Wake Up and Dream (13 page)

Clark dropped the edge of the curtains and re-pocketed the gun. He could let this character leave. But hadn’t he just spent this morning trying to work out what was going on? He decided to risk it, and with the decision came a strange, pleasurable rush. Pushing the tortoiseshell glasses back up to the bridge of his nose, he turned the key in the balcony doors and stepped out.

The guy beneath looked up at the sound of the doors opening, shading his eyes against the sun.

“Can I help you?” Clark asked in a lighter, quicker voice.

“Yeah, well. I was… .” The guy was still squinting, staring. “Are you
really
Daniel Lamotte?”

“Guess I must be.”

“Hey. Well, this is brilliant. I’ve been trying to call. Gee…” He flipped back his glossy hair once more. “I can’t believe it. You’re really
Daniel Lamotte!
This is just so, so… I’m your biggest fan. The absolute biggest. I bored your wife with just how much I admire your work when we spoke. Sorry. Sorry. You probably don’t even know who I am…” He spread his arms. “I’m Timmy Townsend, senior production executive at Senserama. It’s my job to get
Wake Up and Dream
up on the screen. And what a job that is, eh?” He did a little spin and turn on the gravel, his arms still spread. “What a fucking job!”

“D
AN, DAN…” OUTSIDE ON THE GRAVEL,
Timmy Townsend pumped Clark’s hand. A Liberty League badge flashed on his lapel. “It’s a real privilege. An absolute honor.”

Timmy Townsend oozed happy confidence. His eyes shone. His grin was far more disarmingly boyish than any actual boy’s, and he often broke into chuckles as he spoke. It was as if the combination of wealth, looks and charm which he’d almost certainly been born with was continually reoccurring to him.

“Neat little hangout you got here. So, anyway, I just got a call from my secretary telling me the signed contract’s arrived. Seeing as I live down the valley and I got your address, I thought I’d look in and say hi. Is April here right now? Haven’t you got some place in the city you hang out when you’re working?”

Before Clark had a chance to think of a plausible reply, Timmy Townsend was talking again.

“I was just astounded, Daniel—or it’s Dan, right, isn’t it? Dan, yeah, Dan? somehow, I pictured you with a beard—when your latest script landed on my desk. My secretary, love her to pieces, the woman’s a fucking genius, she knew how much I loved that movie about the queen…” He shot a finger at Clark and cocked his thumb.

“
The Virgin Queen.
”

“Yeah! Absolute work of genius. I’m not shitting you when I say that it’s one of the main reasons I’m working here in this city… Blew me away when I saw it at the showing room at our weekend place in Nassau County when I was a kid. I mean, we Townsends made our money in oil, but the feelies are the hot new ticket. I’ve gotta show you the Senserama facility, Dan. I really have.”

Facility? Clark realized Timmy Townsend simply meant the studio. “Well, sure. That would be great. Sometime if—”

“Hey! Why not
right now
? I mean, I know you writers are always busy, and I sure don’t want to distract you from your work now that the studio’s money’s riding on it—but, hey Dan…” He chuckled and spread his arms and turned, embracing in the gesture not just Erewhon and its grounds, but all of Woodsville, and the whole bowl of the city that Clark could see shimmering beneath them on this fine morning. “… why the hell not?”

Clark said he’d follow Timmy Townsend in the Delahaye, and gave him some guff about kids smashing a window and him not wanting April to see the damage as the reason why he’d left the car parked around back of the estate.

He decided he was getting a feel for this automobile as he pressed the right button to bring down the top and picked up the studio executive’s green Bentley above the reservoir and followed him down into the city along the switchback bends. He liked the way it handled. The way, as they began to hit traffic, other vehicles gave way and onlookers gawped. The driver’s door clattered and tinkled when you opened it, but you barely noticed the rim of shattered glass once it was shut.

It would have been easy to turn off into a side street and lose Timmy Townsend now that they were heading through the wide avenues of Hancock Park. But he stayed on the guy’s tail. That buzz he’d felt yesterday when he’d entered the offices of York and Bunce, and even more strongly when he stepped out this morning onto Erewhon’s Juliet balcony, was still with him now. And what, the thought returned to him as he glanced back in the rearview mirror and saw a reverse glimpse of the Hollywoodland sign caught between the buildings, did he have left to loose?

