A Film by Spencer Ludwig

by David Flusfeder

  SPENCER LUDWIG, eyes closed, throws himself on to the bed. JIMMY LUDWIG goes at top speed to the window, knocking over a chair along the way. He rests his elbows on the table and opens the backgammon set.

  JIMMY LUDWIG

  Let’s get to work.

  Spencer picks up the telephone. His father disapproves. Spencer has postponed their backgammon game for this.

  ‘Why do you use that, that citation? It’s a clip joint.’

  ‘I’ve got to call Mary.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mary. My daughter. Your granddaughter. It’s her birthday, she’d never forgive me if I didn’t call.’

  He does not tell his father that he has also used this phone to arrange for flowers to be delivered to her. (Florists, no less than hotel telephones, are a racket, a clip joint.) Mary thanks him for the flowers. She says they made her feel like a movie star.

  ‘I want to come live with you,’ she says.

  ‘Oh baby.’

  She puts her case as being a matter of love. He makes objections and she knocks them down. ‘I’m in America, honey.’

  ‘I love America. You remember what I said the time you took me to New York?’

  ‘Of course I do. You got out of the taxi and said, And now my life begins!

  ‘I want to live in New York.’

  ‘And you will one day. But anyway, I’m not in New York. I’m in Atlantic City.’ ‘I’d like that too.’

  ‘I doubt that, but maybe. But I’m coming back to London soon.’

  ‘You see?! And then I can come live with you.’

  ‘You know my flat. There’s not a lot of room there.’

  ‘I’m small. I don’t take up much room.’

  That is sort of true, but Mary, although indeed small for her age, manages to fill any space she finds herself in, with her voice and appetites and implements.

  ‘I don’t think I’d be that good at looking after you.’

  ‘We’d look after each other. It’ll be fun.’

  ‘Yes. Well. It could be.’

  ‘We’d go out for pizza lots of the time and do the fun things that we like to do with each other. And we can watch all the movies you want to show me. I promise I’ll watch them quietly, even the Jack Ford ones.’

  ‘John Ford.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘And what about work and school?’

  ‘I don’t go to work.’

  ‘No, but I do.’

  ‘That’s OK. I’ll do the sorts of things that I should do. Like tidying up, and my homework. I told you, we’ll look after each other.’

  ‘It sounds very nice.’

  ‘It will be. It will be very nice. It will be so nice.’

  ‘And what about your mother?’

  ‘We don’t want her with us. That’ll spoil everything.’

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘At home? Has something happened?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s just so boring here.’

  ‘It’d be even more boring with me.’

  ‘Oh that’s not true, I know it isn’t. We have fun.’

  Even when she was a baby, Spencer working upstairs would not be able to resist the lure of Mary. A few months old, Mary had a sense of humour. The sight of her always made Spencer’s heart lift. A script abandoned upstairs, Spencer would sit with his daughter on the living-room floor and they would play with plastic teacups or unpleasant miniature farm animals and make each other laugh.

  ‘You don’t make me eat Brussels sprouts.’

  ‘No, that’s true, I don’t,’ he concedes.

  ‘And you wouldn’t make me eat Brussels sprouts. You don’t eat Brussels sprouts.’

  ‘No. They’re horrible. Mean and bitter.’

  ‘That’s what I think too. And you might let me get my ears pierced.’

  ‘Might I?’

  ‘Yes. I think you might. And you let me watch TV on a school night. Not like—’

  ‘Not like who?’

  ‘Nobody. I was just saying.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’

  ‘I’m not talking about anything in true life. It’s just suppose.’ ‘Yes. Of course. I know that. But look, honey. I should go. Do you want to say hello to Papa Jimmy? I think he wants to wish you happy birthday.’

  ‘I suppose so. But promise you’ll think about what I said.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘And you mustn’t tell anyone what we’re planning.’

  ‘We’re not planning anything. All I said was I’ll think about it.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Just like our secret.’

  ‘Sure. Our secret. I better go. I love you.’

