by John Jakes
Most developments in the field excited the colonel, but not all. In Paris in December, two brothers named Lumière had unveiled their Cinematograph projection system to an invited audience of one hundred. “Oh, God damn those frogs,” Shadow groaned when he read the news in a month-old London paper. At the stove, Mary clucked sympathetically. Paul was sitting at the table. Jimmy was on duty downstairs; as soon as Paul ate, he’d relieve him.
“Sid, don’t work yourself up,” Mary said. “It hurts your nerves.”
“How can I help it? These two bozos showed thirty minutes of film. Twelve different subjects! ‘Workers Leaving the Factory.’ ‘Three Monsoors Playing Cards.’ ‘Sea Bathing in the Mediterranean’—Jesus, Jesus, they’re ahead.”
The colonel looked terrible, Paul thought. Not only pale from winter confinement but haggard from worry. He’d been in the cellar workshop all day. His patched blue work shirt was stained with varnish, sprocket grease, glue, and some unidentifiable substances.
“Here’s the worst,” he said. “They showed the pictures in some basement at a place called the Grand Café. The first crowd got in free. After that they sold tickets—one franc to see the whole show. The first day they took in thirty-three francs. The next day they took in over two thousand. It’s been that way ever since. God damn it anyway,” he cried, crushing the paper and flinging it over his head.
“Sid, honey, please.”
“They’re beating me to market! And they aren’t the only ones.” He held his head with both hands, uttering a string of harrowing oaths.
Mary dished out a passable Rippchen, which she’d cooked in Paul’s honor. Paul complimented her. She smiled provocatively. Shadow ate his meal in record time, even faster than Paul, and tossed off two shots of whiskey with it. He threw his napkin on the floor and departed for the cellar in a rush.
Paul went down to the parlor. He told Jimmy about the colonel’s state. Heading for supper, Jimmy rolled a cigarette. “I can’t figure why he gets so fired up. It’s just another business like his minstrel shows or the patent medicines he sold.”
“No, this is much more important to him. Much more important to the world, too. It may be the very greatest—”
He cut it off there. Jimmy was gone up the stairs, uninterested.
Paul roamed the city, passing out handbills or illegally pasting them on walls and telegraph poles. Better-dressed people usually wouldn’t take them; if they did, they threw them away as soon as they saw what was being advertised. Could you blame them? How could the pictures attract a broad audience if you had to go into a bad neighborhood to see them? How would they prosper if preachers damned them as lewd? Which, in the case of “A Chinese Dream,” was true. Paul had watched it several times. He recognized the technical merit of the photography and managed to separate that from the erotic content. Shadow’s picture wasn’t meant to be artistic, it was meant to arouse. It did.
When he wasn’t on the streets, Paul sat at the register and kept an eye on the poor working men, the floaters, the occasional harlots, who constituted the parlor’s trade. If business was slow, he tore through technical journals Shadow had discarded, studying the engraved diagrams, trying to fathom the jargon.
Sometimes he thought about the artistic rather than the technical aspect of living pictures. On a couple of warmer days, he took his noontime sausages and beer up to the big roof of the building and sat in the chilly winter sunshine studying the light, wondering why some kind of picture couldn’t be photographed here. There was plenty of space for improvised scenic backgrounds like those Wex had used. Maybe he’d suggest the idea to the colonel if there was a good opportunity.
He thought about Wex, too. Hoped he was getting along all right in West Virginia.
He thought about Nancy. At the end of his first month with Shadow, he addressed an envelope to her in Reelsville and put a dollar in it. He sent a dollar every two weeks thereafter.
One night when Jimmy was watching the parlor and Shadow seemed calm at supper, Paul asked if he might see the workshop. The colonel reacted like a child asked to open his toy box. “Sure you can, kid, come on.”
Paul had to bend to keep from bashing his head on beams above the narrow stair, as did the colonel. The workshop smelled of oily rags, sawdust, mold. Once the walls had been painted white, but large sections had peeled off, leaving scabrous gray patches. Neither the dirt nor the damp nor the ungodly clutter of plans and materials bothered Paul. To the contrary, he felt privileged, as though he were a visitor in the cave of some great sorcerer.
