Flicker (57 page)

After my talk with Sharkey that night, feeling more vulnerable than ever, I took off for my assignment at the Museum of Modern Art like the sick man who flees to the spa in search of healing waters. I buried myself in the Max Castle Retrospective, relishing my chance to play the Quality Cop. Even the worst of Castle's productions was fine art compared to the vile and tacky fare on which I'd been too generously feeding. Not that I couldn't have found the same abominations in New York, even more plentifully available. The cult film and midnight-movie trade had originated there; it was holed up all over the city in scruffy little lofts and derelict theaters. The big guns of the underground were mounted in Greenwich Village and Soho.

Resolutely, I stayed away from the plague zone, spending my spare hours in the museum's film archives, saturating myself with Renoir and Bergman, Kurosawa and Kobayashi, masters of the craft. I stayed close to film buffs and scholars, people who served the same high standards Clare had taught me. My time away from The Classic was a purgation and renewal of the senses. It sustained me until my trip to Europe to see Saint-Cyr and Olga. And that in turn extended my period of abstention, so that, by the time I returned to Los Angeles to complete my research on Castle, I felt certain I'd broken the habit of cinematic slumming. I had. But what I didn't foresee was that the sleaze was about to leave the slums and come looking for me.

For some time Sharkey had been making vague noises about “moving upstairs.” He meant renovating and reopening the old Ritz Theater. I never listened too closely: this was a vintage dream that I assumed would forever remain out of his reach. True, The Classic was doing better business than ever before; it was making more money in a week on Jujubes and Pepsi-Cola alone than Clare had ever made on a month of art films. But Sharkey was earning in the little hundreds; rebuilding the Ritz was an idea that would cost in the big thousands. Even when I saw the evidence of workmen on the premises, I shook my head in disbelief. I remained convinced that Sharkey would never be able to afford more than a minor renovation. Otherwise he was biting off more than he could chew. I wouldn't have put that past him; he was capable of major financial folly.

What I failed to take into account was Chipsey.

As his reputation in the underground grew, Chipsey began to feel the need of a more fitting showcase for Maldoror Productions. The Goldstein millions were more than adequate to the task; in fact, Chipsey had money to burn. Once the family fortune—much disputed by envious relations after Old Ira's death—had run the gauntlet of seemingly endless litigation and had passed more or less intact into Chipsey's eager grasp, it was his to do with as he pleased. And it pleased him to get his work out of the grungy dungeon. When I returned from Europe, I found The Classic “Closed for Renovation.” The entire building spent most of the next year wrapped in a cocoon of canvas and scaffolding. What emerged from the metamorphosis was a true picture palace of yesteryear, an Art Deco monument. Within its spacious interior, the crummy old Classic sank to the status of a storage basement—and even in that lowly capacity looked more humanly accommodating than the moldy crypt I'd first entered … was it fifteen years before?

The Ritz Classic was given an exuberant gala opening and deserved it. The theater turned out to be everything that rumors in the newspapers had been promising, a veritable luxury liner dry-docked on Fairfax Avenue. There was carpeting and upholstery, fiesta-colored linoleum floors, Bakelite furniture, and chrome trim galore. The murals on ceiling and walls were restored, revealing whimsical mock-epic scenes of the Muses presiding over the glories of the Jazz Age. Those who could decipher the images when the light of the magnificent frosted glass and sculptured tin chandelier came up found depictions of Paul Whiteman conducting an orchestra of thousands, a
Roxy chorus line that stretched to the stars, Amos and Andy, Rudy Vallee, and the Cliquot Club Eskimos broadcasting to the world via the new network microphones.

And of course there was, stretched from end to end across the ceiling, a heroic montage of movie iconography. Directors in berets and knickers shouting through megaphones, cameramen with rolledup sleeves and turned-about caps hand-grinding their machines, the caricatured likenesses of John Barrymore, Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford, Al Jolson. Even the mighty Wurlitzer was resurrected, gleaming magnificently with lights of a hundred colors. A sprightly old guy named Bertie McGee, who had played at the Chinese and the Pantages during the Golden Age, came in on the weekends wearing a full tux and spats to warm up the audience with medleys of “Singin' in the Rain,” “The Good Ship Lollipop,” and “Forty-second Street.” For someone whose work was touted to be twenty daring years ahead of its time, Chipsey had subsidized a remarkably respectful exercise in cultural archaeology.