  ‘I love you too, Daddy.’

  ‘Here’s Papa Jimmy.’

  Grandfather and granddaughter are equally reluctant conversationalists. Neither can ever really understand what the other is saying. And how Spencer cringes when he hears his father bravely trying to wish Mary a happy birthday and say, Happy New Year! in the saddest of jaunty ways.

  Returning to the endless backgammon game, Spencer manages to explain to his father about his daughter’s plan. His father is quick with his opinion.

  ‘Just say yes, she’ll forget about it.’

  He had thought he had gone beyond being shocked by anything of his father’s. Is this the substance of the Jimmy Ludwig doctrine of childcare? Might it even be true? Maybe that was why he had learned never to ask anything of his father.

  When the telephone rings, his father waves an unsteady hand towards it.

  ‘Spencer,’ his father says.

  The saying of his name by his father gives Spencer a gentle pleasure. He nods. He does not answer the phone. He expects it to be his stepmother, or his daughter, or his producer, one of the women in his life who want something from him or, worse, want to give him something.

  Spencer’s father won’t answer the phone either, but the fact that Spencer won’t do it agitates him. He puffs out his cheeks and blows and painfully shakes his head at his son.

  ‘Look. If you want to speak to her, you can always call her,’ Spencer says.

  His father does not answer. He rolls his dice and picks off one of Spencer’s pieces and slams it down on the bar.

  ‘What’s going to happen if she dies before you?’ Spencer asks.

  He has tried this topic before, to push his father’s mind into the future, into making some plan for himself. He has tried to contemplate the ménage that might result, three generations of Ludwig squeezed into Spencer’s flat, but the prospect is more or less unthinkable.

  ‘Then you’ll be loaded.’

  ‘That’s not really what I meant. I’m trying to get you to think about your situation. You must have thought about it, talked about it. What happens if you die first?’

  ‘Then she’ll be loaded!’

  His father is triumphant in his logic. And is this what it’s all about, this good-son business? If his father were poor, would Spencer be so assiduous in his care? He has avoided thinking about it. He usually tries, in his own way, to be honest.

  ‘OK. What about your funeral? Have you made plans for your funeral?’

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s taken care of.’

  ‘Really? Everything? The form of it, how you want the service to be. Have you chosen music?’

  Spencer has chosen the music for his own funeral. A recording of the Kaddish, as performed by Clara Rockmore on the theremin, to be followed by Townes Van Zandt’s ‘You Are Not Needed Now’, played live by his friends Charlie and Mathew and Robert, on vocals, drums and piano. He is not sure he wants Charlie to be the singer. It is probable that Robert will predecease him. This is how rich men must think. They tamper around with their wills; Spencer changes the members of his funeral band. Sometimes Rick Violet is the singer, usually he isn’t.

  ‘It’s paid for.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  He has become accustomed to thinking his thought
s out loud, to carry on a kind of interior monologue, bouncing his words off the uncomprehending eyes of his father.

  ‘I’m not dead yet,’ his father says.

  ‘I know you’re not,’ Spencer says in an effort of conciliation.

  ‘And when I am, what do I care?’

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

  There is a sort of crack in Spencer’s soul that corresponds, he believes, almost to the shape of his father.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘How much what?’ Spencer says.

  ‘How much do you need?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes you do.’

  His father understands him this well at least, that Spencer knows exactly how much money he owes in the world, to the bank, to the credit card company, to his ex-nearly-wife, and, most irksomely, to Michelle, who is the only one on the list that he likes. Like Mary’s when she arrived in New York, his life can only begin when he cuts free from all his obligations, when he pays Michelle what he owes her.

  Spencer’s father gets up from the table. He goes to the wardrobe, the bathroom, the bedside table.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Looking for. Citation.’

  ‘Chequebook?’

  ‘Yes. Citation.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To pay you. So you can start.’

  ‘That’s very kind.’

  ‘Not kind. What do I care?’

  That’s a good question, and one that Spencer does not want to investigate the answer to.

  ‘I won’t take it.’