In one corner, fixed to a tripod obviously homemade, there was a rectangular wooden box with a hand crank and a hole for a lens in the narrow, front side. “This is it, Dutch. The Luxograph. Means writing with light.”
He picked up a smaller box from the worktable. “This is the magazine. Lightproof. Holds fifty feet of Eastman celluloid negative. You have to load it in the dark, but you can load it in the camera anywhere.” He opened the hinged side of the camera, showing Paul how the smaller box fit behind the lens. He closed the camera, rotated the crank on the side.
“You get eight frames per turn, two turns per second. In other words, sixteen frames a second, same as the Lumière Cinematograph. Mr. Edison’s sticking with forty-eight frames. Now tell me, do you really understand the principle of this thing?”
“I believe so.” Paul drew a breath. He must speak carefully; make no mistakes. “Film in the camera moves to the lens, and away from it, one frame at a time. At the lens a frame is exposed like a snapshot. The film is standing still then. While the film moves to allow the next exposure, light must be kept out. This is the purpose of the shutter mechanic—no—” He struggled a moment. “Mechanism. The shutter mechanism. The same idea applies when the film is shown. Still pictures are flashed one at a time. But the frames go by so fast, the eye is tricked, it sees continuous movement.”
“Dutch, that’s not half bad. I read in a book that it works because of a principle of optics; it’s called persistence of vision. If you flash a light, then put it out, the eye sees the light for a tenth to a twentieth of a second afterward. Same thing with flicker pictures. Your eye holds one picture till the next is in front of you, and it all seems continuous. Not only does Daws not understand any of it, he doesn’t give a shit.”
“Well, sir, you know what I think. I’m keen on every bit of it.”
A grin spread over Shadow’s pale, blotchy face. Paul had passed the examination.
“You know, kid, the great Mr. Edison’s fooled around with living pictures for eight or ten years. I mean Edison in the person of his helper, Laurie Dickson. Dickson does all the work in Room Five. Room Five, that’s the flicker room. The Wizard of Menlo Park, who doesn’t work a hell of a lot at Menlo Park anymore, has a locked room for every one of his major projects. I know because Mary’s favorite brother Benjamin—Benjy—bummed around the country as an itinerant carpenter for years. He was in Jersey when the Wizard built his big new lab. Benjy did some remodeling work at Glenmont, too. That’s his fancy mansion.”
“Is that how you first heard about the flickers?”
“Yeah, from Benjy. At least once a year, sometimes twice, Mary’s old lady gets sick. She’s eighty-two now, sound as a gold dollar, but she gets sick like clockwork. Mortally ill. Ready to meet her Maker. It’s how she whips Mary’s old man into line. And the kids—twelve, counting Mary—they all rush home for a week, everybody sits around and eats pie and cries into their hankies and then Mary’s ma pops out of bed, rises from the dead, good as new till the next time. In 1890 it really looked like the old lady was ready to cash her chips and leave the game. I was on the road, peddling. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I sold. Medusa hair-growth salve. Five dollars for a jar this teeny, and absolutely God damn worthless. Anyway, I said to Mary, this sounds serious, I’ll go to Richmond with you. Wouldn’t you know, the old game hen rallied like always. But while I was stuck in Richmond, I listened to Benjy talk about Room Five. Edison does
n’t think much of the living pictures, he just fools around with ’em because he can afford it. He can afford anything, whether it pays or not. He’s got a picture studio on the property at West Orange. The roof’s nothing but big shutters that can open to let in more light. The whole building pivots, like a swing bridge, so it can follow the sun all day. All that just to tinker!”
“He made his own peep show machines, didn’t he?”
“One of his subsidiary companies did. Now he’s working on a camera. From what I hear, his camera isn’t practical. It’s driven by a battery-powered electric motor. Too complicated, too costly—most of all, too heavy. Pick up the Luxograph.”
Carefully, Paul folded the tripod, lifted it and rested it on his shoulder.
“Light.”
“God, you’re eager. Forty-eight pounds isn’t what I call light. But it isn’t as heavy as an elephant, either. At forty-eight pounds the Luxograph can go anywhere there’s a picture worth taking. All you have to bring to it is a sharp eye and a steady hand on the crank. Somewhere in this mess I’ve got thirty feet of ruined film. Want to see how to load it?”
