Connie Willis - Remake

I cut in with, “What’s your question?”

“I watched that movie you told me I was playing a part in. Rear Window? Thelma Ritter? And all the meddling you said she did, telling him to mind his own business, telling him not to get involved. It was good advice. She was just trying to help.”

“What’s your question?”

“I watched this other movie. Casablanca. It’s about this guy who has a bar in Africa someplace during World War II, and his old girlfriend shows up, only she’s married to this other guy—”

“I know the plot,” I said. “What part don’t you understand?”

“All of it,” she said. “Why the bar guy—”

“Humphrey Bogart,” I said.

“Why Humphrey Bogart drinks all the time, why he says he won’t help her and then he does, why he tells her she can’t stay. If the two of them are so splatted about each other, why can’t she stay?”

“There was a war on,” I said. “They both had work to do.”

“And this work was more important than the two of them?”

“Yeah,” I said, but I didn’t believe it, in spite of Rick’s whole “hill of beans” speech. Ilsa’s lending moral support to her husband, Rick’s fighting in the Resistance weren’t more important. They were a substitute. They were what you did when you couldn’t have what you wanted. “The Nazis would get them,” I said.

“Okay,” she said doubtfully. “So they can’t stay together. But why can’t he still pop her before she leaves?”

“Standing there at the airport?”

“No,” she said, very serious. “Before. Back at the bar.”

Because he can’t have her, I thought. And he knows it.

“Because of the Hays Office,” I said.

“In real life she would have given him a pop.”

“That’s a comforting thought,” I said. “But the movies aren’t real life. And they can’t tell you how people feel. They’ve got to show you. Valentino rolling his eyes, Rhett sweeping Scarlett off her feet, Lillian Gish clutching her heart. Bogie loves Ingrid and can’t have her.” I could see her looking blank again. “The bar owner loves his old girlfriend, so they have to show you by not letting him touch her or even give her a good-bye kiss. He has to just stand there and look at her.”

“Like you drinking all the time and falling off the skids,” she said.

Now it was my turn to look blank.

“The night Alis brought you back to my room, the night you were so splatted.”

I still didn’t get it.

“Showing the feelings,” Heada said. “You trying to walk through the skids screen and nearly getting killed and Alis pulling you out.”

SCENE: Exterior. The Hardy house. Wind whirls the dead leaves. Slow dissolve to a bare-branched tree. Snow. Winter.

I’d apparently had quite a night that night. I had tried to walk through the skids wall like a druggate on too much rave and then popped the wrong person. A wonderful performance, Andrew.

And Alis had saved me. I took the skids down to Hollywood Boulevard to look for her, checking at Screen Test City and at A Star Is Born, which had a River Phoenix lookalike working there. The Happy Endings booth had changed its name to Happily Ever After and was featuring Dr. Zhivago, Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in the field of flowers, smiling and holding a baby. A knot of half-interested tourates were watching it.

“I’m looking for a face,” I said.

“Take your pick,” the guy said. “Lara, Scarlett, Marilyn—”

“We were down here a few months ago,” I said, trying to jog his memory. “We talked about Casablanca…”

“I got Casablanca,” he said. “I got Wuthering Heights, Love Story —”

“This face,” I interrupted. “She’s about so high, light brown hair—”

“Freelancer?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Never mind.”

I walked on. There was nothing else on this side except VR caves. I stood there and thought about them, and about the simsex parlors farther down and the freelancers hustling out in front of them in torn net leotards, and then went back to Happily Ever After.

“Casablanca,” I said, pushing in front of the tourates, who’d decided to get in line. I slapped down my card.

The guy led me inside. “You got a happy ending for it?” he asked.

“You bet.”

He sat me down in front of the comp, an ancient-looking Wang. “Now what you do is push this button, and your choices’ll come up on the screen. Push the one you want. Good luck.”

I rotated the airplane forty degrees, flattened it to two-dimensional, and made it look like the cardboard it had been. I’d never seen a fog machine. I settled for a steam engine, spewing out great belching puffs of cloud, and ff’d to the three-quarters’ shot of Bogie telling Ingrid, “We’ll always have Paris.”

“Expand frame perimeter,” I said, and started filling in their feet, Ingrid in flats and Bogie in lifts, big chunky blocks of wood strapped to his shoes with pieces of—

“What in hell do you think you’re doing?” the guy said, bursting in.

“Just trying to inject a little reality into the proceedings,” I said.

He shoved me out of the chair and started pushing keys. “Get out of here.”

The tourates who’d been ahead of me were standing in front of the screen, and a little crowd had formed around them.

“The plane was cardboard and the airplane mechanics were midgets,” I said. “Bogie was only five four. Fred Astaire was the son of an immigrant brewery worker. He only had a sixth-grade education.”

The guy emerged from the booth steaming like my fog machine.

“ ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ took seventeen takes,” I said, heading toward the skids. “None of it’s real. It’s all done with mirrors.”

SCENE: Exterior. The Hardy house in winter. Dirty snow on roof, lawn, piled on either side of front walk. Slow dissolve to spring.

I don’t remember whether I went back down to Hollywood Boulevard again. I know I went to the parties, hoping Alis would show up in the doorway again, but not even Heada was there.

In between, I raped and pillaged and looked for something easy to fix. There wasn’t anything. Sobering up the doctor in Stagecoach ruined the giving birth scene. D.O.A. went dead on arrival without Dana Andrews slugging back shots of whiskey, and The Thin Man disappeared altogether.

I called up the menu again, looking for something AS-free, something clean-cut and all-American. Like Alis’s musicals.

“Musicals,” I said, and the menu chopped itself into categories and put up a list. I scrolled through it.

Not Carousel. Billy Bigelow was a lush. So was Ava Gardner in Showboat and Van Johnson in Brigadoon. Guys and Dolls? No dice. Marlon Brando’d gotten a missionary splatted on rum. Gigi? It was full of liquor and cigars, not to mention “The Night They Invented Champagne.”

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers? Maybe. It didn’t have any saloon scenes or “Belly Up To The Bar, Boys” numbers. Maybe some applejack at the barnraising or in the cabin, nothing that couldn’t be taken out with a simple wipe.

“Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” I said to the comp and poured myself some of the bourbon I’d bought for Giant. Howard Keel rode into town, married Jane Powell, and they started up into the mountains in his wagon. I could ff over this whole section — Howard was hardly likely to pull out a jug and offer Jane a swig, but I let it run at regular speed while she twittered on to Howard about her hopes and plans. Which were going to be smashed as soon as she found out she was supposed to cook and clean for his six mangy brothers. Howard giddyapped the make-believe horses and looked uncomfortable.