Passing Through the Flame (70 page)

Velva giggled. Paul poised to cut the take off after the kiss. “Well, I wouldn’t want to do that,” she said with high-school-girl exhibitionistic shyness, visibly aware of the tastiness of her own body. And she kissed him full on the mouth without touching his body. Paul brought his right arm up—

The crowd cheered. “Hey, I’m flying high, too.” A young barechested kid with long blond hair stepped up to Velva; he couldn’t have been more than sixteen. This is great, Paul realized, I’ve gotta keep this, and when Velva looked in his direction for guidance, he waved frantically for her to keep it going, to wing it.

She planted a kiss on the blond kid, touching the tips of her breasts to his bare chest, applying a little pressure, but still making it look like an innocent act. Beautiful! Fantastic! It was reality intersecting film; it was Velva becoming Peggy Greene, and Peggy Greene becoming Velva.

“Hey, would you like to ball?” an older guy in a leather vest asked Velva ingenuously. Velva grinned just as Peggy Greene would have grinned, provocative innocence and embarrassment crossed with secret desires. Let’s keep this going, Paul decided, let’s run out the magazine and see what we get.

“How about some reds?”

“Want a hit?”

They were crowding all around her, very friendly, but Velva was getting a little frightened as they moved in offering joints, pills, tablets, and bottles of wine.

“Orange Sunshine?”

“Need a tent to crash?”

“Hey, did you really win that contest?”

“I’m from Kansas!”

What am I supposed to do? Velva wondered. What would Peggy Greene do? Why is Paul letting this go on? She smiled nervously at her fans, not wanting to offend them, but not wanting to take their drugs either. She was totally confused, and all she could do was let it show through. Beside the camera, Paul was grinning like an ape, obviously loving it. I wish I knew what I was doing so right!

A huge, hulking bearded man with a big beer belly, long matted hair, and a mouthful of rotten teeth lumbered up to her and smiled a crooked jack-in-the-box smile with strange child’s eyes. “Can I have a kiss, too?” he asked in what seemed like a sincere little boy’s voice.

“Get it on, Bear!” someone yelled.

He looked at her so sadly with those retard eyes, that big man’s body with a little boy’s posture, that horrible face full of bad teeth. Velva hadn’t the faintest idea of what to do. She glanced at Paul, who was frantically nodding yes! yes!

Holding her breath, Velva stood on her tiptoes and kissed Bear softly but quickly on the lips, pulling away as his mouth started to open.

The crowd cheered.

Bear lit up like a light bulb.

Velva stood there feeling weirder than she ever had in her life.

“Cut!” Paul shouted. “Fantastic! Thank you all, thank you all, you were beautiful.” He waved happily at the crowd.

Velva glowed all over as the crowd waved back. That was really something, that was the best thing she had ever felt while making a movie, and she had fucked some pretty expert studs in pornies.

It’s sure weird being a star, she thought. But I think I’m gonna like it.

Paul Conrad gobbled a handful of cashews and raisins and went through the blocking in his mind again. Gentry would drift away from the circle of extras listening to the press release and walk out of the Poster Palace into the crowd outside. Harv would keep shooting with the number one camera until he was outside, then Fritz would pick him up, and the third cameraman would take wild footage for cutaways, the only way to get cutaway footage for a scene you can’t shoot the same way twice. Again, Paul was exhilarated by the tremendous technical freedom he had. The trick, though, was to get the footage out of Gentry, and
that
wasn’t going to be easy.

Gentry was standing next to the camera dolly as if clinging to it like a security blanket. The extras were huddled around him and the crew around them; it looked like a wagon train drawn into a defensive circle. Paul had to admit that this Poster Palace was a pretty bizarre setting.

On the inside of the building, the snail-shell spiral formed a curving ramp up and around the interior wall, exactly like the Guggenheim in New York. But here the ramp ended in a circular catwalk around the top of the dome, where another ramp began, descending inside the same spiral, forming a double helix. It was like being inside a giant DNA molecule.

Printed posters lined the spongy polyurethane wall along both ramps, forming another crisscrossing double helix, this one a series of colored frames, as if the place were draped with lengths of giant color film, the cutting room of the gods. Eerie greenish-gold light filtered through the tinted skylight at the pinnacle of the snail-shell dome. Endless lines of slowly shuffling people moved like animated genes along the spiral lattices of the double helix.

