I went in to stare at the screen until the reels changed. I came out.
“Reel nineteen in for reel ten,” I said.
At which moment the theater manager staggered out, tears in his eyes, face all pale cheese, reeling from wall to wall with despair and shock.
“What have you done to me? What are you doing?” he shrieked. “Bums! Bastards! Ingrates! The Joe Samasuku Samurai Theater is ruined forever!”
He lunged at us, and I held him off. “Joe, Joe,” I pleaded, “don’t talk like that.”
The music swelled. It was as if film and audience were inflating themselves toward a vast ripped-forth explosion which might tear mind from matter as flesh from bone.
Joe Samasuku fell back, pressed a key in my hand, and said, “Call the cops, telephone the janitor service to clean up after the riot, lock the doors if the doors are left, and don’t call me, I’ll call you!”
Then he fled.
We would have dogged him out of his old California patio and down the mean streets had not at that instant a huge stolen chunk of Berlioz and a cymbal smash straight out of Beethoven ended the film.
There was a stunned silence.
Aaron and I turned to stare madly at the shut-tight theater doors.
They banged wide open. The mob, in full cry, burst to view. It was a beast of many eyes, many arms, many legs, many shoes, and one immense and ever-changing body.
“I’m too young to die,” Aaron remarked.
“You should’ve thought of that before you messed with things better left to God,” said I.
The mob, the great beast, stopped short, quivering. We eyed it. It eyed us.
“There they are!” someone shouted at last. “The producer, the director!”
“So long, Aaron,” I said.
“It’s been great,” said Aaron.
And the beast, rushing forward with an inarticulate cry, threw itself upon us … hoisted us to its shoulders and carried us, yelling happily, singing, slapping us on the back, three times around the patio, out into the street, then back into the patio again.
“Aaron!”
I stared down aghast into a swarming sea of beatific smiles. Here loped the reviewer of the Manchester Guardian. There bounded the mean and dyspeptic critic from the Greenwich Village Avanti. Beyond gamboled ecstasies of second-string film reviewers from Saturday Review, The Nation, and The New Republic. And far out on the shore of this tumultuous sea, in all directions, there was a frolic and jump, a laughing and waving of columnists from Partisan Review, Sight and Sound, Cinema, multitudinous beyond belief.
“Incredible!” they cried. “Marvelous! Superior to Hiroshima Mon Amour! Ten times better than Last Year at Marienbad! One hundred times greater than Greed! Classic! Genius! Makes Giant look like a Munchkin! My God, the New American Wave is in! How did you do it?”
“Do what?” I yelled, looking over at Aaron being carried for the fourth time around the lobby.
“Shut up and ride high in the saddle!” Aaron sailed over the ocean of humanity on a sea of smile.
I blinked up, wild strange tears in my eyes. And there in the projection-room window above, a shadow loomed with wide-sprung eyes. The projectionist, bottle in numbed hand, gasped down upon our revelry, ran his free fingers over his face in self-discovery, stared at the bottle, and fell away in shadow before I could shout.
When at last the hopping dancing dwarfs and gazelles were exhausted and laughing out their final compliments, Aaron and I were set back down on our feet with: “The most tremendous avant-garde film in history!”
“We had high hopes,” said I.
“The most daring use of camera, editing, the jump-cut, and the multiple reverse story line I can remember!” everyone said at once.
“Planning pays off,” said Aaron modestly.
“You’re competing it in the Edinburgh Film Festival, of course?”
“No,” said Aaron, bewildered, “we—”
“—planned on it after we show at the Cannes Film Festival competition,” I cut in.
A battalion of flash cameras went off and, like the tornado that dropped Dorothy in Oz, the crowd whirled on itself and went away, leaving behind a litter of cocktail parties promised, interviews set, and articles that must be written tomorrow, next week, next month—remember, remember!
The patio stood silent. Water dripped from the half-dry mouth of a satyr cut in an old fountain against the theater wall. Aaron, after a long moment of staring at nothing, walked over and bathed his face with water.
“The projectionist!” he cried, suddenly remembering.
We pounded upstairs and paused. This time we scratched at the tin door like two small, hungry white mice.
After a long silence a faint voice mourned, “Go away. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it.”
“Didn’t mean it? Hell, open up! All is forgiven.” said Aaron.
“You’re nuts,” the voice replied faintly. “Go away.”
“Not without you, honey. We love you. Don’t we, Sam?”
I nodded. “We love you.”
“You’re out of your mother-minds.”
Feet scraped tin lids and rattling film.
The door sprang open.
The projectionist, a man in his mid-forties, eyes bloodshot, face a furious tint of boiled-crab red, stood swaying before us, palms out and open to receive the driven nails.