Senserama Studios lay on the fringes of the Baldwin Hills. The remains of the old MGM complex wasn’t far off, but that was up for sale or redevelopment, and most of the rest of this area of the city was filled with new estates, golf clubs, country clubs and mansions set back far on green lawns. The high chainlink fence outside the studio was overshadowed by a giant billboard for their latest roadhouse production, a Biblical epic called
The Throne of Forever
featuring a typically scantily clad Monumenta Loolie. Then came an equally big billboard featuring Senserama president and current State Governor Herbert Kisberg’s face. Brown-skinned, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, white-toothed, and with just the right amount of cosmetic care around the crinkles of his smile, he didn’t look far off being a movie star himself.

The security guy at the entrance raised the barrier and saluted as he let them by. Clark followed Timmy’s Bentley past the hanger-like soundstages signs toward signs marked
PRODUCTION
, and had to slow for a herd of longhorn cattle crossing the road. He parked outside a three story office amid a line of other Bentleys, Rolls Royces, Lincolns and Cadillacs. Drawn between the extra-wide white lines marked
RESERVED FOR AUTHORIZED STUDIO VISITORS
, the Delahaye seemed at last to have found its spiritual home.

“Beauty of a car,” Timmy said, leaning in. “Weren’t kidding about that door, though. I’d file a police report if I were you.” Then he did one of his characteristic spin-and-turns. “So—welcome to the salt mines… !”

The women sashaying past along the corridors of Accounts and Production made the receptionist at York and Bunce look like Lon Chaney with a hangover. The walls were lined with framed posters of Senserama’s many successes. Any moment now, Clark thought, someone’s going to come up to me and ask who I really am. But it never happened. It was like being onstage. It was like a dream.

He was introduced to vice presidents and deputy managers in charge of this or that. Of course, the way Timmy told it, they were all indispensable—
absolutely vital
—parts of the Senserama team. Senior or junior, male or female, they all had the same muscular handshake and equally muscular smile.

Timmy’s own office was spacious, and entirely empty of the usual production company mess of overspilling file cabinets and bookcases stuffed with unread scripts. Apart from a golf putter leaning in the corner, it was hard to see what the man did here all day. But there was plenty of evidence of what he got up to outside of Senserama. The walls were covered with glossy ten by eights. Timmy Townsend convincingly cowboyish on the backs of several expensive horses. Timmy Townsend out in the forest with various kinds of game dead at his feet.

“Why don’t I show you were the
real
work gets done?” Timmy suggested after he’d spun for a while like a kid on a ride in his recliner leather chair.

Just as Clark remembered, it was always a long walk from one part of a studio to another. They crossed roads and backlots under the hot sun. A troupe of kids dressed as fairies pranced by. They saw a woman dressed like a medieval princess carrying a live goose.

“I can’t say enough about what a fan I am of your work, Dan.” Timmy laid his arm across Clark’s shoulder. “That scene in that historic pic you wrote—I mean, the way that French-sounding broad, the one who gets her head chopped…”

“Mary Queen of Scots?”

“That’s her. The way you did that. Absolutely brilliant. I mean,
absolutely
brilliant. Course,
Wake Up and Dream
is
another
biopic, which I sort of liked straight off…”

Clark, who felt he’d earned an interest in
Wake Up and Dream
, wondered where this was going. He knew that simply “liking” anything in this industry was the equivalent of seeing it as a heap of dogshit. Let alone with addition of a “sort-of ”.

“Do you know, Dan, how many companies were talking of doing Lars Bechmeir about five years ago before his wife went and killed herself? Fucking
dozens
. But what do you do with
that
for an ending, eh? And, I’ll be honest, that was my first reaction when I looked at this treatment as well. I thought, uh-oh, a work of total genius and all of that—with your name on it, it has to be—but where the hell are we going in the final reel…? But what you did with that was brilliant. I can see it playing in Pigswill, Idaho.” He gave a squeeze of Clark’s shoulder.

“Thanks.”

“But the way you make it seem like it’s a kind of sacrifice, that she’s doing it for us all—like, well, Jesus. Sheer master stroke. There was talk of a Thomas Edison biopic a couple of years ago with some nobody called Tracey in the lead. Didn’t get off the ground, which leaves the whole high concept guy-with-an-invention theme entirely free. It’s unpissed snow.”