It seemed to Paul to be full of cosmic metaphors he couldn’t quite put his finger on. But then, maybe that’s exactly what it was designed to do, to allude to meanings that weren’t quite there and to twist your head a little in the process. The old
2001
schtick, and from the looks on the faces on the catwalks, they were eating it up.

But to Gentry and the extras and the crew, it was all just spooky. Gentry really looked nervous, standing there by the camera trying to shrink into himself. And he’s supposed to walk through this like a bored, arrogant son of a bitch. Like his usual sweet self. I didn’t think
this
take was going to give us any trouble. I figured he was made for it.

“All right, let’s go, let’s set this thing up!” Paul called sharply, clapping his hands, stepping into the huddled circle of film people, breaking the defensive mood with an artificial blast of personal energy. “Emmett, get the extras in place. Fritz, Owen, take your positions. Rick, I want to talk to you for a moment.”

He drew Gentry aside while Jerry Ullman was positioned for the take with the extras around him, and the number two and three camera crews were positioned outside the Poster Palace. Gentry looked subdued, indrawn, nervous. Something in his posture elicited sympathy from Paul—but sympathy was not what was called for here.

“This is going to be very simple, Rick,” he said briskly, deliberately distancing himself from Gentry’s introverted mood. “This press handout is dull, routine bullshit, not the kind of stuff you’re here for, so you lose interest, wander out into the crowd, feeling bored and contemptuous of the whole scene. I want good reaction footage, you don’t have any lines, but this is an important scene. It establishes your attitude when you bump into Peggy Greene.”

Gentry nodded absently, glancing up and back over his shoulder at the people on the ramps, who were now all looking down at the crew, at the bustle of activity below them. “Are you listening to me?” Paul snapped.

“Of course I’m listening, Paul,” Gentry said. “I’m sorry. But Lord, the whole thing is so bewildering. Rather frightening too, don’t you think? All these unstable people, all the drugs, this ominous atmosphere.... I can just
smell
the danger in the air. Any spark could set it off. I don’t like it here....”

“Just remember, you’re Doug Winter. You’ve seen it all, you’ve done it all, and nothing’s even freaky enough to
amuse
you at this moment. I want to see contempt and disdain.
Your specialty.
”

But Gentry wouldn’t rise to the bait. He just nodded again, looking nervously over his other shoulder. Paul sensed that there was no point in pursuing it further, no way he could psych Gentry into the Doug Winter persona. I better just try for a take and hope he can be enough of a professional to force it.

In a few minutes, Emmett had the extras arranged in a semicircle around Ullman, who was playing the flack. Gentry stood in the clot of reporters like one of the boys, unemphasized by position. Paul gave final instructions to Friedman. “Move in very slowly from the establishing shot and drift to the right of center, so that you gradually center on Gentry as you come in for a close-up. Then come out slowly, but recentered on Rick, so that now he’s emphasized. Then just dolly with him until he’s outside and Fritz picks him up. How’s that?”

“I like it,” the cameraman said laconically.

“Okay, then let’s go. Lights!... Roll it!”

“Sunset
City
, Scene forty-one, take one.”

“Speed.”

“And.... action!”

Ullman began delivering his dull industrial press release. “This dome was built of polyurethane foam by Dangerfield’s plastics division as a demonstration of the feasibility of erecting large-scale temporary structures overnight at extremely low cost....”

Paul stayed close by Friedman’s camera as it moved in on Gentry, who began to fidget convincingly. As Gentry began to inch backward, turning to his right, Friedman was right in on him, exactly as it had been blocked. A moment later Gentry turned, leaving the circle of reporters as Ullman said, “easily colored any hue....” Right on cue! So far so good.

They began to dolly the camera backward in front of Gentry as he started to walk toward the sunlight streaming in through the open entrance to the Poster Palace. Paul followed the camera, concentrating on Gentry, confident that he could trust Friedman to make the right moves. Gentry was doing all right so far, his face a brittle mask of boredom, and nothing more showing through. From the catwalks, hundreds of eyes followed the action silently. Paul began to feel their pressure on the back of his neck. What must it feel like to Gentry?

