Zeroville (19 page)

“Is it faster in first class, back to Hollywood?”

“It’s the same, Vikar. Listen, this guy didn’t understand what you’re doing either. But he was more or less convinced you’re doing
something
. He said the first ten minutes he thought you were completely incompetent but by the time he got to the end he knew that wasn’t it. He said he has no idea whether the picture is working or any good but that every decision you’re making is original at best and counterintuitive at the least.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Me neither. But the way he explained it is that most editors, if they’re cutting from a shot where the action is going on at the right of the frame, then they cut to another shot where the action is at the right so the audience can follow it, unless the picture wants to unsettle the audience at that moment, then they do it the other way around. I gather you’re doing everything upside down, not to mention you’ve taken the central murder plot about the artist and the nightclub and framed it with the sub-plot about the supermodel rather than vice-versa, which is also backward from what anyone else would do.”

“Scenes have profiles like people and things. All stories are in the time and all time is in the stories.”

Rondell blinks. “If you say so, Vikar. So I asked this guy, ‘What are you telling me, he’s some kind of genius?’ and the guy says of course not, there are no geniuses other than Bach and Rita Hayworth, but I
am
telling you, the guy says, that he’s editing in a way I haven’t seen before and now there’s an internal logic to this picture that you would be better to follow through on rather than try to fix, if that’s the word. The die is cast and we should go with it. Make it work for us. Is what he said. Otherwise we’re messing with the aesthetic continuity of the thing. Is what he said.”

Vikar says, “Continuity is one of the myths of film. In film, time is round like a reel. Fuck continuity. In every false movie is the true movie that must be set free.”

Rondell sighs heavily.

“That, vicar,” Viking Man will explain a few months later, “is the sound of a studio executive, God love him, staring into the Nietzschean abyss of his own ignorance, venality and spinelessness,” but Viking Man isn’t here to say it now.

“No,” says Vikar.

“Pardon me?” says Rondell.

“I don’t want to anymore.”

“We have an agreement.”

“You fired me.”

“Does this have anything to do with Ms. Palladin?” Rondell rubs his brow with both hands. “Vikar, the company is going through a great deal at the moment. All the top people have left to go form another company, including the man who’s headed ours more than a quarter century. They’ll take talent with them, Woody Allen, others. We need to salvage whatever of this picture can be salvaged. Cannes is in seven and a half weeks. All the principal shooting is done, we’re down to a few final establishing shots, pick-up stuff. We don’t need to absolutely lock the picture but we do need something more than a fine cut. It may still be we can make Cannes work for us. I don’t want to withdraw the picture. We can’t withdraw the picture. Very bad if we withdraw the picture. What do you want? We’ll raise your pay and I’ll take you down to the archive at midnight myself, as many pictures as you can carry out. Do you want to make a picture of your own?”

“There’s a book. It’s in French. I’ve read it many times.”

“We can make a lot of things happen if you pull this out for us.”

Vikar says, “About Soledad.”

“You want her off the picture.”

“Why would I want that?”

“What, then?”

“Off the picture?”

“Vikar, listen. You said to find her so we found her. You saw her. If that’s what it took to make you happy, then that’s what we were ready to do. If you were a normal person we would have done things the normal way and supplied you with the usual kilo of coke.” He adds, “She had her own interest at stake, too.”

“It’s her daughter.”

“Her daughter?”

“She’s sleeping in cars and going to clubs she shouldn’t go to and she’s nine.” He says, “Actually, she’s twelve.”

“A little young for you, wouldn’t you say, Vikar?”

“What?” Something barely comprehending compels him to say, “Her mother doesn’t take care of her,” with an undertone of violence that makes Rondell draw back.

“Sorry,” Rondell laughs uneasily, “bad joke.”

“Find her and make sure she’s all right. Get her a room in a hotel.”

“And her mother?”

“If she’s with her mother,” Vikar says.

“I’ll do what I can. It’s all I can promise.”

“Do what you can.”