“Beat me,” he whispered. “Kill me.”
“Kill you? You’re the greatest thing that ever happened to dog meat in the can!”
Aaron darted in and planted a kiss on the man’s cheek. He fell back, beating the air as if attacked by wasps, spluttering.
“I’ll fix it all back just the way it was,” he cried, bending to scrabble the strewn film snakes on the floor. “I’ll find the right pieces and …”
“Don’t!” said Aaron. The man froze. “Don’t change a thing,” Aaron went on, more calmly. “Sam, take this down. You got a pencil? Now, you, what’s your name?”
“Willis Hornbeck.”
“Willis, Willie, give us the order. Which reels first, second, third, which reversed, upside down, backwards, the whole deal.”
“You mean …?” the man blinked, stupid with relief.
“I mean we got to have your blueprint, the way you ran the greatest avant-garde film in history tonight.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Willis let out a hoarse, choking laugh, crouched among the tumbled reels, the insanely littered floor where his “art” lay waiting.
“Willis, honey,” said Aaron. “You know what your title is going to be as of this hour of this fantastic night of creation?”
“Mud?” inquired Hornbeck, one eye shut.
“Associate producer of Hasurai Productions! Editor, cutter, director even—maybe. A ten-year contract! Escalations. Privileges. Stock buy-ins. Percentages. Okay now. Ready, Sam, with the pencil? Willis. What did you do?”
“I—” said Willis Hornbeck, “don’t remember.”
Aaron laughed lightly. “Sure you remember.”
“I was drunk. Then I got scared sober. I’m sober now. I don’t remember.”
Aaron and I gave each other a look of pure animal panic. Then I saw something else on the floor and picked it up.
“Hold on. Wait,” I said.
We all looked at the half-empty sherry bottle.
“Willis,” said Aaron.
“Yes, sir?”
“Willis, old friend …”
“Yes, sir?”
“Willis,” said Aaron. “I will now start this projection machine.”
“Yes?”
“And you, Willis, will finish drinking whatever is in that bottle.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you, Sam?”
“Sir?” said I, saluting.
“You, Sam,” said Aaron, flicking the machine so a bright beam of light struck out into the quiet night theater and touched an emptiness that lay waiting for genius to paint incredible pictures on a white screen. “Sam, please shut and lock that heavy tin door.”
I shut and locked the heavy tin door.
Well, the dragon danced at midnight film festivals all round the world. We tamed the Lion at Venice at the Venice Film Festival, we took first honors at the New York Film Festival and the Brasilia Special Prize at the World Film Competition.
And not just with one film, no, with six! After The Dragon Danced there was the big smash international success of our The Dreadful Ones. There was Mr. Massacre and Onslaught, followed by The Name Is Horror and Wattle.
With these, the names of Aaron Stolittz and Willis Hornbeck were honey on the lips of reviewers under every flag.
How did we make five more smash hits in a row?
The same way we made the first one.
As we finished each film we grabbed Willis, rented the Samasuku Theater at twelve midnight, poured a bottle of the finest sherry down Willis’s throat, handed him the film, started the projector, and locked the door.
By dawn our epic was slashed to ribbons, tossed like monster salad, gathered, respliced, glued fast with the epoxy of Willis Hornbeck’s subliminal genius, and ready for release to the waiting avant-garde theaters in Calcutta and Far Rockaway.
To the end of my insignificant life I shall never forget those nights with Willis shambling among his whirring, shadow-flickering machines, floundering about from midnight until dawn filled the patio of the Samasuku Theater with a gold the pure color of money.
So it went, film after film, beast after beast, while the pesos and rubles poured in, and one night Aaron and Willis grabbed their Academy Oscar for Experimental Film, and we all drove XKE Jags and lived happy ever after, yes?
No.
It was three glorious, fine, loving years high on the avant-garde hog. But …
One afternoon when Aaron was chortling over his bank account, in walked Willis Hornbeck to stand facing the big picture window overlooking Hasurai Productions’ huge back lot. Willis shut his eyes and lamented in a quiet voice, beating his breast gently and tearing ever so tenderly at his own lapels: “I am an alcoholic. I drink. I am a terrible lush. I booze. Just name it.
Rubbing alcohol? Sure. Mentholated spirits? Why not? Turpentine? Spar varnish? Hand it over. Nail-polish remover? Pure gargle. Rumdummy, mad fool, long-time-no-see-the-light-of-day Willis Hornbeck, but that’s all over. The Pledge! Give me the Pledge!”
Aaron and I ran over and circled Willis, trying to get him to open his eyes.
“Willis! What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. All’s right.”