Clark had encountered Timmy Townsend’s type many times before. For all the bullshit, for all the bad deals and back seat handjobs, Timmy clearly still believed as firmly in the dream on which this whole industry floated as did the latest wannabe actress climbing off the Super Chief at Union Station with nothing but a fresh pair of panties and a new hairdo. “Difference with Edison, of course, being that he’s dead. I mean, he
is
dead, isn’t he? That, and he’d sue. Bechmeir being alive is a whole different ballgame. Not that we actually need his
permission
, but imagine what a blast it would be if we could get him to come to the premiere.”

“I got a letter from the Trust this morning,” Clark said. “Something about them having no fundamental objection to the project. Gave the name of their attorney, though.”

“Got that letter with you?” He shook his head.

“Better make sure our lawyers get it. But I really don’t think we need worry. Herbert Kisberg’s on the board of the Bechmeir Trust. You won’t believe how
up
we all already are for this project at Senserama. It’s like the feelie’s already made. Things are just falling together…”

Calling the soundstage they were walking toward merely a building really didn’t do the place justice; it could have housed the
Hindenburg
. No, Clark decided as they stepped in through a tiny gap in the massive sliding doors, the Hindenberg could have flown around in here.

Women in period dress, shackled slaves and Klu Klux Clansmen lounged, chatting, sweating, smoking and fanning themselves with scripts. Scaffolding rang. Transformed hummed. Klieg lights clanged on and off. Frazzled looking technicians clustered in agitated debate. They were shooting, Timmy shouted over the clamor, a drama set in the precivil war deep south which was to be called either
White Gables
or
The Cotton House
. Even though
Gone With the Wind
had been such a notorious flop, Senserama still reckoned that there was money in the whole Dixie/Confederate thing.

Clark was introduced to the director, a fat, distracted man with a straggly beard who emanated a stronger version of the tired body funk which pervaded the entire set. The guy seemed vaguely familiar—he was almost sure he’d once done a screen test for him—but there was little chance that anyone here would ever bother to recognize a reclusive screenwriter, let alone a guy who’d last worked as an actor in the ancient days of the talkies. The director turned to bellow through his bullhorn that this was the last take before lunch. Clark knew that meant there would almost certainly be another. Some things might change in this industry. Others didn’t.

Two thirds through the shooting script of
White Gables
or
The Cotton House
, our southern belle had escaped from the clutches of the rebel slaves with the help of some brave Klu Klux Clansmen. Now alone and destitute, she had finally made it back to the house of her birth. In this scene, the actress—whose name Timmy had purred with appropriate reverence—was required to stagger along the front path to the door of the spackleboard mansion, her gasping and emoting progress tracked by several cameras, an overhead boom and a feelie iconoscope.

Her face already transformed into the pallid mask which the lighting and the monochrome filmstock would transform into a vision of longsuffering beauty, and wearing a suitably torn and dirtied ballgown, she put aside
Harper’s Monthly
and stepped up to the first taped marker on the soundstage floor as the shot was readied. Technicians called their okays. But for the dull electric humming and the subdued whirr of the camera motors, the entire set fell silent, and the director called
action
.

As always, the take itself—the actual business of the actress crawling up the fake path towards the fake steps to throw herself down before the fake front door—seemed anticlimactic. This might be a big scene, but it would need cuts of the door, cuts of our heroine’s tear-glinting face, a swelling soundtrack, and probably overdubbing of her gasps and sighs, not to mention some enhancement of the feelie track, before any selfrespecting audience would be convinced.

Clark stood behind the iconoscope operator. Then he took a couple of steps back; even before the power had been upped to its full level, he felt a familiar crawl in the pit of this belly. He’d never really liked these things. Bechmeir field receivers were frail and complex devices; trolley-mounted contraptions of precision steel and copper fronted with bulging eyes of silver-treated glass which seemed to peer blindly into the scene which they were recording. Inside were electron guns and magnetic focusing coils and step-up transformers which fed a massive Uher wire recording machine along fat lengths of cable, and also threw a faint representation up on a cathode ray tube for the iconoscope operator to follow what the machine was seeing. All in all, they were pretty much up there on the pinnacle of what the human species could achieve. But he’d always got that crawling, snagged-nail-across-steel feeling when he was close to them, and being back here on a soundstage more than reminded him that it hadn’t gone away. He found this faint green image projected onto the operator’s viewscreen especially disturbing. As the actress moved, a vaguely human shape, a flame seen through misted glass, shivered and sparked across the screen.