She slammed the door behind her, and the image receded. I opened it and leaned out. “Be so good you’ll make me hate you,” I called after her, but she was already gone.
SCENE: Busby Berkeley production number. Giant revolving fountain with chorus girls in gold lame on each level, filling champagne glasses in the flowing fountain. Move in to close-up of champagne glass, then to close-up of bubbles, inside each bubble a chorus girl in gold-sequined tap pants and halter top, tap-dancing.
Alis didn’t come back again after that. Heada went out of her way to keep me posted — she hadn’t found a dancing teacher, the Viamount takeover was a done deal, Columbia Tri-Star was doing a remake of Somewhere in Time.
“There was this Columbia exec at the party,” Heada told me, perched on my bed. “He said they’ve been doing experiments with images projected into negative matter regions, and there’s a measurable lag. He says they’re this close” — she did the thumb-and-forefinger bit — “to inventing time travel.”
“Great,” I said. “Alis can go back to the thirties and take dancing lessons from Busby Berkeley himself.”
Only she didn’t like Busby Berkeley, and after taking all the AS’s out of Footlight Parade and Gold Diggers of 1933, neither did I.
She was right about there not being any dancing in his movies. There was a glimpse of tapping feet in 42nd Street, a rehearsal going on in the background of a plot exposition scene, a few bars in “Pettin’ in the Park” for Ruby, who danced about as well as Judy Garland. Otherwise it was all neon violins and revolving wedding cakes and fountains and posed platinum-haired chorus girls, every one of whom had probably been a studio exec’s popsy. Overhead kaleidoscope shots and pans and low-angle shots from underneath chorus girls’ spread-apart legs that would have given the Hays Office fits. But no dancing.
Lots of drinking, though — speakeasies and backstage parties and silver flasks stuck in chorus girls’ garters. Even a production number in a bar, with Ruby Keeler as Shanghai Lil, a popsy who’d done a lot of hooch and a lot of sailors. A hymn to alcohol’s finer qualities.
Of which there were many. It was cheap, it didn’t do as much damage as redline, and if it didn’t give you the blessed forgetfulness of chooch, it stopped the flashing and put a nice soft-focus on things in general. Which made it easier to work on Mayer’s list.
It also came in assorted flavors — martinis for Topper, elderberry wine for Arsenic and Old Lace, a nice Chianti for Silence of the Lambs. In between I drank champagne, which had apparently been in every movie ever made, and cursed Mayer, and deleted beakers and laboratory flasks from the cantina scene in Star Wars.
I went to the next party, and the one after that, but Alis wasn’t there. Vincent was, demonstrating another program, and the studio exec, still pitching time travel to the Marilyns, and Heada.
“That stuff wasn’t klieg after all,” she told me. “It was some designer chooch from Brazil.”
“Which explains why I keep hearing the Beguine,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Nothing,” I said, looking around the room. Vincent’s program must be a weeper simulator. Jackie Cooper was up on the screen, in a battered top hat and a polka-dot tie, blubbering over his dead dog.
“She’s not here,” Heada said.
“I was looking for Mayer,” I said. “He’s going to have to pay me double for The Philadelphia Story. The thing’s full of alcohol. Sherry before lunch, martinis out by the pool, champagne, cocktails, hangovers, ice packs. Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart. The whole cast’s stinking.”
I took a swig from the crème de menthe I had left over from Days of Wine and Roses. “The visuals will take at least three weeks, and that doesn’t include the lines. ‘I have the hiccups. I wonder if I might borrow a drink.’ ”
“She was here earlier,” Heada said. “One of the execs was hitting on her.”
“No, no, I say, ‘I wonder if I might borrow a drink,’ and you say, ‘Certainly. Coals to Newcastle.’ ” I took another drink.
“Should you be doing so much alcohol?” Heada, the chooch queen, said.
“I have to,” I said. “It’s the bad effect of watching all these movies. Thank goodness ILMGM’s remaking them so no one else will be corrupted.” I drank some more crème de menthe.
Heada looked at me sharply, like she’d been doing klieg again. “ILMGM’s doing a remake of Time After Time. The exec told Alis he thought he could get her a part in it.”
“Great,” I said, and went over to look at Vincent’s program.
Audrey Hepburn was up on the screen now, standing in the rain and sobbing over her cat.
“This is our new tears program,” Vincent said. “It’s still in the experimental stage.”
He said something to his remote, and the screen split. A computerized didge-actor sobbed alongside Audrey, clutching what looked like a yellow rug. Tears weren’t the only thing in the experimental stage.
“Tears are the most difficult form of water simulation to do,” Vincent said. The Tin Woodman was up there now, rusting his joints. “It’s because tears aren’t really water. They’ve got mucoproteins and lysozymes and a high salt content. It affects the index of refraction and makes them hard to reproduce,” he said, sounding defensive.
He should. The didge-woodman’s tears looked like Vaseline, oozing out of digitized eyes. “You ever program VRs?” I said. “Of, say, a movie scene like the one you used for the edit program a couple of weeks ago? The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers scene?”
“A virtual? Sure. I can do helmet and full-body data. Is this something you’re working on for Mayer?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Could you have the person take, say, Ginger Rogers’s place, so she’s dancing with Fred Astaire?”
“Sure. Foot and knee hookups, nerve stimulators. It’ll feel like she’s really dancing.”
“Not feel like,” I said. “Can you make it so she actually dances?”
He thought about it awhile, frowning at the screen. The Tin Woodman had disappeared. Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart were at the airport saying good-bye.
“Maybe,” Vincent said. “I guess. We could put on some sole-sensors and rig a feedback enhance to exaggerate her body movements so she could shuffle her feet back and forth.”
I looked at the screen. There were tears welling up in Ingrid’s eyes, glimmering like the real thing. They probably weren’t. It was probably the eighth take, or the eighteenth, and a makeup girl had come out with glycerine drops or onion juice to get the right effect. It wasn’t the tears that did it anyway. It was the face, that sweet, sad face that knew it could never have what it wanted.
“We could do sweat enhancers,” Vincent said. “Armpits, neck.”
“Never mind,” I said, will watching Ingrid. The screen split and a didge-actress stood in front of a didge-airplane, oozing baby oil.
“How about a directional sound hookup for the taps and endorphins?” Vincent said. “She’ll swear she was really dancing with Gene Kelly.”
I drank the rest of the crème de menthe and handed him the empty bottle and then went back up to my room and hacked away at The Philadelphia Story for two more days, trying to think of a good reason for Jimmy Stewart to carry Katharine Hepburn and sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” without being sloshed, and pretending I needed one.