He returns to the Bowery at night looking for Zazi, but she isn’t there and no one has seen her. “We can’t find her,” Rondell says when Vikar phones four days later from the cutting room, “on my word we’ve tried. Production wrapped a week ago, they’re probably driving back to L.A. Short of the Highway Patrol putting out an APB, I don’t know what else to do.” On Vikar’s last night in New York, confronted with a choice between the Sound and the Movies, he finds he loves the Movies after all, raiding the archives one last time.

Variety
, May 8, 1978: “NEW YORK—A subject of intense gossip, rumor and speculation over the past year, United Artists’ production of
Your Pale Blue Eyes
will premiere in competition at the 31st annual Cannes film festival beginning next week, it was announced today.

“Rife with difficulties during production, the motion picture is now at the center of a heated dispute leaving it without an officially credited director, pending arbitration before the DGA. Editing of the picture reportedly has changed hands several times in the last eight months.

“Other U.S. pictures in competition at Cannes this year include
An Unmarried Woman
,
Coming Home
,
Midnight Express
,
Pretty Baby
and
Who’ll Stop the Rain
. The jury that bestows the Palme d’Or and other prizes is headed by an American, director Alan J. Pakula (
All the President’s Men
,
The Parallax View
), for the third time in the festival’s history, following screen legend Olivia de Havilland in 1965 and, two years ago, playwright Tennessee Williams.”

The large boxes packed with movies are waiting when Vikar returns to Los Angeles, after being gone nearly six months. He unpacks his library that now crowds his apartment, and falls asleep to visions of smashing Soledad in the face with a Coke bottle.

Vikar doesn’t know it, but everything now has been reset to zero.

The first movie he sees back in Los Angeles is a French gangster film where a beautiful samurai hit man floats through Paris without expression, in white fedora and gloves. Vikar is most taken with a scene involving a huge ring of keys that the hit man uses to steal cars. In the driver’s seat of a car that isn’t his, the hit man in white coolly lays out on the passenger seat beside him a ring of what must be a hundred keys; one by one he takes each key from the ring and tries it in the car’s ignition until finally the correct key starts the car. As each key fails, the hit man lays it with precision on the passenger seat next to the previous key. In the movie, the fourth attempt starts the car—but what if he had begun at the ring’s other end? The car wouldn’t have started with the fourth key but the ninety-sixth. Under what growing spell and for how long would the audience be held as each key failed? The entire scene is shot from the vantage point of the passenger’s seat, which is to say the hit man’s right profile, the profile that reveals his calm, resolve, grace.

For a week and a half Vikar hires a car to drive him around the city, looking for a black Mustang. He phones the beach house where he hasn’t been for years now, Viking Man whom he hasn’t spoken to since before Madrid, anyone who might know where the daughter and mother are. He calls methodically as though laying out on the passenger seat the keys of a car to be stolen.

Over the course of the following week the phone doesn’t ring at all, then one morning he receives three calls, the first two from the
Los Angeles Times
and
Variety
asking for Vikar’s reaction to the response at Cannes to
Your Pale Blue Eyes
. “The true movie has been set free from within the false movie,” he says, to silence on the other end of the line. The third call is from Mitch Rondell.

Vikar says, “You found them.”

“What?” says Rondell.

“You found Zazi and her mother.”

Rondell sounds slightly flustered. “I’m at JFK, about to get on a plane for France. Vikar, we need you to come over.”

“To New York?”

“Europe. There’s an Air France flight this evening. We’ve booked you a first-class seat.”

“Newspapers are calling.”

“About the picture?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ve heard.”

“Heard what?”

“It screened in competition at Cannes a week ago. Apparently it was riotous. You didn’t hear?”

“No.”

“Not
Rite of Spring
tear-up-the-theater riotous, but the sort of commotion one picture in the festival always whips up every year. I gather it was hard to tell whether the applause or boos were louder.”

“Boos?”

“Air France will fly you into Nice and someone will meet you and drive you to Cannes, which is the next town over.”

“People booed?”

“Vikar, it’s the picture everyone’s talking about.”

“They booed.” Vikar is fascinated.

“We’ve booked you a small suite at the Carlton, which at this point was difficult. Truth is we had to move someone else out.”