But what got served up at the renovated Ritz was Sharkey's same old bill of fare. In fact, trash classics and undergrounders became more prominent than before, taking over the weekends and midnight shows when the theater drew its largest crowds. Sharkey knew his audience. And he knew his backer. “The Films of Chipsey Golden-stone” began to crop up all through the year as weekend retrospectives or a Thursday-night series. Everything Chipsey had ever photographed since junior high school was now on display—and always for a cheering audience of hangers-on and sycophants. New movies from Maldoror began to appear in assembly-line quantities, vying with the output of Andy Warhol's Film Factory in New York—which was also featured on Sharkey's programs.

Attending the Ritz Classic—and I was fast becoming a regular—was now a strangely disorienting experience. Disorienting because so effortless, so inviting, so
guiltless.
It had always struck me as wholly appropriate for underground cinema to make its home in Sharkey's wretched little basement; it belonged in those lower depths like a fungal growth. For shy types like me, it took some psyching up to buy a ticket and walk through the door. Like reaching into a tub full of scummy water. Once inside, you felt you had crossed a line, had left the normal and the respectable behind. Sitting there in the funky dark, your shoe soles sticking to the floor, your rump trying to find
a level spot among the splintered slats you sat on, you knew where you were. At the bottom of the world.

But now the sleaze had, in more than one sense, moved upstairs. It had put on clean socks and combed its hair. It advertised its wares on a bright marquee. Its posters were out on the street for all to see.
'Venetian Magenta.
The
film maudit
of the century. Explicit! Outrageous! Unashamed! Children must be accompanied by an adult.” You could watch these forbidden delights from an upholstered seat, eating popcorn glopped over with real butter. There were even ushers.

One day, in a high pitch of crusading defiance, Sharkey showed Andy Warhol's latest.
Fuck.
That was the title. There it was, the ultimate word, in lights on the marquee. In his now well-appointed office, Sharkey hunkered down, waiting for the law to strike, coking up, rehearsing his speech to the jury. The cops never arrived. But somebody else did. Moishe from the Deli came knocking at the door, looking sore. “Hey, Sharkey, where d'you get off stickin' that word up there? I got customers complainin'. Rabbi Weintraub, he calls me up, he wants to know what kind of element you are. What'm I gonna tell him? Gimme a break, huh?”

Cowed by his old pal's outrage, Sharkey retitled his program
Andy Warhol's F***
.

“What the hell, Moishe's family,” he explained to me later. “I wouldn't've done it for the cops, believe me.”

“But the cops
didn't
care,” I reminded him. “Nobody cares anymore—except Moishe. And he only cares because it's bad for business.”

I remembered Clare's words. “If
it
ever gets out of control, God help us all!” But “it”
was
out of control—the assault on standards, the crusade against quality—not running amok, slashing and bashing like Attila the Hun, but writing best-selling books, making top-ten records, showing movies on Main Street. Blending in. Taking over. Smoothly. Linda Lovelace was making appearances on college campuses. Kenneth Anger had won a Ford Foundation grant. Chipsey Goldenstone was touring the talk shows.

The world was making it so very easy to have
fun.
But still not easy enough for Sharkey.

The Ritz had been in business for nearly a year when he called, asking me to drop by his office next time I was in the theater. He was, as he put it, “knocked up with a big idea.”

“Trouble is,” he told me when we met, “some of us regulars miss the old place.”

“The old Classic? You're kidding.”

“No, really, we do. It had a certain, I don't know …
feel.”

“It sure did. It's called terminal grubbiness.”

“Yeah, but you know it was right for a certain kind of show. More intimate, you know. More culty. Upstairs is too mainstream.”

“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
is mainstream?”

“I'm thinking maybe we could open a second screen, put the old downstairs back in operation, use it mainly for open screenings. What d'you think?”