“Yes!”
Shadow laughed. “Guess I didn’t need to ask.”
The companion to the camera was the Luxograph projector, also unfinished. Crank-operated, it resembled a child’s coffin standing on end. Inside was a complex arrangement of rubber friction rollers, gears, and sprockets that moved the perforated film through a metal gate, holding each frame behind the projection lens for an infinitesimal moment before jerking the next into position. Shadow was proudest of a glass cell he’d designed into the space between the arc light and the film gate. “Film’s flammable as hell. Water in the cell damps down some of the arc light heat. There may be some picture distortion, but not enough so people would ask for their money back. I hope.”
He turned off the workshop light and wiped his hands on his shirttail as they went upstairs. “You want a beer?”
“Certainly, thank you very much.” It was turning out to be a momentous evening.
In the kitchen, Shadow brought a brown bottle of Crown’s from the icebox and fetched a bottle of Kentucky bourbon from the cupboard. Mary called sleepily from the bedroom.
“Be in soon, sweet. G’night.”
Shadow filled his glass to the rim. Paul pried the crown off the bottle. “Prosit, Dutch.” Shadow drank an alarming amount in one gulp. “That camera downstairs is all I need to start supplying pictures. But I’ll have to build a projector for every location that might show ’em.”
“What sort of locations would they be?”
“Variety theaters. But I’m also thinking I could have my own places, maybe using abandoned stores. Wouldn’t need much to try it. Just a few benches or chairs, plus a good white wall. If I made money with one, I could expand. I could have store shows in every town of any size. Operators would have to be trained to run the projectors, but I’ll have that problem anyplace I go.”
The man’s vision was amazing. Perhaps he wasn’t a genius like Mr. Edison, but he had imagination and a grasp of practical things, especially making money. Paul said, “That is a very ambitious plan.”
“Yeah, but down the road aways. Variety halls are first. Even that’s risky. So far I’ve put three hundred and twenty-nine dollars into building one projector. How I can recoup enough money when the pictures will be sharing the bill with ten other acts I’m not sure. Also, I haven’t got so much as one good picture for demonstrating the projector when it’s ready. I know there’s a way to make it all work, but I haven’t figured out every angle. It keeps me awake nights. When I’d rather be dreaming of Mary’s milky thighs.”
“You say you have made no pictures?”
“A couple of short ones—a few seconds. Not enough for a variety bill. They’d want ten, maybe fifteen minutes’ worth.”
“Could I help you make more? I have been studying the roof of this building. It’s very large. As the spring comes, there will be much more sunlight. We could film a little picture with a story. I read that they showed a story picture in Paris.”
“Yeah, I saw that. In my opinion, people don’t want to see stories.”
“But if we made one or two, you would have something to demonstrate.”
Shadow flung a boot on the table. Gave Paul a long look. “You’re right. If you get any ideas, jot ’em down. I’m glad I took you on, kid. You’ve got plenty of the old git-go. That’s American for drive—push. Jimmy, he’s different. He’s a tough apple, but he’s short on ambition. I mean the useful kind that earns you last rites in your own warm bed instead of a prison cell. Jimmy wants the green stuff but he doesn’t want to work for it. Not in any way that calls for thought, or lasts longer than five minutes. Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve bent the law more than a few times. But make a habit of it and someday they’ll build a hang noose just for you.”
After a pause, Paul said, “Colonel, I have wondered—did you like appearing on the stage?”
“For a while. Then it got boring. Same blackface every night. Same bad jokes and coon songs—” He jumped up, did a fast shuffling dance, struck a pose. When he sat again, he almost fell off the chair. It didn’t keep him from pouring more whiskey.
“The minstrel shows taught me plenty. But peddling was a lot more profitable. I told you I sold some awful stuff. Farmer Brown’s Family Recipe Pep Tonic—‘the drink that makes wives content.’ Nothing but grain alcohol, coloring, and cayenne. One old coot died after downing two pints, his heart gave out while his cock was still going. The town fathers hauled out the tar barrel for me. Fortunately I’d already decamped on the midnight local. Then there was my cultural endeavor. The Little Library of Ribaldry, twenty-two handsome miniature volumes containing some of the world’s juiciest—well, you get the idea.”
