Connie Willis - Remake

“Yeah.” I turned the sound up again.

“Liz says you are,” Jimmy Stewart said.

I rew’d to the beginning of the scene and froze it for the frame number, and then went through the scene again.

“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?” Jimmy Stewart said. “Liz says you are.”

I blanked the screen, and accessed Heada. “I need to find out where Alis is,” I said.

“Why?” she said suspiciously.

“I think I’ve found her a dancing teacher,” I said. “I need her class schedule.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know it.”

“Come on, you know everything,” I said. “What happened to ‘I think you should help her’?”

“What happened to, ‘I stick my neck out for nobody’?”

“I told you, I found her somebody to teach her to dance. An old woman out in Palo Alto. Ex-chorus girl. She was in Finian’s Rainbow and Funny Girl back in the seventies.”

She was still suspicious, but she gave it to me. Alis was taking Moviemaking 101, basic comp graphics stuff, and a film hist class, The Musical 1939-1980. It was clear out in Burbank.

I took the skids and a bottle of Public Enemy gin and went out to find her. The class was in an old studio building UCLA had bought when the skids were first built, on the second floor.

I opened the door a crack and looked in. The prof, who looked like Michael Caine in Educating Rita, a movie with way too many AS’s in it, was standing in front of a blank, old-fashioned comp monitor with a remote, holding forth to a scattering of students, mostly hackates taking it for their movie content elective, some Marilyns, Alis.

“Contrary to popular belief, the computer graphics revolution didn’t kill the musical,” the prof said. “The musical kicked off,” he paused to let the class titter, “in 1965.”

He turned to the monitor, which was no bigger than my array screens, and clicked the remote. Behind him, cowboys appeared, leaping around a train station. Oklahoma.

“The musicals, with their contrived story lines, unrealistic song-and-dance sequences, and simplistic happy endings, no longer reflected the audience’s world.”

I glanced at Alis, wondering how she was taking this. She wasn’t. She was watching the cowboys, with that intent, focused look, and her lips were moving, counting the beats, memorizing the steps.

“…which explains why the musical, unlike film noir and the horror movie, has not been revived in spite of the availability of such stars as Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. The musical is irrelevant. It has nothing to say to modern audiences. For example, Broadway Melody of 1940…”

I retreated up the uneven steps and sat there, working on the gin and waiting for him to finish. He did, finally, and the class trickled out. A trio of faces, talking about a rumor that Disney was going to use warmbodies in Grand Hotel, a couple of hackates, the prof, snorting flake on his way down the steps, another hackate.

I finished off the gin. Nobody else came out, and I wondered if I’d somehow missed Alis. I went to see. The steps had gotten steeper and more uneven while I sat there. I slipped once and grabbed onto the banister, and then stood there a minute, listening. There was a clatter and then a thunk from inside the room, and the faint sound of music.

The janitor?

I opened the door and leaned against it.

Alis, in a sky-blue dress with a bustle, and a flowered hat, was dancing in the middle of the room, a blue parasol perched on her shoulder. A song was coming from the comp monitor, and Alis was high-stepping in time with a line of bustled, parasoled girls on the monitor behind her.

I didn’t recognize the movie. Carousel, maybe? The Harvey Girls? The girls were replaced by high-stepping boys in derbies and straw hats, and Alis stopped, breathing hard, and pulled the remote out of her high-buttoned shoe. She rewound, stuck the remote back in her shoe, and propped the parasol against her shoulder. The girls appeared again, and Alis pointed her toe and did a turn.

She had piled the desks in stacks on either side of the room, but there still wasn’t enough room. When she swung into the second turn, her outstretched hand crashed into them, nearly knocking them over. She reached for the remote again, rew’d, and saw me. She clicked the screen off and took a step backward. “What do you want?”

I waggled my finger at her. “Give you a little advice. ‘Don’t want what you can’t have.’ Michael J. Fox, For Love or Money. Bar scene, party, nightclub, three bottles of champagne. Only not anymore. Yours truly has done his job. Right down the sink.”

I swung my arm to demonstrate, like James Mason in A Star Is Born, and the chairs went over.

“You’re splatted,” she said.

“ ‘Nope.’ ” I grinned. “Gary Cooper in The Plainsman.” I walked toward her. “Not splatted. Boiled, pickled, soused, sozzled. In a word, drunk as a skunk. It’s a Hollywood tradition. Do you know how many movies have drinking in them? All. Except the ones I’ve taken it out of. Dark Victory, Citizen Kane, Little Miss Marker. Westerns, gangster movies, weepers. It’s in all of them. Every one. Even Broadway Melody of 1940. Do you know why Fred got to dance the Beguine with Eleanor? Because George Murphy was too tanked up to go on. Forget dancing,” I said, making another sweeping gesture that nearly hit her. “What you need to do is have a drink.”

I tried to hand her the bottle.

She took another protective step toward the monitor. “You’re drunk.”

“Bingo,” I said. “ ‘Very drunk indeed,’ as Audrey Hepburn would say. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. A movie with a happy ending.”

“Why’d you come here?” she said. “What is it you want?”

I took a swig out of the bottle, remembered it was empty, and looked at it sadly. “Came to tell you the movies aren’t real life. Just because you want something doesn’t mean you can have it. Came to tell you to go home before they remake you. Audrey should’ve gone home to Tulip, Texas. Came to tell you to go home to Carval.” I waited, swaying, for her to get the reference.

“Andy Hardy Has Too Much to Drink,” she said. “He’s the one who needs to go home.”

The screen faded to black for a few frames, and then I was sitting halfway down the steps, with Alis leaning over me. “Are you all right?” she said, and tears were glimmering in her eyes like stars.

“I’m fine,” I said. “ ‘Alcohol is the great level-el-ler,’ as Jimmy Stewart would say. Need to pour some on these steps.”

“I don’t think you should take the skids in your condition,” she said.

“We’re all on the skids,” I said. “Only place left.”

“Tom,” she said, and there was another fade to black, and Fred and Ginger were on both walls, sipping martinis by the pool.

“That’ll have to go,” I said. “Have to send the message ‘We care.’ Gotta sober Jimmy Stewart up. So what if it’s the only way he can get up the courage to tell her what he really thinks? See, he knows she’s too good for him. He knows he can’t have her. He has to get drunk. Only way he can ever tell her he’s in love with her.”

I put out my hand to her hair. “How do you do that?” I said. “That backlighting thing?”

“Tom,” she said.

I let my hand drop. “Doesn’t matter. They’ll ruin it in the remake. Not real anyway.”

I waved my hand grandly at the screen like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. “All a ’lusion. Makeup and wigs and fake sets. Even Tara. Just a false front. FX and foleys.”

“I think you’d better sit down,” Alis said, taking hold of my arm.