Walter Williams: The Picture Business

He went on to explain the mediatron hacks he used to make the dead cinema bodies behave correctly—it involved disconnecting certain elements of the geodesic structures that underlay the images, and he was proud of how he did it.

Gloria listened thoughtfully, then looked at him. “How do you know so much about how people die?”

Pauhe looked right back. “Because I know what’s what,” he said.

Gloria turned away and nodded, as if to herself. “That’s what I thought.”

“I’m also thinking of changing the title,” he said.

“Hm?”

“Public Enemy could be the title of any gangster film. So I thought this one should have a title that explains more what it’s about.”

“Like what?” she said.

“Like How Gangsters Got Invented.”

Gloria nodded, then turned away. Paulie saw that her shoulders were shaking.

“Are you laughing?” he asked.

Her shoulders kept shaking. She nodded her head, but couldn’t speak.

Pauhe rose from his chair and stood over her, and planted his fists on his hips.

“Is there something funny about my title?”

Gloria, her back still turned, shook her head. “It’s… perfect, ” she said, and then began to laugh. She smothered her laugh with the back of her hand, but she couldn’t keep it from burbling out.

“If the title’s so perfect,” Pauhe said, “how come you’re laughing?”

Gloria began to laugh and hiccup simultaneously. She reached in her big shoulder bag for a tissue. “It’s perfect,” she gasped, “for you. ”

“Whaddya mean for me?” Glaring. “It’s good for me, and it’s not good for someone else?”

He was not, he thought, going to spend two hundred fifty an hour to be laughed at.

Gloria’s hiccups got the better of her for a minute or so. Paulie considered grabbing her and throwing her off the deck to join Norton’s garbage in the canyon. But then, in between the little chirps she made when she hiccuped, Gloria explained herself.

“It’s a perfect title for your movie,” she said. “It’s so you —it just gets right to the point, doesn’t it? No time wasted, no fooling around, no poetry. How Gangsters Got Invented. Right to the heart of things.”

“No poetry ?” Paulie demanded, still annoyed. “I’m supposed to be a poet now?”

“You’re perfect,” Gloria hiccuped, “just as you are.”

Paulie stood over her and glared for another minute or two, but he couldn’t stay mad at someone who thought he was perfect. He returned to his chair in front of the mediatron console.

“Maybe you should get on your cellphone and hustle up some business,” he said. “I’m going to work for a while.”

Paulie finally finished editing his new ending. All the clips of violence he was using were in color, and he had put them through this process called “color-timing,” which made sure that the various shades of blue matched from one scene to the next—the mediatron did it automatically, in about twenty minutes—and then Paulie remembered that he might as well not have bothered, because he was going to have to turn it all into black and white to match the original footage anyway.

He ran the ending through the mediatron again, using all three screens. It was, he thought, really good; and he hated to lose the element of color, because there was this kind of visual motif of red that ran through everything. It had started accidentally, with blood getting spilled in a massacre, and in the next scene a woman bystander happened to be wearing a red dress, and Paulie thought the continuity of color was interesting, so he kept adding more. Some red roses in a flower shop that got bombed, and a red car that Cagney used for a drive-by, and red neon signs and red shoes on the women and red ties on the men, and red marinara sauce in a restaurant where somebody ended up face-down at his table…

And now he was going to have to lose all that. Damn.

And then he thought, wait a minute, maybe I don’t.

Because the movie was about how gangsters got started, back in the days of black-and-white; but the ending was about how they survived, right up into the era of color and virts. So maybe the ending could stay.

He spliced the new ending into the old movie and watched the transition. No, he thought, too jarring. The sudden shift into color took him out of the story, made him aware of the fact that he was watching something artificial instead of something real.

So maybe, he thought, the color could start more subtly. Like when Cagney’s boss was killed. So he went through and turned the scene black-and-white, but then added color to the blood splashes. Only slight color, not anything bright. He liked the subtle effect, so he went through the ending scene-by-scene, adding more color each time, making the reds brighter and brighter, until the final scenes blazed with color, more color than there ever was in real life.

He liked it, but he felt a bit uncertain whether other people would enjoy it or not. He’d never seen a movie that was partly in color and partly not, except for that dumb Oz thing he saw when he was a kid.

Maybe, he thought, he should do what they call a preview. So he got on the phone and called Heho.

“I’d like to invite you and some other people over Saturday night,” Pauhe said. “I’ve got a movie I’d like to show you.”

“What kind of movie?”

Pauhe detected a degree of suspicion in Helio’s voice. He wanted to reassure Heho that it wasn’t pornographic.

“It’s a sort of a gangster movie, Helio.”

“I don’t watch gangster movies,” Heho said. “They never get anything right.”

“I know what you mean,” Pauhe said. “But I sort of fixed this one.”

“What do you mean, fixed it?”

“I found this movie on the mediatron, and it was wrong, so I fixed it. I put a new ending onto it, and I made some other changes.”

“You mean you made this movie?”

“I made parts of it, yeah.”

“Well.” Pauhe could tell that Heho was impressed. “Sure I’ll come and see it. But is it a movie I can bring my wife to? She’s kind of conservative, and I don’t like to get her upset.”

Pauhe thought about it for a moment. “It’s a little intense in places,” he admitted.

“Could I come Friday night instead?” Heho said. “Friday night is the night for girlfriends, Saturday night for wives.”

And Sunday morning for church, Pauhe knew.

He should have remembered that Saturday was Wife Night. Not being married himself, he hardly ever thought about these distinctions.

“Sure,” Pauhe said. “Make it Friday night, then, and bring your girlfriend.”

He called Raimundo, Leo, and Marcio, and invited them and their girlfriends for Friday. And then he reahzed he didn’t have a date for himself.

Gloria probably didn’t count as a girlfriend, since he was paying her and everything, but she would have to do.

He realized then that he didn’t have her phone or beeper number. Once they’d first met, she’d always called him.

He called her service.

The man recognized his voice. “You’re white, redhead, straight sex, no kink, no kids,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Paulie.

He asked the service to page Gloria, and when she returned his call, he told her he wanted her for all of Friday night.

“Friday’s a busy night for me,” she said. “I’ve already got a couple dates scheduled.”

“Can you break them? I’d make it worth your while.”

“What’s the big occasion?”

Paulie explained.

“So this is a social event? You actually want me as an escort? ”