Then Paul was backing out into the brilliant sunlight with the camera dolly, and he saw Fritz Nagy, the number two cameraman, picking up the coverage. He touched Harvey Friedman on the shoulder, and the number one cameraman stopped shooting, looked away from his viewfinder, relaxed.

Paul hadn’t taken his eyes off Gentry. Gentry was maintaining tight control, suppressing the fear Paul knew he felt, showing only the cynical boredom of Doug Winter. He was actually
acting.
Now, as he stepped out of the cool green light of the Poster Palace and into the bright glare of day, he hesitated, blinking. But that was okay, it would play....

The area immediately in front of the Poster Palace was saturated with people—there had been lines waiting to go in before the shooting started, and now curiosity had drawn an even bigger crowd. Paul sidled over to Nagy, and together they backed into the solid press of people ahead of Gentry as he hesitantly walked into the crowd. Paul felt flesh pressing up against his back, then gently yielding; the crowd wasn’t stopping them, but it wasn’t melting away, either. Great! It’ll give us just the feeling we want.

The crowd flowed around Gentry as he walked further into it, enveloping him like an amoeba. Their young faces were curious, perhaps a little contemptuous, but not terribly threatening, and thank God, they weren’t mugging into the camera. But Gentry’s shoulders sagged, his eyes became furtive. Fear was breaking through Doug Winter’s disdainful cool. It was all wrong....

“Cut!”

Gentry slumped with relief. “Let’s take five back inside,” Paul said. Gentry quickly eeled his way through the crowd back into the cool green light of the Poster Palace. Paul and the number one camera crew followed. Paul took Gentry aside. “We can keep all the footage we shot in here, but you looked terrified outside. You’ve got to be Winter; you’ve got to stay cool.”

“I can’t,” Gentry said. “Those people terrify me. I feel like a Christian in the lion cage out there.”

Paul shoved a handful of cashews and raisins into his mouth, munched them thoughtfully. How can I make this play? Doug Winter simply
can’t
come on frightened... maybe if I give Gentry a line or two... it’ll put his head in a different place....

“We’ll try the second half of this shot again, Rick,” Paul said. “But we’ll do it a little differently this time.”

“Sunset City
, Scene forty-one-A, take one.”

“Speed.”

“Action.”

Rick Gentry walked out of the Poster Palace into the crowd. He looked nervous. He looked terrible. It was already another blown take, but Paul decided to let it go on for a while to see if the change might be made to work on the next take. Gentry looked around.

Then he walked up to five long-haired guys in jeans who were standing together passing around three joints and tremulously delivered the line Paul had given him: “Where can a guy get a drink around here?”

Purely awful! “Cut!”

“Get a drink?”

“Hot shit!”

“Get the dude a drink!”

Gentry had backed away when Paul called cut, but the guys he had spoken to were still crowding around him, making faces at each other, mimicking Gentry, playing to the crowd. Paul saw a flash of anger, of the usual bitchiness, cross Gentry’s face. But it was immediately replaced by fear as hands shoved joints in his face, as dozens of bodies pressed toward him.

If only I had some way to bring that out. Hmmmm.... Paul turned to Fritz Nagy. “I want to do a few dummy takes of this,” he said. “Pretend you’re shooting, but don’t run any film till I tell you to.” Nagy nodded, giving Paul a fish-eyed stare.

“Sunset City
, Scene forty-one-A, take two.”

“Speed.”

“Action.”

Gentry walked out of the Poster Palace into the crowd. Two of the original five young men had drifted off, but the remaining three had become a focus of the crowd’s attention.

“Where can a guy get a drink around here?”

“Where can a guy get a drink around here?”
mimicked the tallest of the kids in a fruity voice. The crowd laughed. Gentry flushed. He glared back at the tall kid.

“Cut!”

“Sunset City
, Scene forty-one-A, take three.”

“Speed.”

“Action.”

“Where can a guy get a drink around here?” Gentry said, this time addressing the crowd at large. There was more of an edge in his voice. He was starting to get pissed off. It was working.

“Where can a guy get a hit of acid around here?” someone hooted.

“Where can a guy get bombed around here?”

The crowd laughed and jeered. Gentry whirled, glared at Paul, his face a mask of embarrassment and rage.