“It is a long way from minstrels and peddling to the pictures. Was it Mary’s brother who inspired your interest?”
“Right. I’d been looking for the big one, the big chance, all my life. Seemed like I was never going to find it. I was pretty discouraged. Then I had another piece of dumb luck.”
“What?”
“Mary’s ma got ready to die again.”
Just last year it was (Shadow went on). The old lady had her semiannual seizure. It looked serious, same as it had back in ’ninety. All the Beezer brothers and sisters sent frantic telegraph messages—“This is it, this time she’s really going.” Mary was truly busted up, though. I had to go along to buck her up.
Like I said, I was feeling pretty low. I’d opened this parlor in June of ’ninety-three. No, I didn’t lay out the place, or manufacture the machines, a man named Eppleworth did. I think he stole someone else’s machine design—all the flicker people steal from each other—but I never had the opportunity to ask. Eppleworth got shot to death on State Street six weeks after he opened. Bystander in a stickup. I was sick of peddling, I saw an advertisement, I scraped up every penny and I bought the joint on contract from Eppleworth’s widow.
We dickered a lot. At first she wouldn’t budge on the price. Like Mary when I met her, Bessie Eppleworth was a lot younger than the old geezer who got himself plugged. I thought of an inducement that might persuade her to lower her price. I talked it over with Mary. She didn’t like it much but she said all right since it was business. Bessie Eppleworth signed the sales contract on the last night of our blissful week at Toronto and Niagara Falls. She bought the tickets, the rooms, the wine—everything but the marriage license. I think she hoped I’d ante up for that. Not me! That trip was strictly business, I wouldn’t have married her no matter who paid for it.
I had big plans for the parlor. Big dreams. I was stupid. This is a bad neighborhood, and Chicago has two other parlors in better locations. From the start I barely made enough to buy groceries, buy coal, pay the light bill, and keep a few cents in my pocket. So I wanted to get away, think things over. That’s another reason I went back to Richmond with Mary.
It sure as hell wasn’t a vacatio
n in paradise. Richmond, Indiana, is nothing but a bunch of hay-binders and dirt-kickers. After the first twenty-four hours I was out of my skull with boredom, just like the first time. I excused myself from the premature wake and strolled downtown to a saloon, where I fell into conversation with the one customer who didn’t look like a hayseed. Fancy suit, good manners. He introduced himself as C. Francis Jenkins, but I should call him Charlie. He was in town for his sister’s wedding.
Charlie Jenkins was some kind of clerk in the Treasury Department in Washington. On the side he fooled with inventions and wrote these Jules Verne-type articles about sending voices and pictures through the ether with no wires, don’t ask me how. I told him I tinkered and built things too, and was pretty good at it, so we hit it off.
I told him I owned a peep show parlor. No future, he said. Big pictures projected on big screens to big bunches of people, that’s the future, he said.
How can you be so sure? I asked.
Well, he said, he couldn’t give me any solid proof just yet. But he and a man named Tom Armat, a real estate broker in Washington, they’d formed a partnership and staked everything they had. They’d bet the farm on pictures.
He explained how it happened. Couple of years before, some gent named Tabb had wandered into Armat’s office on F Street. He knew Armat slightly, knew he was always looking for opportunities. Tabb was high on Edison’s Kinetoscope, in fact had a deal to take several machines to the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta and make a big splash in the South.
Armat couldn’t see any future or profit in a picture machine watched by one person. But he did like the basic idea. He’d been out to the Columbian Exposition here and spent hours looking at the Anschütz Electric Tachyscope. I did the same thing. (Paul said that he had too.) Armat saw a future for the bigger pictures thrown on bigger screens. He was convinced the public would go wild for them.
Back in Washington, Armat signed up for some classes he thought would help him understand the flickers. That’s where he met Charlie Jenkins, at the Bliss School of Electricity. They got to be pals very fast. They both were onto the idea of projected pictures. So they went into partnership to build their machine.