  ‘You will.’

  Spencer will not. He does not want to erase current dependencies with another, more burdensome one.

  ‘No. I won’t.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Maybe so.’

  ‘You’ll take it after I’m dead.’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘How?’

  Another good question, which Spencer can’t begin to answer. Why should it make a difference that he receives money from his father while he’s alive? Why should that be worse than receiving cash from a dead man? He has the urge to call Michelle, to tell her that he wants to raise money for a project to be called The Trouble with Money. But he can’t call Michelle, not until he has £27,000 to pay her off with, and the money may not come from his father.

  Spencer makes his way downstairs to the film festival floor. Spencer had once made a film—he was between projects, trying to raise money, to force his way back into the productive world—that was a montage of film editing clichés. He had five actors committed to the next, penniless project and he needed to keep them, and himself, busy if he wasn’t to lose them along with something else more important and more intangible. A door opens, a match flares, a train goes through a tunnel, an aeroplane takes off from a foggy runway, a woman smiles, a gate slams shut, a conversation between two men cuts between them, jumping into tighter close-up each time, a baby in a pram jolts downstairs—cut quickly to all the menace of the world: baby carriage—wild bear—baby carriage—men with guns—baby carriage—a whirling tornado—baby carriage—earthquake—baby carriage—mushroom cloud of a nuclear storm—baby carriage—psycho with noose approaching—baby carriage nearly at the foot of the stairs now—onrush of car, headlights and horn sounding—carriage one step from foot of stairs—and a woman wakes up in bed screaming. The torturer’s steel, the martyr’s face. A clock ticks, a man looks at his watch, the surgeon’s scalpel lifts, the front legs of an abattoir cow give way, it sinks to its belly, blood spurting from the wound in its throat. An adolescent boy’s frantic stare, the cleavage of a beautiful mature woman, the long line of cows in a milking parlour, line of milk cartons in a supermarket, exterior of a desolate corner store with the sign on the window Closing Down, a sad man walks into a dingy back room, a revolver waiting on a plain wooden table, two youths run through a field, clouds in a murky sky, rain splashes on to the surface of a river, a hand turns a tap, a pretty girl lifts a glass of water to her mouth. A door opens. A match flares.

  It was all done with style and attention to detail, entirely straight-faced and deadpan; the humour was in the material, not in the makers’ attitude to it. Every scene, every costume, each tip of an actor’s hat was as authentic as Spencer could make it. And maybe that was why it was so successful with its audience, or maybe it was because it was done so quickly, a jeu d’esprit. These are films for throwing away, Fassbinder once said, and One Door Opens was Spencer Ludwig’s own thrown-away film.

  It attracted a following, it spawned its imitators, it became its own cliché. Spencer didn’t care, it was his thrown-away film; the fact that it had a life was none of his concern.

  Spencer walks down the corridor to the film festival viewing room. The area is not as crowded as a Featured Director might wish. Spencer walks modestly, his laminated badge (Spence Lunwig, Featured Director) swinging against his new black T-shirt, from which the logo and lettering have yet to fade. A young man dressed in the black livery of the festival sits on a stool outside the viewing room with his attention on the laptop on his lap. Spencer shows his name badge but the young man does not shift his gaze. Going past, Spencer looks back to see the poker game on the young man’s screen.

  Spencer Ludwig’s retrospective is not what he had expected it to be. In the beige-and-tan room, with immovable windows looking out on to the Wild West casino, are eight television monitors. Beside each, pinned to the wall like labels in an art gallery, are lists of the films showing upon them. There are three presumptive cinéastes in the room, who are doing a slow bored tour of the monitors. Spencer identifies the screen showing his own films. It is the climactic scene of Robert W’s Last Walk, his favourite of his own films, which happens, co-incidentally or not, to be the one that attracted no foreign sales, for either film or television, and had only a brief first run, hardly any repertory showings, and appeared once on British television, only, it seemed, to demonstrate just how precise the instruments had become that registered how low audience figures could go. Spencer had employed as the lead an old character actor, who could turn in the most accomplished performance on the first take, but whose alcohol dependency meant that each subsequent take got worse and worse. They shot the picture in an old Austrian village outside Vienna, where the actor (who had once been a leading Beckett interpreter, but whose almost-familiarity came from his work in 1970s sitcoms, 1980s soap operas and 1990s television commercials) developed a liking for schnapps.

