Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

One of Hugo’s meatboys is standing a solo watch inside the locked doors of the theatre. As Sylvia approaches, he starts shaking his head and saying, “We’re closed tonight.”

“I have an appointment,” she tries through the glass. “With Mr. Schick.”

He stares at her with a blank face until a voice from inside yells, “It’s all right, Mr. Franco. Let her through.”

The bouncer turns a deadbolt, opens the door and steps aside to let her pass. She enters the lobby and stands for a second pushing her wet hair back on her head until a voice calls from above, “You’ll catch cold, my darling.”

She looks up to the center of the lobby’s balcony and sees Hugo Schick, dressed up in a Nazi SS uniform. He looks down on her, smiles, bows his enormous, bald head forward until she thinks he’s going to swan-dive over the railing, then rights himself and begins to brush at his lapels.

“It belonged to my grandfather,” he says, indicating the uniform. “You like?”

She tries to push her hair behind her ears and says, “You didn’t tell me this was a formal event.”

He starts down the right-side stairway.

“Momentous, yes,” he says, “but not formal, my dear.”

He approaches, takes her hand, squeezes it, lifts it up and, of course, brings his head down slightly and kisses it.

“As you’ll soon see, the dress for tonight’s gathering is anything but formal.”

She pulls her hand free.

“Where’d you get the pictures, Hugo?”

“Has no one ever told you, Sylvia,” he says, the almost-patient father figure, “you mustn’t, you can not rush the more important things in this life?”

“And tormenting me is an important thing for you?”

He looks over her and gives a kind of sad smile, shakes his head slightly.

“One of the achievements of my career,” he says, “has been my ability to prolong the moment. You can’t imagine how complex a task this can be, Sylvia. Too much prologue and the eye gets bored. Not enough, and there’s no time for the anticipation to build. It’s an instinctual talent. It’s born here,” rubbing his stomach.

“Why did you go after Perry? Is it because he works for Boetell?”

“You’re so American, my love,” he says. “Now let me take your raincoat. We have a long and wonderful night ahead of us.”

There’s no question he’ll have everything played his way. He’s the director. Her opinion is to walk away or accept his terms. It’s a matter of how badly she wants explanation, how much she needs definitive answers. So she unzips the slicker, pulls it off and hands it to Schick. It’s not that she has some idea that what Hugo tells her will change things. It’s just that she’s so disgusted by ambiguity at this point that she’s willing to walk this thing through to the end. Even if what she hears is exactly what she fears. Even if the voice of revelation isn’t that of her mother, but an egomaniacal Austrian pornographer.

“Let me have Mr. Franco bring you a robe,” Hugo says.

“I’m fine as is, thanks.”

“But you’re soaking—”

“I’ll dry.”

He gestured to her camera and says, “I knew you wouldn’t disappoint, Sylvia.”

“The night is young, Hugo.”

He takes her hand again and starts to lead her up the left-hand staircase.

“My work, as you know, is my life,” he says. “And I can’t help but feel that with the completion of tonight’s filming I’m surrendering to mortality.”

“Happens to the best of us,” she says.

“There will be other features,” ignoring her, “but they’re just cookie-cutter entertainments. They will have their flourishes. They’ll proudly bear the mark of Schick. But there will never be another epistle from the purest center of my heart.”

“Well, we’ve each got just so much purity to go around,” she says.

They come to the top of the stairs, walk past the entrance to the theatre proper and start up the spiral stairway to the studios.

“We began Don Juan Triumphant seven years ago. We filmed just one week each year since then. This was my plan from the start. Our starlet, Miss Pauline, was just eighteen at the time we began. She lacked much of the assertiveness we’ve all come to love.”

He stops at the landing and looks down at Sylvia, trapping her in the narrow circle of metal. “You don’t know where Leni is tonight, do you?”

“Leni didn’t show? On your last night of filming?”

He stares at her.

“I believe she may have run off with my assistant director. I finally find someone who knows what he’s doing and she seduces him and kidnaps him. She is a plague sent from the angry god of cinema.”

“What are you going to do?”

He squints and says, “A Leni Pauline cannot stop the fulfillment of this film. I can shoot around the hole that is Leni Pauline. Her absence is a minor technical difficulty. I’ve dealt with far worse. Besides, this is Don Juan’s night. The scenes all belong to him.”

They come to a stop in front of the double wooden doors spray-painted Henrick Galeen Memorial Studio. She hears Hugo take a deep breath, sees him square his shoulders. He stares straight ahead and whispers, “Once I go in, I do not come out until it is done.”

Then, before Sylvia can respond, he straight-arms the doors and they fly open to the full extent of the hinges and inside the studio you can hear all sound sucked away immediately, as if a machine had been turned off.

He stands framed inside the doorway, surveying the landscape. Sylvia lags back, stays in his shadow, follows as he slowly enters this cavernous loft. And his people stare back at him as if he were Hannibal or Napoleon or Cecil B. DeMille, some conquering entity inflated larger than life by vision and ego. Some force that can change the course of the moon.

He comes to a stop a few feet inside the studio, stands quietly, then brings his hands up to chest-level and presses them together as if in prayer, an enormous, mutant, fascist altar boy. And then he begins to bow slightly, over and over, in a running semicircle aimed at his entire congregation.

A wave of applause comes back at him, starting slowly at first, but building to an ovation which Hugo eventually waves down.

“My people,” he says to the room in a booming, theatrical voice, “my little family, my fellow dwellers in this madhouse we call art, I welcome you all tonight for the conclusion, after seven years of backbreaking, soul-crushing labor, after hundreds of hours of exposed film, after countless changes of cast crew and scripts, and yes, my friends, my family, after births and deaths and lost loves and betrayals and too many trips to the brink of financial disaster, we come to the final night of our story. Tonight, the myth shall be made whole. The tale completed. My work ended. And the thing itself, the film, birthed into this wretched world. And so,” a pause and another small bow, “it ends as it began. With love. With courage. And with passion. I say to you, my people, my children, let us begin this last night in Eden.”

No applause now, just a respectful, earnest hush. And then Hugo brings his hands around to his back, locks them together and begins a pre-filming tour of his soundstage. Sylvia catches up next to him and says, “Very impressive. Now, about the photographs you sent me—”

He looks at everything except her.

“Did you like them?” he says, for the first time acknowledging the shots of Perry and Candice. “They’re technically crude, but they have a certain bite, don’t you think?”

“Just tell me what—” she begins, but he cuts her off.

“I take it you’ve brought plenty of film?” he says, meaning it’s not yet time for their heart-to-heart.