Walter Williams: The Picture Business

“No.”

“No.” Paulie smacked his palm with a fist. “ Exactly. Cagney’s outfit decides to surrender! Which is stupid, because they are established on this turf and the other outfit is not, and they have all the advantages. And it’s even stupider, because they don’t even tell the other outfit that they’re giving up, and Cagney and his boss get killed after they’ve already surrendered.”

“They didn’t want to hurt anybody,” Gloria pointed out.

Paulie waved his arms. “They are wise guys! ” he said. “They are in the hurting business!”

Gloria nods. “I guess I see your point.”

“They gotta know what world they’re living in. You know what I’m saying?”

“Sure.”

“Like the way Cagney handled that woman.”

“Hitting her in the face with the grapefruit.”

“Right. Now is that any way to cope with some girl that’s giving you grief?”

“I guess not,” Gloria said.

“You bet. A grapefruit? I woulda tied her up and left her in the fucking closet.”

Gloria seemed startled. “Huh?”

“Slapped her around first, then tied her up and, hke, maybe called in a replacement.”

Gloria looked at him thoughtfully. “A replacement,” she repeated.

“An escort or something. Boink her in front of the stupid blonde to show that she can be replaced.”

“Replaced,” Gloria repeated, as if she was reaching for a meaning of the word she hadn’t encountered before.

“ Anybody can be replaced,” Paulie said. “I mean, you think Cagney had this woman around for the pleasure of her conversation or something?”

“I guess not.”

“She’s getting nice clothes, nice jewels, a nice fuck pad to live in, and she starts giving him grief first thing in the morning? Right over breakfast? She was taking advantage. She needed a lesson. Just to show that she could be replaced.”

Gloria appeared to be trying to clarify something in her mind. “So if I, for example, were to complain to you in the morning—”

“Two hundred fifty bucks an hour,” Pauhe pointed out, “I’d better not hear any complaints.”

“Ah.”

“Besides,” Paulie added, “you’re not as dumb as that cooze in the movie.”

She looked at him. “Nice of you to notice.”

“So the problem with Cagney here,” Paulie said, “is that he kept letting people take advantage of him, and it got him killed. Which is why that other outfit, who ain’t even in the movie, are the real smart guys, and the movie should be about them! ”

“They’re the heroes, you mean.”

“Yeah.” Paulie found himself glaring at the empty screen, upset with Cagney’s sheer stupidity. “Cagney should of just got himself some firepower and put that other outfit outta business.”

“Well,” Gloria said, “if you don’t hke the ending, you could change it.”

“Huh?” Pauhe looked at her in surprise.

She gestured toward the mediatron. “You’ve got all you need right here. Right in the mediatron. You could put any ending you want on that movie.”

“I don’t know how to work it. Not really.”

Gloria sniffed. “Anybody can learn to work a mediatron. A while back I trained for a year in order to learn how to work one of the old Scenelmagers, but then this thing came out, and there went my three-hundred-buck-an-hour job. Nowadays clerks at McDonald’s are paid more than mediatron operators.”

“Oh.” He looked at the mediatron, then back at Gloria. “Will you teach me?” he asked.

“At two-fifty an hour?”

Pauhe laughed. “Maybe I could hire somebody from McDonald’s.”

“Yeah, okay,” Gloria said. “I’ll get you started. But I’ve still gotta make my 6:30.”

After Gloria left, Paulie sat down at the DEC and tried to work out how to change Public Enemy into a movie that showed the world he knew. Gloria had managed to demonstrate a lot in just a short time, but there were still gaps in his knowledge. Fortunately there were a number of Norton’s projects, left in various stages, that illustrated how the machine could be used.

Generating whole new scenes was possible, though it seemed to require a lot of programming skill, and the mediatron was better at converting images that already existed, when he could point-and-click one image over another, and then craft in as much verisimilitude-enhancing detail as he liked. There were a lot of complex programs devoted to facial expression. Norton had a vast number of stock images on file that he used in his adaptions, but the majority were pornographic. If he wanted to make every change he wanted, Paulie would have to get some more stock footage.

It was easy enough to find on the net, he discovered, particularly the violence he intended to use in his last ending. And a whole log of props were available: digitized, three-dimensional images of old cars, airplanes, and clothes. But splicing it all together took time, and digitizing the old actors’ images over the footage took even more, and there were suddenly a number of professional engagements that took time away from Paulie’s project. Helio kept him busy, and since he sometimes worked for other people, he also had to fly to Boston—which was as close as he wanted to get to Little Joe for now—to New Orleans, and to Cabo San Lucas.

In Cabo San Lucas he took a few days off. The fellow whose problems he solved had a fishing boat, and so after Paulie weighted him and dropped him into the Sea of Cortez, he kept the boat for a few days, caught some albacore and tuna, and tried to relax.

But the old movie kept nagging him. When he closed his eyes, he kept seeing images, bits of the old movie mixed with parts of his own creation, and he kept working out dialogue in his head. Eventually, though he’d planned to stay a couple of more days, he left the boat and returned to Topanga Canyon and the mediatron.

He found a lot of old books about movies on the net—they always called the movies “film,” even though it was all digital now—and he tried to learn about how movies were put together, about jump-cuts and two-shots and fades and montage, all the stuff that the film critics thought was important.

He had to find out about that stuff, because Public Enemy used a lot of old-fashioned techniques, like lap-dissolves, that nobody ever used anymore, but which Paulie would have to use in order to make his new scenes match the old. The books on film called lap-dissolves “literary,” and jump-cuts “in your face,” and said that modern editors only used jump-cuts.

Paulie kind of liked the dissolves, though. They put a different kind of unhurried rhythm to things.

When he wasn’t out of town or working on Helio’s projects, he saw Gloria two or three times a week. She’d call if she were in the vicinity, and after sex he’d show her the parts of the movie he was working on, and she’d give him programming ideas and pass on bits of technique.

Not that he didn’t have plenty of ideas on his own.

Once, when he was showing a bit of the movie where Cagney was getting his revenge on the mob that had moved into his turf, Gloria shivered and said, “The dead people in your movie look so dead. ”

“Well, yeah,” Paulie said. “That always bothered me about movies. When people die in the movies, they don’t really look dead, because the actors are still alive. An actor can’t fall like a real dead person, because the dead person isn’t in charge anymore. A dead person just drops—the shoulders falls in one direction, the hips someplace else, and the knees so in another place, because the only thing holding the body together anymore is skin and maybe a few big bones, the muscles that support it all ain’t working anymore.”