Page Seventeen III: At World’s End

The lift was not working so I had to walk down all the stairs to the studio. They had Conversation after Midnight on Stage A, and on Stage B they were shooting the night-club sequence for Black and White Blues. Outside in the yard they were trying some extra scenes for Peep and Judy Show, the Inigo Ransom comedy which was long over schedule time. I met the continuity girl from the new studio and I asked her whether she had seen anything of Robertson lately. She was tired and said no she had not and asked me how I was getting on with the cutting of The Waning Moon. She was interested in it because she had been the floor secretary for the production.

“Let her go,” said Port to Tunner, whose face showed concern. “She’s worn out. The heat gets her down.”

But Porter was not only making his own films now, he was training new directors to work under him. The motion-picture audience and my mother’s middle were growing proportionately. My infancy, the infancy of Edison’s Kinetoscope, and Porter’s callow moving-picture shows, are intertwined.

As editor of IMP films, Jack Cohn provided an invaluable service to the economy-minded Laemmle. IMP directors were led to believe they were shooting one-reel films and hence were encouraged to be niggardly with film stock and production time. Through chicanery by the executives, the movies were actually released as two-reelers.

‘But how did you discover by means of our watches?’ asked Clinton.

“I tell you nothing. You can work it out for yourself.” Thunderpeck loved to lecture me. “You know the cost of these new anti-gravity units; it’s phenomenal. Only a very rich man could afford one. There are few of them in production as yet; they go only to heart cases. A ten-stone man can wear one of these units and adjust it so that he weighs only two stone. It saves the heart pump a lot of work. So we know our friend was rich and suffered from heart trouble. Right. Where do such people often live? On the coast, by the sea, for the good of their health. So he died walking along the front–people do, you know. An offshore breeze carried him out to us.”

In the Middle Ages there was a curious belief that everything in the air or on the earth had its double in the sea. So when a previously undiscovered fish was found washed up on the coast of Norway and described as having a close-shaven head and an ungracious face, it was straightaway called a monk-fish. Its shoulders were said to be covered with what appeared to be a monk’s hood with feathering fins for arms, and a long tail at the end of its body. The King of Poland took a particular interest in this odd fish, and asked for it to be sent to him to see.

Seven passages from the page seventeens of seven books from around here. The last-quoted is the only book I have left from my childhood, its sentimental value somewhat tarnished by the discovery that it’s substantially plagiarised from Borges’ own monster dictionary.

The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor by Cameron McCabe; The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles; Moving Pictures by Budd Schulberg; King Cohn by Bob Thomas; The Warder of the Door by Robert Eustace & L.T. Meade, from The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths edited by Mark Valentine; Earthworks by Brian W. Aldiss; A Dictionary of Monsters and Mysterious Beasts by Carey Miller.

Always Reading Books, Sir

Marvelous Mary alerted us to the Christian Aid book fair and, swallowing my disapproval of anything with the word “Christian” in it, we went along. Last year I got a super-rare book of Gerald Kersh short stories (get into Kersh — a must!) and Ray Milland’s autobiography and a number of other things still lying unread. It was time to enlarge that pile.

(Milland’s book tells us of his screen near-debut in Scotland. He was cast in a small role, shipped north, and spent a week in a hotel looking at the rain hitting the windows. Never made it in front of a camera. Got paid. Went back south. Pretty good training for the movies.)

This time I got no film books (film & TV section was a depressing load of TV spin-offs) but the stuff I came back with has several filmic connections and also would form a pretty good plan of the inside of my head ~

Three Men and a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome

The Complete Books of Charles Fort

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy, Len Deighton

Bill the Conqueror, PG Wodehouse

I Chose Caviar, Art Buchwald

The Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges

Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol.2, Ben Bova, ed.

The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, Michael Cox & R.A. Gilbert, eds

Random passages. You’re welcome to try to assign them to their source tomes. I was going to colour-code them so you could at least tell where one ended and the next began, but then it seemed more entertaining not to.

Mr. Mankowitz pulled me to one side. “Do you know why all those fellows are standing around Miss Lollobrigida?”

“Why?”

“Because there is a rumour that if a virgin flea bites Miss Lollobrigida, and then bites another person, that person will inherit the Colosseum in Rome.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Yes, but it has to be a virgin flea. There was one flea that bit Miss Lollobrigida and then went out of his head and started to bite other fleas. We had to kill him.”

