The receptionist looked at a chart on a clipboard. "Follow me." She led her down a quiet corridor.
On the walls were posters of some of the studio's older movies. She paused to touch the crisp, wrinkled paper delicately. Farther down the hall were posters of newer films. The ads for movies hadn't changed much over the years. A sexy picture of the hero or heroine, the title, some really stupid line.
He was looking for peace, she was looking for escape. Together, they found the greatest adventure of their lives.
She'd seen the action movie that line referred to. And if the story had been their greatest adventure, well, then those characters'd been leading some totally bargain-basement lives.
Rune paused for one last aerial view of the Magic Kingdom, then followed the receptionist down a narrow hallway.
Betting herself that Mr. Weinhoff's would be one totally scandalous office. A corner one, looking north and west. With a bar and a couch. Maybe he'd be homesick for California so what he'd insisted they do to keep him happy was to put a lot of palm trees around the room. A marble desk. A leather couch. A bar, of course. Would he offer her a highball? What was a highball exactly?
They turned another corner.
She pictured Weinhoff fat and wearing a three-piece checkered suit, smoking cigars and talking like a baby to movie stars. What if Tom Cruise called while she was sitting in his office? Could she ask to say hello? Hell, yes, she'd ask. Or Robert Duvall! Sam Shepard? Oh, please, please, please…
They turned one more corner and stopped beside a battered Pepsi machine. The receptionist nodded. "There." She turned around.
"Where?" Rune asked, looking around. Confused.
The woman pointed to what Rune thought was a closet, and disappeared.
Rune stepped into the doorway, next to which a tiny sign said S. Weinhoff.
The office, about ten feet by ten, had no windows. It wasn't even ten by ten really, because it was stacked around the perimeter with magazines and clippings and books and posters. The desk-chipped, cigarette-burned wood-was so cluttered and cheap that even the detective with the close-together eyes would've refused to work at it.
Weinhoff looked up from Variety and motioned her in. "So, you're the student, what's the name again? I'm so bad with names."
"Rune."
"Nice name, I like it. Parents were hippies, right? Peace, Love, Sunshine, Aquarius. All that. Can you find a place to sit?"
Well, she got one thing right: he was fat. A ruddy nose and burst vessels in his huge cheeks. A great Santa Glaus-if you could have a Jewish Santa. No checkered suit. No suit at all. Just a polyester shirt, white with brown stripes. A brown tie. Gray slacks.
Rune sat down.
"You want coffee? You're too young to drink coffee, you ask me. 'Course my granddaughter drinks coffee. She smokes too. God forbid that's all. she does. 1 don't approve, but I sin, so how can I cast stones?"
"No, thanks."
"I'll get some, you don't mind." He stepped into the corridor and she saw him making instant coffee at a water dispenser.
So much for the highballs.
He sat back down at his desk and said to her, "So how'd you hear about me?"
"I called the public relations department here?" Her voice rose in a question. "See, I'm in this class-The Roots of Film Noir, it's called-and I'm writing this paper. I had some questions about a film and they said they had somebody on staff who'd been around for a while…"
" 'Around for a while,' I like that. That's a euphemism is what that is."
"And here I am."
"Well, I'll tell you why they sent you to me. You want to know?"
"I'll tell you. What I am is the unofficial studio historian at Metro. Meaning I've been here nearly forty years and if I were making real money or had anything to do with production they'd've fired my butt years ago. But I'm not and I don't so I'm not worth the trouble to boot me out. So I hang around here and answer questions from pretty young students. You don't mind, I say that?"
"Say it all you want."
"Good. Now the message said-do I believe it?- you've got some questions about Manhattan Is My Beat?"
"That's right."
"Well, that's interesting. You see a lot of students or reporters interested in Scorsese, Welles, Hitch. And you can always count on Fassbinder, Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola. Three, four years ago we got calls about Cimino. That Heaven's Gate thing. Oh, we got calls! But I don't think anybody's ever done anything about the director of Manhattan Is My Beat. Hal Reinhart. Anyway, I digress. What do you need to know?"
"The movie was true, wasn't it?"
Weinhoff's eyes crinkled. "No, that's the whole point. That's why it's such a big-deal movie. It wasn't shot on sets, it was based on a real crime, it didn't cast Gable, Tracy, Lana Turner, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, or any of the other sure-draw stars. You understand? None of the actors that'd guarantee that a film, no matter it was a good film, it was a bad film, that a film opened, you know what I mean, opened!"
"Sure." Rune's pen sped across the pages of a notebook. She'd bought it a half hour before, had written Film Noir 101 on the cover, then smeared the ink with her palm to age it, like a master forger. "It means people go to see it no matter what it's about."
"Right you are. Now, Manhattan Is My Beat was probably the first of the independents."
"Why don't you hear about it nowadays?"
"Because it was also the first of the bad independents. You've seen it?"
"Four times."
"What, you also tell your dentist to drill without no-vocaine? Well, if you saw it that many times, you know it didn't quite get away from the melodrama of the big studio crime stories of the thirties. The director, Rein-hart, couldn't resist the shoeshine boy's mother falling downstairs, the high camera angles, the score hitting you over the head you should miss a plot twist. So other films got remembered better. But it was a big turning point for movies."
His enthusiasm was infectious. She found herself nodding excitedly.
"You ever see Boomerang? Elia Kazan. He shot it on location. Not the greatest story in the world for a crime flick-I mean, there's not much secret who did it. But the point isn't what the story was but how it was told. That was about a real crime too. It was a-whatta you call it?-evolutionary step up from the studio-lot productions Hollywood thought you had to do. Manhattan Is My Beat was of the same ilk.
"Oh, you gotta understand, the era had a lot to do with it too, I mean, shifting to movies like that. The War, it robbed the studios of people and materials. The big-production set pieces and epics-uh-uh, there was no way they could produce those. And it was damn good they did. You ask me-hey, who's asking me, right?- but I think movies like Manhattan helped move movies out of the world of plays and into their own world.
"Boomerang. The House on 92nd Street. Henry Hathaway did that. Oh, he was a gentleman, Henry was. Quiet, polite. He made that film, I guess, in forty-seven. Manhattan Is My Beat was in that movement. It's not a good film. But it's an important film."
"And they were all true, those films?" Rune asked.
"Well, they weren't documentaries. But, yeah, they were accurate. Hathaway worked with the FBI to do House."
"So, then, if there was a scene in the movie, say the characters went someplace, then the real-life characters may have gone there?"
"Maybe."
"Did you know anyone who worked on Manhattan? I mean, know them personally?"
"Sure. Dana Mitchell."