The visions went on and so did the short story. Phil told no one, although Sasha began to complain about the way he was behaving. When I retraced the chronology, I realized she'd called me a couple of times then and casually mentioned how grumpy and strange he'd been since returning from Yugoslavia.
"This was before Matthew Portland died?"
"A long time before, Weber. Phil said Pinsleepe was coming to him every day by that time. He also said he actually was told the Portland thing would happen, but he wouldn't do anything about it."
"Tell me more about the angel."
Lunch was served. A stewardess named Andrea brought our trays and asked us to sign her autograph book. Wyatt quickly drew a picture of Finky Linky, Andrea, and me all holding hands while we flew across the sky together.
"What's this?"
"I don't know. Meat? Cake?" We poked at the same brown object on our trays.
"Maybe it's the napkin. The videos he sent you and Sasha are pretty good evidence something exists; whether it's an angel or not, who knows?"
"Why'd he think it was an angel?"
"Because it came to tell him to stop making the Midnight films."
The first Midnight began as a kind of desperate joke. Eight years ago, Phil Strayhorn was an inch away from bottoming out. He'd had no luck cracking the Hollywood egg and was down to doing free-lance research on anything for anyone, just to pay his bills. Because he was a plain-looking man with little acting experience, he was only another person on line at casting calls. Along the way, he'd tried working in development at a studio but was neither social nor cunning enough to be successful at it. He loved acting and loved movies, but he'd reached a point where there was no way any of it was working out for him.
Someone doing a book on the occult asked him to research Zoroastrianism. Tunneling through the subject, he discovered The Book of Arda Viraz, an autobiography by a Persian priest who purportedly survived death and came back to talk about what was "over there."
On the other side, among other tasks, Viraz had had to cross the "Bridge of the Separator," where he (and all other souls) met his conscience for a reassessment of all he'd done in life.
Fascinated by the idea, Phil dug deeper and found similarities in Islamic tradition. There, the story goes that on the day of judgment one must undergo "the trial of crossing al-Sirat, a bridge that is thinner than a hair, sharper than a sword, and, in some versions, set with hooks and thorns; the righteous cross easily to the Garden, but the wicked find the bridge slippery and dark and, after expending thousands of years attempting to cross, fall into the Fire below."
I didn't see him much in those days because I was about to go to Europe to film Babyskin and was caught up in my own solipsism. It was probably better, though, because our relationship was strained. Since graduating from college, I'd published a collection of poetry and made a film that was well reviewed. I was on my way, and however much he loved me and cheered my success, I knew it was hard for him to watch someone else get all the A's. Especially Phil, who'd been at the head of the class all his life.
When I returned from Europe several months later, he picked me up at the airport. Pulling the car away from the LAX curb, he handed me a script.
"What's this?"
"A script I wrote. You won't like it because it's a horror movie, but please read it and tell me if it's any good. If it has any potential."
"A horror film? 'Midnight.' What's it about?"
"Meeting our conscience on a bridge."
Something glitched in the universe. We never find out why, but it's implied early in the film it was mankind's fault. Wars, greed, sniffing around in certain dangerous corners of science. . . . Whatever, things on a cosmic level fell apart and the ceremony of innocence met Bloodstone. Whatever happened caused part of death to cross the mortal line into life in the form of Bloodstone. He could simply be an angry little sliver of death or part of our conscience come to meet us on the Bridge of the Separator . . . if we were dead, but we aren't. He could even be Death itself, helplessly forced to live in our east of Eden. All that matters is Bloodstone is angry – angry to be here, angry to be in a hated foreign land. Phil always smiled and called him the xenophobe.
The degree of violence and imagination in the things Strayhorn's fiend did were both obscene and startling. Reading the script for the first time, I couldn't believe what he was doing, page after page. But Bloodstone did them repeatedly in the most inventive and ghoulish ways. I called it car-crash art – you don't want to look, but you have to.
I called Matthew Portland, a producer who was always looking for scripts full of boobs, blood, and interesting gore. He asked for the story over the phone. Instead of telling him, I read the now-famous scene of Bloodstone, the infant, and the magnifying glass.
"That's the most repellent thing I've ever heard. Who wrote it?"
The three of us went to lunch. After they shook hands for the first time, Portland said he liked the script but it needed work. We all knew it was a perfect script, but every producer says that at the first meeting. Phil smiled and quietly said Matthew's last film, Hide and Sick, was a steaming pile of shit. The other smiled back and said he knew that, but it'd paid the bills.
They traded insults for most of the meal and then agreed on a deaclass="underline" Phil's script stayed as it was, and he would play Bloodstone. In exchange, he asked for very little money but a nice guaranteed piece of the gross.
They got a young man straight out of USC film school to direct who knew just about every horror film ever made, including such howlers as Plan 9 from Outer Space. But they were lucky because they'd found a genuine aficionado and fan of the genre who also knew what he was doing.
It took twenty-nine days to shoot Midnight in a northern California town where the entire six-hundred-person population was delighted to have a movie crew setting fire to their streets and flinging fake body pieces out their windows.
Matthew Portland and half the crew played roles. Phil played three (including Bloodstone). The director was a perfectionist who pissed everybody off but whose enthusiasm for what they were doing kept people afloat.
At a sneak preview of the film in Hibbing, Minnesota, a teenage girl had a heart attack and died. It made national news and was the best free publicity they could have wanted.
Millions were made. T-shirts and posters were licensed. Merchandisers and distributors and major studios started licking their lips and rubbing their hands together for what they saw as a possible long and happy marriage between gold and a new ghoul.
The furor grew. It was understandable. Midnight is a kind of masterpiece, but it is also immoral and too convincing, too real. Horror films are fun to watch because they're usually so outrageous or hyperbolic you spend half the time smiling at all that red silliness.
Midnight is different. For one, it is a very smart film. Although Phil said it was inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's work, I know a great deal of it came from his own utterly unhappy childhood. Not the horror so much as the almost tactile sadness that sits on the movie like the night demon on the sleeping woman's chest in that famous painting by Fuseli. Pauline Kael said it first when she wrote the wonderful review comparing Midnight to De Palma's Carrie and Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. That gave the intelligentsia permission to go to the film, much like Leonard Bernstein did in the seventies when he said he liked the Beatles.