Steve Erickson - Zeroville

Someone in English calls out, “Are you going to direct a film of your own?”

“There’s a book. It’s called Là-Bas ,” says Vikar. “I’ve read it many times.”

“This is a somewhat notorious book in France,” the translator says. “They want to know why an American filmmaker would make into a film this book.”

“Americans are in love with shame,” Vikar says. “Can you imagine Bogart fucking Bergman with a cube of butter on the Champs-Elysées? This movie will be”—a small pandemonium now seems to surge from the back of the salon—“about the right hand of Joan of Arc who became the greatest child killer of all time, next to God. This movie will expose the child-killer God in all His profiles. It will set the record straight on God.” It’s unclear to Vikar whether the translator actually has finished translating before the press conference appears to collapse into chaos. As the shouts and demands wash over them, Vikar turns to Rondell, whose face is buried in his hands. “Do you think,” says Vikar, “they understood the part about my name?”

194.

That evening in his suite at the Carlton, the phone rings. “God love you, vicar,” comes the voice on the other end, “don’t you know all that business about saving the movie in the editing room is just one of the great urban legends of film? Nobody ever really saves the movie in the editing room. That’s one of the excuses they have for taking movies away from directors, that they can save the fucking thing in the editing room. Now you’ve gone and actually saved a movie in the editing room and there will be no end to it. You’ve created a lot of trouble.”

193.

Vikar says, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s a joke, vicar,” Viking Man says, after the usual transatlantic lag. Vikar hasn’t heard from or spoken to Viking Man in three years. “Well, sort of, anyway. The trades over here are all trying to figure out whether anyone ever has gotten an award at Cannes for editing, or montage or mise-en-scène or whatever fancy word they’re using.”

“I heard one of those words this morning. There was a press conference.”

“Yeah, that’s the other thing they’re all a-twitter about here.”

“It was only this morning.”

“News travels fast, vicar.”

“They called me by the wrong name. I had to set the record straight.”

“You set the record straight all right.”

“It’s important that in Hollywood they’re straight on the name.”

“I think in Hollywood what they’re straight on at the moment, vicar, is that you’re a lunatic. But then they just don’t know you like I do, and I suppose it could be worse — a lunatic means no one can figure out what you might do next, and since it might be something phenomenal and they don’t want to miss out on it, it can make them irritable in a potentially productive way.”

“We’ll make it work for us.”

“I’m not sure you should have said that thing about John Wayne.”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

“I have to take exception there, vicar.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“I mean, the man is dying. Vicar, you still there?”

“Can you hear me?”

“There you are … hey, vicar, listen—”

“Have you seen Zazi and Soledad?” Their voices cross.

“How’s that?”

“Zazi and Soledad?”

“Last I heard she was in New York on your movie there …”

“No …”

“… thought that’s what I heard. What?”

“I need to find them.”

“When are you coming back?”

“Tomorrow.”

“We’ll get together and drink tequila, amigo, scope out the local wenches who become more creatures of the Devil’s seed with every passing day. But listen.” A pause. “Vicar?”

Vikar has a momentary impulse to tell Viking Man how his film about the Berber chieftain wound up in a film about the death of the assassin the Generalissimo.

“Give Dot a call sometime. I know she would love to hear from you. She’s got to be peeing in her rubber panties about this Cannes thing.”

192.

Back in Los Angeles, Vikar no longer has room in his apartment on its secret boulevard for all the movies he’s stolen. With the money from Your Pale Blue Eyes , he rents a house further west in the Hollywood Hills, which he could barely see from room 939 of the Roosevelt Hotel nine years before, if he had known to look for it.

191.

It’s an old house for Los Angeles, dating back to the thirties. It cascades down the side of the hill in three levels, the large windows on the top level staring out at a panorama of trees and little houses and little cars driving up winding roads that seem to drop off in midair. As on a fjord of galvanized stardust, the house sits on the edge of the city, overlooking a vast shadowless sundial.

190.

The top floor of the house, at street level, is the living room with the kitchen. It’s shaped like a half moon, walled in white brick with a wooden floor and fireplace, circled by the large bare windows with window seats. On the second level below are two bedrooms; Vikar’s has a window facing east. The one large room at the foot of the stairs, on the third and bottom floor, becomes the film library, with a small console for editing and enlarging stills. Large canisters line all four walls, except where a small window faces south.

In the distance to the southeast, Vikar can see downtown. Directly below the house and the hill, occasionally blurting into view between the knolls and gullies, is Sunset Boulevard, now an asphalt timeline with not simply geographical addresses but temporal ones, from the classic forties, when glamour ran like silver sewage, to the utopian sixties, when hippies rampaged the gutters, to the anarchic present at the boulevard’s far eastern end where a Sound grows, not unlike what Vikar heard in the Bowery.

189.

Vikar goes to see a new movie by Buñuel. It’s a remake of Von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman and takes place near Soledad’s hometown of Seville. At first Vikar believes the movie is about a middle-aged widower in love with two women who share the same name, until he realizes, halfway through, that in fact two different actresses are playing one and the same woman. Buñuel knows about the profiles, Vikar realizes. He has taken it farther than anyone, actually showing each profile as played by an entirely different person. In one incarnation the woman dances flamenco, as Soledad did when she was a small girl.

188.

He doesn’t install a telephone, as much by design as indifference. “Give Dot a call sometime,” Vikar hears Viking Man in his sleep one night, and when he wakes, he knows it’s too late.

187.

“All of us are too fucking late, vicar,” Viking Man says quietly, a week later, “once someone is gone.” Subdued, he smokes his cigar in the bar of the Hyatt on the Strip below Vikar’s house, across from the Sunset Tower where Vikar used to look for a light in George Stevens’ window. The two sit at a small round corner cocktail table as young girls flit around in tiny cellophane dresses waiting for rock stars to appear. “Who thinks he did all he could, once someone is gone?”

“I should have called,” Vikar says.

A shot of Cuervo Gold sits on the small cocktail table before Viking Man. Vikar drinks a vodka tonic like Dotty first ordered for him at Nickodell’s. “You see the thing that ran in Variety ?”

“Yes.”

“Not much,” says Viking Man. “It’s a cliché to say it doesn’t seem like much of a life when it comes down to an inch and a half in Variety , but that’s more than most of us get.” He puts out the cigar. “I mean, she worked on A Place in the Sun . Never was a George Stevens man myself, but still.”