The founder and proprietor of the Mammoth Publishing Company, that vast concern which supplies half–the more fat-headed half–of England with its reading matter, hung up the receiver.

I knew the trick of it, I thought. Here was one of those word-padlocks, once so common; only to be opened by getting the rings to spell a certain word, which the dealer confides to you.

Descartes tells us that monkeys could speak if they wished to, but that they prefer to keep silent so that they won’t be made to work.

The desk-telephone emitted a discrete buzzing sound, as if it shrank from raising its voice in the presence of such a man.

“Telephone for Mr. Palmer. Calling Mr. Palmer. Send Mr. Palmer to the telephone.” The operator’s words lacked the usual artificial exactness, and were only a nervous sing-song. It was getting her, and she wasn’t bothered by excess imagination, normally. “Mr. Palmer is wanted on the telephone.”

“Smell that air,” said Major Mann.

I sniffed. “I can’t smell anything,” I said.

“That’s what I mean,” said Mann. He scratched himself and grinned. “Great, isn’t it?”

Early next day he took Mr. Greathead’s body out of the bath, wrapped a thick towel round the head and neck, carried it down to the dairy and laid it out on the slab. And there he cut it up into seventeen pieces.

Rossen was shouting for us to keep quiet. “Have we got enough blood on the set?” he asked the make-up department.

They said there was enough blood.

“Okay, give Alexander a large wound in the leg.”

I lifted my spear to protect him, but somehow the make-up man fought his way through and splashed blood all over Burton’s thigh.

They built forts, or already had forts, on hilltops.

Something poured electricity upon them.

The stones of these forts exist to this day, vitrified, or melted and turned to glass.

The Thing on the floor shrieked, flailed out blindly with tentacles that writhed and withered in the bubbling wrath of the blow-torch.

It was said of demons that they could make large and bulky creatures like the camel, but were incapable of creating anything delicate or frail, and Rabbi Eliezer denied them the ability to produce anything smaller than a barley grain.

A city in the sky of Liverpool. The apparition is said to have been a mirage of the city of Edinburgh. This “identification” seems to have been the product of suggestion: at the time a panorama of Edinburgh was upon exhibition in Liverpool.

I walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

 

Elvis Lives

Finally caught up with THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY, in which the editor of French Elle suffers a massive neurological kerfuffle which paralyses everything but one eyelid, transforming him into a sentient version of Errol Morris’ Interrotron, the camera everybody talks to.

The late great Jean-Pierre Cassel.

It’s a fine film, directed by Julian Schnabel with some interesting touches. The idea of the hero as P.O.V. is a sound one, probably the only way to make this particular story visible. There’s not much point cutting to reaction shots very often since the hero is unable to react with anything but one eye. (They sew up his bad eye to stop it going off. Ew.)

This is what you see when you get your eye sewn up. You can thank me later.

But as Hitchcock observed, endless subjective camera without reaction shots doesn’t really make us feel we’re the character in the story, it’s more alienating than that. We feel like voyeurs inside his head. Which is kind of what he’s been reduced to, so it all makes sense.

Schnabel is guilty of that modern movie crime, borrowing music from another movie, in this case the theme from LES QUATRES CENT COUPS, which he accompanies with SHOTS borrowed from the same film. But as Georges Delerue’s title theme reaches its melancholy conclusion, over a flashback of the hero, in pre-camera mode, driving to meet his kids, it all works in an oneirically beautiful way, capturing that quality Borges was pleased to be the first person to write about in a poem: the sensation of doing something for the last time.

Mrs. Roman Polanski, Emmanuelle Seigneur appears as the camera’s wife. A fine actress, whose brave and multi-faceted perf in BITTER MOON didn’t really get the credit it deserved (watch B.M. as a very black comedy and it’s a much better film than might at first appear). And who’s this as the hero in childhood flashback?

Walk like an Egyptian.

Yes, it’s little Elvis Polanski, Emmanuelle’s son. Little Elvis first popped up as a walk-on Fauntleroy in OLIVER TWIST. I do hope he continues with his acting career, since I get a kick out of his name. Child abuse can take many forms. I do hope Roman at least plied the infant with champagne and Quaaludes before naming him that. It’s the least he could do.

The Diving Bell And The Butterfly [DVD] [2007]

Oliver Twist [DVD]