Free Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood

their life. And they dodge a lot of headaches.… Take the men at this place. What do they know or care about anything, except getting their pay checks? If any problem arises outside their immediate job, they expect someone else to decide it for them. Quite right, too, from their point of view. A country has to be run by a minority of some sort. The only thing is, we’ve got to get rid of these damned sentimental politicians. All politicians are amateurs. It’s as if we’d handed over the studio to the Publicity Department. The only people who really matter are the technicians. They know what they want.”
    â€œAnd what do they want?”
    â€œThey want efficiency.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œEfficiency is doing a job for the sake of doing a job.”
    â€œBut why should you do a job, anyway? What’s the incentive?”
    â€œThe incentive is to fight anarchy. That’s all Man lives for. Reclaiming life from its natural muddle. Making patterns.”
    â€œPatterns for what?”
    â€œFor the sake of patterns. To create meaning. What else is there?”
    â€œAnd what about the things that won’t fit into your patterns?”
    â€œDiscard them.”
    â€œYou mean, kill Jews?”
    â€œDon’t try to shock me with your bloody sentimental false analogies. You know perfectly well what I mean. When people refuse to fit into patterns, they discard themselves. That’s not my fault. Hitler doesn’t make patterns. He’s just an opportunist. When you make patterns, you don’t persecute. Patterns aren’t people.”
    â€œWho’s being old-fashioned now? That sounds like Art for Art’s sake.”
    â€œI don’t care what it sounds like.… Technicians are the only real artists, anyway.”
    â€œIt’s all very well for you to make patterns with your cutting. But what’s the use, when you have to work on pictures like Prater Violet? ”
    â€œThat’s Chatsworth’s worry, and Bergmann’s, and yours. If you so-called artists would behave like technicians and get together, and stop playing at being democrats, you’d make the public take the kind of picture you wanted. This business about the box office is just a sentimental democratic fiction. If you stuck together and refused to make anything but, say, abstract films, the public would have to go and see them, and like them.… Still, it’s no use talking. You’ll never have the guts. You’d much rather whine about prostitution, and keep on making Prater Violets. And that’s why the public despises you, in its heart. It knows damn well it’s got you by the short hairs.… Only, one thing: don’t come to me with your artistic sorrows, because I’m not interested.”
    *   *   *
    WE STARTED shooting the picture in the final week of January. I give this approximate date because it is almost the last I shall be able to remember. What followed is so confused in my memory, so transposed and foreshortened, that I can only describe it synthetically. My recollection of it has no sequence. It is all of a piece.
    Within the great barnlike sound-stage, with its high bare padded walls, big enough to enclose an airship, there is neither day nor night: only irregular alternations of activity and silence. Beneath a firmament of girders and catwalks, out of which the cowled lamps shine coldly down like planets, stands the inconsequent, half-dismantled architecture of the sets; archways, sections of houses, wood and canvas hills, huge photographic backdrops, the frontages of streets; a kind of Pompeii, but more desolate, more uncanny, because this is, literally, a half-world, a limbo of mirror-images, a town which has lost its third dimension. Only the tangle of heavy power cables is solid, and apt to trip you as you cross the floor. Your footsteps sound unnaturally loud; you find yourself walking on tiptoe.
    In one