Open screenings were Sharkey's special pride, regular weekend events to which aspiring “filmsmiths” (as Sharkey called them) brought their own work to show after the midnight movie for those who still weren't too stoned to watch. Sharkey had no shortage of takers for the opportunity; there was a waiting list weeks long of would-be Warhols and Goldenstones jostling one another to be screened at the Ritz. Most brought a single shabby, homemade eight-millimeter reel. Since none of this projected well in a space as large as the Ritz, people would usually work out of the orchestra pit, setting up their own cheesy equipment, struggling to beam a small, blurry square of light on the big Ritz screen, coordinating with a tape recorder if there was any sound at all. Most of what I'd seen from the open-screeners was a tackier version of the same campy clowning you saw in every underground movie: bad imitations of worthless originals. But Sharkey turned nobody away. He believed in what he was doing. He called it “participative film.”

“We need some place different for the really far-out stuff,” he went on. “Some place with that underground milieu. It would be exclusively for eight- and sixteen-millimeter shows. Got a great name for it. The Catacombs.”

“Sounds exactly right. That's a cross between a morgue and a sewer.” I didn't mention that I'd once thought of The Classic as a sort of catacombs. That was part of another adventure.

Sharkey looked hurt. “Hey, don't be so down on the idea. Give it a chance. Catacombs. Remember, that's where the chosen few hid out while the empire crumbled. And, sure enough, where something new got born out of the ruins, see what I mean?”

I saw what he meant, and all too clearly.” ‘And what rough beast' …”

Theodore Roszak

“Huh?”

“It's a poem, Sharkey.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Something to chalk on the walls of your catacombs.”

Sharkey gave me a grave, pondering squint. “Heavy, man. That's heavy.”

It took Sharkey another two months to open his second front at the Ritz. The new downstairs was rather less dungeony than the old Classic; there was fresh paint and better ventilation; the seats, though a well-worn secondhand, were decent quality and bolted to the floor. It was more comfortable than it needed to be to catch on with the local underground. Soon the Catacombs was showing whole weekend evenings of do-it-yourself movies. Financially, the place was an absolute zero, most of the audience taking advantage of the house policy to admit friends of the filmmakers free. But Sharkey didn't care about that. The new screen was his chance to boost participative film. He was in his element, a slap-happy patron of the avant-garde.

And I turned out to be more of a prophet than I realized. For, with the catacombs supplied, the rough beast soon came knocking at the door. His name was Dunkle.

“He's got pink eyes.”

That was the second thing Sharkey told me about Simon Dunkle. The first thing was: “He's a genius. I discovered a genius.” But that was less striking. Ever since the Catacombs had opened, Sharkey had been discovering geniuses at the rate of one a month, calling me up regularly to report the fact, always bubbling over with pride and
excitement. Discovering film geniuses was by now business as usual for him. But this was the first one with …

“Pink eyes?”

“Yeah. Like a bunny rabbit. The kid's a genuine freak. What d'you call that when you're pure fucking white, even when you're black?”

“An albino?”

“Right. You ever meet an albino? Weird.”

“And he's a genius besides.”

“No question. Absolutely.”

“Another eight-millimeter genius.”

“Super eight. The kid works in Super eight. So help me. You gotta see his work. You'll love it.”

“I doubt it.”

“Come on, Jonny, give it a chance.”

“When I get the time.”

“Tonight? He's running a couple things tonight.”

“Not tonight.”

“But you'll come. Promise. Soon.”

“Yes, yes. When I get the time … no, not this week, maybe next… . Sharkey, I'm busy. I have classes, I'm behind on my manuscript… . I'll see… . I'll try… .”

Sharkey knew I was putting him off, and he knew why. He knew what I thought of the last several talents he'd discovered. I hadn't pulled my punches with him. Upon returning from Europe, I'd served notice; I intended to do my duty as Quality Cop. No more wallowing in the fleshpots of fun. The Ritz might have installed upholstered seats, but it was the same old grind house that Sharkey's Classic had been; I'd vowed to protect myself from its corrupting airs.