Free Zeroville by Steve Erickson Page B

Luciano. Have I received the, uh, last changes in the La Mancha script?”
    “It’s not in the script,” says Vikar.
    “Perhaps I should speak with Arthur,” Luciano says to Elvira on the other end of the phone.
    “It’s not in the script,” Vikar repeats.
    “Excuse,” Luciano says to Elvira, then to Vikar, “what?”
    “I don’t believe it’s a very good movie,” Vikar says.
    “Elvira, I will call you back.” Luciano hangs up the phone. “It is not in the script?”
    “It’s twenty-three years after the script ends,” says Vikar, “she dies of consumption …” He taps the drawing. “… here.”
    “Who says this?”
    “Under this arch.”
    “Who says she dies of consumption?”
    “Every building has a back story and future story,” Vikar says. “Like an actor’s character.”
    “This building is in the present.”
    “The building is in all times. Every building is in all times and all times are in the building.”
92.
    Dotty Langer says, “I hear you’re vexing them in set design over at UA.”
    “I vex people,” Vikar acknowledges. “Have you ever heard of someone named Trane?”
    They’re in an editing room on the Paramount lot. Dotty has about her a slightly boozy air, and a Jack Daniels bottle sits next to the moviola as before. “Is he in set design?” Dotty says. She opens a canister of film and begins spooling it through the moviola; she starts a cigarette. “Cut the light, will you?”
    Vikar reaches over and turns out the light. In a moment, Montgomery Clift is on the small screen of the moviola, standing by the road trying to hitch a ride. Franz Waxman’s music rises up behind him over the moviola’s rattle.
93.
    Montgomery Clift comes to town, the poor relation of a rich family that finds him a job at the local factory, where he meets and sleeps with Shelley Winters despite stern orders not to fraternize with the other workers. At a party he sees Elizabeth Taylor, the most beautiful of the local rich girls.
    After twenty minutes, Dotty finally speaks. “Now watch this here,” she says. In the scene, Taylor and Clift dance. “Do you know what an editor does on a picture?” she turns to Vikar.
    “Puts the scenes in order because they’ve been shot out of order.”
    “That’s the first thing,” says Dotty. She stops the camera, Taylor and Clift mid-dance. “The editor also chooses which shot to use. In this scene here,” she waves her cigarette at Taylor and Clift, “something is happening that hasn’t happened in this picture until now.”
    Vikar stares at the image. “A close-up,” he says.
    “Very good.”
    “I had to think about it awhile.”
    She says, “It’s not something most people are aware of no matter how long they think about it—when the camera is close and when it’s far away. Those are the kinds of choices an editor makes.”
    “Doesn’t the director make them?”
    “It depends on the director. Most directors in pictures, up until the last ten or fifteen years, started off as writers or in the theater, so they concentrated on the actors and story. Your Mr. Preminger started in theater, Lubitsch and Welles started in theater. Sturges and Wilder started as writers—they really became directors just so they could protect their scripts from idiots. But Hitchcock was an art director early on, so he knew what he wanted his pictures to look like, and Von Sternberg and David Lean were, guess what, editors, so the same thing. Kubrick was a magazine photographer. Mr. Stevens started as a photographer too—though his parents were actors—then he was a cinematographer. He shot a lot of early Laurel and Hardy, of all things. You see what’s unusual here?”
    “They’re dancing and we’re not seeing their bodies.”
    “I’m impressed. The audience may not know it, but this picture’s been keeping them at arm’s length all this time. Monty has even slept with Shelley Winters from a distance. But as soon as Monty and Liz lay eyes on each