  Spencer’s attention, which has been wandering to the custodian’s laptop (he is playing a multi-table Hold ‘Em tournament as well as grinding away at a one dollar-two dollar Omaha game), is fixed by the final image of the title character, who has turned away once again from the camera (it is one of the strategies of the movie that the title character is always resisting the camera’s gaze, always trying to find some modest private place, with the implication, never brazenly stated, that the camera and the audience might well be improved by learning a little tact), and makes the timidly grand gesture of lifting his hands away from his sides and touching his thumbs together.

  Spencer is always moved by this moment. The film, as if, finally, belatedly, learning to respect Robert W’s privacy, fades slowly to black, with Robert W’s hands the last part of the image to disappear. There are no end credits. The moment of aloneness is meant to be shared by the cinema audience. But there is hardly any audience in this room. And neither does the moment of darkness, of aftermath (which, obscurely, Spencer personifies as female), sustain as she is meant to because the films are on some automatic DVD loader—and immediately One Door Opens loads with its first shot of a door opening.

  ‘Look,’ says a chubby man in shorts, whose attention has been taken by Spencer’s work at last. ‘That’s like the commercial. The one for that cereal.’

  ‘Oh yeah, it’s really annoying,’ says his companion.

  Spencer has given no permission for his film to be u
sed for a commercial for cereal or indeed any other product. This is against his narrow set of principles. He is not surprised or even dismayed. Something he cannot quite identify has been confirmed.

  Chapter Eight

  Spencer is in danger of confusing genres. This is not a scene from an independent film, it’s rebel Hollywood from the early 1970s, Michael Sarrazin and an ironically resurrected tough guy from a darker, more uncomplicated era—Sterling Hayden maybe, or Robert Ryan, Lawrence Tierney, even Elisha Cook Jr, if we are going down the ultra-ironic route—meet Karen Black and Carol Kane, a glimpse of the sea, another way of living, two girls of easy virtue and kind ways and only half-surrendered hopes, the four of them discovering an unlikely respite of shared humanity and heart. But everything is against them—the Corporation, the war in Vietnam, the past, men in ties and houndstooth jackets—and the world will explode in a Technicolor® starburst (with cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond).

  Drussilla is from Latvia, Tanya says she is American. Her accent though is rough with unfamiliar edges and utterly unplaceable to Spencer.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asks.

  ‘Wherever you want me to be from, honey,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t really have a preference. I was just interested,’ he says.

  Tonight is the gala and Spencer is nervous. He has his tuxedo ready, the one his father gave him several years before, a relic from the early 1970s, wide lapel, discreet flare. He has ironed the faded black T-shirt (Vive le Rock!) that he will wear underneath. And then he was sitting staring at his father and his father was sitting staring at him, and time was dripping far too slowly around them, until his father suggested they go to the bar for a drink. Which is where they met Drussilla and Tanya, or, rather, Drussilla and Tanya met them, attracted perhaps by the heavy gold band that Spencer, its unlikely owner, wears clasped around his left wrist.

  Both Drussilla and Tanya wear high-heeled shoes, short skirts, tight blouses. Drussilla’s hair is frosted blonde, piled up on her head in a tumble of curls that her slender neck looks unready to support. Tanya’s hair is long and sleek and dark, falling almost to the small of her back.

  Spencer’s father breathes harder. Long ago, Spencer’s father took Spencer’s stepbrothers to Kennedy Airport, where he taught them techniques in how to pick up air stewardesses. When Spencer had heard about this, he was tearfully jealous. Spencer was only twelve at the time, but he was thirsty for experience, particularly shared experience with his father.