Free Kino by Jürgen Fauth Page A

the ghastly overacting and oppressive angles. In person, he was an insufferable asshole. He bellowed orders and treated people like puppets. He made his actors repeat scenes for twenty, thirty, fifty takes and directed by assigning numbers to gestures and facial expressions. Then he'd count them off while the camera rolled: one, two, turn your head, smile, six, seven, faint, nine, ten. He had nothing but disdain for actors; he was a bully and a bore. And yet I watched him closely, learning as much as I could.
    On the day Lang shot Siegfried's arrival in Worms, I was coming down from a three-day bender, having trouble standing up straight in the knight's heavy chain mail and helmet. Holding the shield before me, I stood shaking where Lang had placed us on a tiled floor, lined up symmetrically. By the time we redid the scene for the twentieth time, I was itchy in the ill-fitting costume. I had loosened the strap that held my leg in place. Just when Kriemhild was descending the staircase again, I could feel my leg slip until, with a slight thud, it fell flat on the ground before me.
    â€œCut!” Lang barked through his bullhorn, his monocle dropping out of his eye. I had ruined the take. “We are hiring cripples now? All I needed was somebody to stand there, and you get me a guy who's missing a leg? The warriors of Worms don't suffer from runaway limbs!”
    Out of the darkness behind him, Thea von Harbou appeared, cradling her lap dog like a baby. She was always on set, wearing the same green outfit every day. She knitted sweaters and dictated novels to an assistant.
    â€œFritz,” she said, putting a calming hand on his arm. I had witnessed this before, Thea smoothing over Lang's rough edges, calming his fearsome tantrums for the sake of the production. “Everyone's good for something.”
    With my leg in my hand, I went blank. She was buying me time, giving me an opportunity to speak up for myself, but I didn't know what to say. What was I good for? The only job I wanted was Lang's, but if I'd told him that, he would have pulled out his Browning and shot me on the spot. My career would have been over before it started–if Gerhard Gruber, the set designer, hadn't explained that he was having trouble setting up Siegfried's epic battle with the dragon. Gruber had constructed a huge beast, a monster of twenty-five meters that was operated from the inside, but the man who worked the tail complained there wasn't enough room for his legs.
    Lang lifted the eyebrow that didn't hold the monocle and grinned.

    Siegfried's fight with the Lindwurm was a marvel. The contraption was heavy as a tank and took ten men to move. For endless, claustrophobic days, I had to kick my stump, which was attached to the lever that manipulated the dragon's crocodile tail. We moved the creature's eyes, mouth, legs, and tail, we made it breathe fire and smoke, we pumped the blood that gushed from the wound where Paul Richter, the foppish son-of-a-bitch who played Siegfried, pierced the rubber skin with his sword. We damn near suffocated on the fumes. It was the most grueling work I have done in my life. The only way to bear this wretched work was to stay perpetually high, and every morning, I doled out a generous allotment of cocaine for every man inside the monster.
    Word got out. One person introduced me to three others, and soon I was providing Zement to the entire production. The cinematographer, the camera and lighting crews, and the costume designers bought huge quantities for their departments, and Steffen started coming to the set to make deliveries. I became the best friend of crew and cast. Thea von Harbou sniffed lines and dictated with such speed that white foam formed in the corners of her mouth. She was full of ideas, she was efficient. Thea was the one with talent.
    As the shooting of the dragon scene dragged on, a peculiar bond formed between the ten of us who made it come alive from within. We were the bones of the