Vikar says, “Is it farther than Spain?”

“You may have to change planes in Paris …”

“Perhaps I’ll come in a couple of weeks. I just got back to Los Angeles.”

“Vikar, there won’t be a festival in a couple of weeks.” Now the tension in Rondell’s voice is unmistakable. “The closing ceremony is tomorrow night. The driver will take you straight to the Palais.”

“The director of the movie should be there.”

“There
is
no director of this movie. Literally, at this point there is no ‘Directed by’ in the credits. Until the DGA decides otherwise, this picture directed itself.”

“I don’t want to.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to come.”

Vikar can hear the panic rise in Rondell’s voice.

“Listen to me,” comes the voice on the other end of the line, “three hours ago we got a call in our offices here—I can’t say who—to get you to Cannes. Do you understand? This person wouldn’t say more, he wasn’t even supposed to say that much, but … The head of the festival jury is an American director who just did a Jane Fonda-Jimmy Caan picture for us … modern Western thing he’s nervous about … do you understand what I’m getting at?”

“No.”

“I mean this guy wouldn’t be jerking us around five thousand miles away if there wasn’t something afoot. Listen. What about that French novel you want to film?”

“God, I love that book.”

“That can become a very real possibility, but you have to get to Cannes.”

“You don’t believe Zazi and her mother are there, do you?”

“I’ve got to catch my plane, Vikar. We’re sending a car to pick you up in … what time is it in L.A.?” There’s the sound of the phone on the other end changing hands as Rondell checks his watch. “Eleven-thirty in L.A., right? A car is going to pick you up in five hours. Please tell me you have a passport. You must, because you went to Spain for that madman.”

Vikar says, “I live on a secret street.”

“What?”

“It might be hard to find me.”

“Someone will call you in the next thirty minutes and sort everything out. The driver in Nice will have formal wear for you … you’ll have to change in the limo.” A moment’s pause. “We’ll get a hat for you.” Another moment’s pause. “No, you know what? No hat. Better no hat. We’ll make it work for us. See you tomorrow night on the Red Steps.”

In the limo traveling southwest from Nice, looking at the coast Vikar can almost believe he hasn’t left Los Angeles at all, that the plane flew around in the air twelve hours and returned where it took off. “Is that the Atlantic Ocean?” he asks the driver, who glances at Vikar in the rear-view mirror. “Monsieur, it’s the Mediterranean,” the driver says. In a large plastic bag in the seat next to him, Vikar unwraps the black pants, jacket and tie, white shirt, socks and shoes. In a smaller plastic bag are strange black beads that he lays precisely on the seat side by side, like a series of keys that have failed to start a car.

The limo drives twenty-five kilometers to the outskirts of Cannes, along the rue des Belges before cutting down to the Croisette. In the distance Vikar sees a large round building bathed in a light. Reaching a point where other traffic is being turned back, the limo is waved through and then suddenly it’s in the midst of a throng caught between the sea, where the white beach tents are visible in the night, billowing like parachutes as though everyone has dropped from the sky, and red-carpeted steps on the other side, nearly as wide as they are long, leading up to the Palais. The limo stops and Vikar doesn’t move; someone outside opens his door. “Am I supposed to get out here?” he says to the driver. He’s slightly astonished to find that the shirt has no buttons. He lays the tie on the seat next to him with the black beads.

He gets out of the limo. From out of the throng, Mitch Rondell appears.
He has a shirt that buttons. I should have gotten one of those
. All around is an explosion of bulbs flashing from cameras that Vikar can’t see. Rondell stares aghast at Vikar’s completely open shirt. “There are no buttons,” Vikar explains. Rondell frantically sticks his hand in the pockets of Vikar’s coat searching, then peers into the limo at the black buttons sitting on the seat. He begins to reach in and scoop them up, and another round of flash bulbs goes off around them. “You know what?” he says to Vikar, withdrawing from the limo, “better without the buttons. We’ll make it work for us,” and then one of the ceremonial escorts leads Rondell and Vikar up the long red steps, camera flashes barraging the man with the unbuttoned shirt and the tattoo of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his head.