important. Writing. It’s a trivial pursuit, hardly worth the effort, inconsequential on any cosmic level.

  It’s just blood and sweat and guts and bone hauled out of our bodies and fed through a typewriter to slosh all over the platen. It’s just the sick soul of America turning sour in the sunshine. Nobody really reads what I’ve written. In this town, they don’t know Flannery O’Connor or Ray Bradbury, let alone Jack Martin. Nothing will be remembered. We’ll all die and it’ll be over. The sands will close over our civil
isation and the sun will turn into a huge red fireball and burn even you from the face of the earth.”

  He didn’t seem convinced. Martin was a writer. In high school, he’d won a national competition for an essay entitled “It’s Great to Be Alive.” Now in his grumbling forties, the sensitive but creepy short stories that were his most personal work were published in small science-fiction and men’s magazines, and put out in expensive limited editions by fan publishers who went out of business owing him money. He had made a living as a screenwriter for ten years without ever seeing anything written under his own name get made. He had a problem with happy endings.

  However, he knew what was going on in “the Industry” and was her first port of call when a case got her mixed up with the movies. He lived in a tar-paper shack on Beverly Glen Boulevard, wedged between multimillion dollar estates, and told everybody that at least it was earthquake-proof.

  Martin rattled the ice. She ordered him another Coca-Cola. He stubbed out one cigarette and lit another.

  The girl behind the hotel bar, dressed as a magician, sloshed ice into another glass and reached for a small chromed hose. She squirted Coke into the glass, covering the ice.

  Martin held up his original glass.

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could slip the girl a buck and have her fill up this glass, not go through all the fuss of getting a fresh one and charging you all over again. There should be infinite refills. Imagine that, a Utopian dream, Gene. It’s what America needs. A bottomless Coke!”

  “It’s not policy, sir,” said the girl. With the Coke came a quilted paper napkin, an unhappy edge of lemon, and a plastic stirrer.

  Martin looked at the bar girl’s legs. She was wearing black fishnets, high-heeled pumps, a tight white waistcoat, a tail coat, and tophat.

  The writer sampled his new, bottomed, Coke. The girl went to cope with other morning customers.

  “I’ll bet she’s an actress,” he said. “I think she does porno.”