The tourates might as well relax and enjoy the show. What there was of it. Only one of the side walls was working, and half of it was running a continuous loop of ads for ILMGM, which apparently didn’t know it’d been taken over yet. In the center of the wall, a digitized lion roared under the studio trademark in glowing gold: “Anything’s Possible!” The screen blurred and went to swirling mist, while a voice-over said, “ILMGM! More Stars Than There Are in Heaven,” and then announced names while said stars appeared out of the fog. Vivien Leigh tripping toward us in a huge hoop skirt; Arnold Schwarzenegger roaring in on a motorcycle; Charlie Chaplin twirling his cane.
“Constantly working to bring you the brightest stars in the firmament,” the voice-over said, which meant the stars currently in copyright litigation. Marlene Dietrich, Macaulay Culkin at age ten, Fred Astaire in top hat and tails, strolling effortlessly, casually toward us.
I’d dragged Alis out of the dorm to get away from mirrors and the Beguine and Fred, tippity-tapping away on my frontal lobe, to find something different to look at if I flashed again, but all I’d done was exchange my screen for a bigger one.
The other wall was even worse. It was apparently later than I’d thought. They’d shut the ads off for the night, and it was nothing but a long expanse of mirror. Like the polished floor Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell had danced on, side by side, their hands nearly—
I focused on the reflections. The druggates looked dead. They’d probably taken capsules Heada told them were chooch. The Marilyn was practicing her pout in the mirror, flinching forward with a look of open-mouthed surprise, and splaying her hand against her white pleated skirt to keep it from billowing up. The steam grating scene from The Seven Year Itch.
The tourates were still watching the station sign, which read La Brea Tar Pits. Alis was watching it, too, her face intent, and even in the fluorescents and the flickering light of ILMGM upcoming remakes, her hair had that curious backlit look. Her feet were apart, and she held her hands out, braced for sudden movement.
“No skids in Riverwood, huh?” I said.
She grinned. “Riverwood. That’s Mickey Rooney’s hometown in Strike Up the Band,” she said. “We only had a little one in Galesburg. And it had seats.”
“You can squeeze more people in during rush hour without seats. You don’t have to stand like that, you know.”
“I know,” she said, moving her feet together. “I just keep expecting us to move.”
“We already did,” I said, glancing at the station sign. It had changed to Pasadena. “For about a nanosecond. Station to station and no in-between. It’s all done with mirrors.”
I stood on the yellow warning strip and put my hand out toward the side wall. “Only they’re not mirrors. They’re a curtain of negative matter you could put your hand right through. You need to get a studio exec on the make to explain it to you.”
“Isn’t it dangerous?” she said, looking down at the yellow warning strip.
“Not unless you try to walk through them, which ravers sometimes try to do. There used to be barriers, but the studios made them take them out. They got in the way of their promos.”
She turned and looked at the far wall. “It’s so big!”
“You should see it during the day. They shut off the back part at night. So the druggates don’t piss on the floor. There’s another room back there,” I pointed at the rear wall, “that’s twice as big as this.”
“It’s like a rehearsal hall,” Alis said. “Like the dance studio in Swing-time. You could almost dance in here.”
“ ‘I won’t dance,’ ” I said. “ ‘Don’t ask me.’ ”
“Wrong movie,” she said, smiling. “That’s from Roberta.”
She turned back to the mirrored side wall, her skirt flaring out, and her reflection called up the image of Eleanor Powell next to Fred Astaire on the dark, polished floor, her hand—
I forced it back, staring determinedly at the other wall, where a trailer for the new Star Trek movie was flashing, till it receded, and then turned back to Alis.
She was looking at the station sign. Pasadena was flashing. A line of green arrows led to the front, and the tourates were following them through the left-hand exit door and off to Disneyland.
“Where are we going?” Alis said.
“Sight-seeing,” I said. “The homes of the stars. Which should be Forest Lawn, only they aren’t there anymore. They’re back up on the silver screen working for free.”
I waved my hand at the near wall, where a trailer for the remake of Pretty Woman, starring, natch, Marilyn Monroe, was showing.
Marilyn made an entrance in a red dress, and the Marilyn stopped practicing her pout and came over to watch. Marilyn flipped an escargot at a waiter, went shopping on Rodeo Drive for a white halter dress, faded out on a lingering kiss with Clark Gable.
“Appearing soon as Lena Lament in Singin’ in the Rain,” I said. “So tell me why you hate Gene Kelly.”
“I don’t hate him exactly,” she said, considering. “American in Paris is awful, and that fantasy thing in Singin’ in the Rain, but when he dances with Donald O’Connor and Frank Sinatra, he’s actually a good dancer. It’s just that he makes it look so hard.”
“And it isn’t?”
“No, it is. That’s the point.” She frowned. “When he does jumps or complicated steps, he flails his arms and puffs and pants. It’s like he wants you to know how hard it is. Fred Astaire doesn’t do that. His routines are lots harder than Gene Kelly’s, the steps are terrible, but you don’t see any of that on the screen. When he dances, it doesn’t look like he’s working at all. It looks easy, like he just that minute made it up—”
The image of Fred and Eleanor pushed forward again, the two of them in white, tapping casually, effortlessly, across the starry floor—
“And he made it look so easy you thought you’d come to Hollywood and do it, too,” I said.
“I know it won’t be easy,” she said quietly. “I know there aren’t a lot of liveactions—”
“Any,” I said. “There aren’t any liveactions being made. Unless you’re in Bogota. Or Beijing. It’s all CGs. No actors need apply.”
Dancers either, I thought, but didn’t say it. I was still hoping to get a pop out of this, if I could hang onto her till the next flash. If there was a next flash. I was getting a killing headache, which wasn’t supposed to be a side-effect.
“But if it’s all computer graphics,” Alis was saying earnestly, “then they can do whatever they want. Including musicals.”
“And what makes you think they want to? There hasn’t been a musical since 1996.”
“They’re copyrighting Fred Astaire,” she said, gesturing at the screen. “They must want him for something.”
Something is right, I thought. The sequel to The Towering Inferno. Or snuffporn movies.
“I said I knew it wouldn’t be easy,” she said defensively. “You know what they said about Fred Astaire when he first came to Hollywood? Everybody said he was washed up, that his sister was the one with all the talent, that he was a no-talent vaudeville hoofer who’d never make it in movies. On his screen test somebody wrote, Thirty, balding, can dance a little.’ They didn’t think he could do it either, and look what happened.”
There were movies for him to dance in, I didn’t say, but she must have seen it in my face because she said, “He was willing to work really hard, and so am I. Did you know he used to rehearse his routines for weeks before the movie even started shooting? He wore out six pairs of tap shoes rehearsing Carefree. I’m willing to practice just as hard as he did,” she said. “I know I’m not good enough. I need to take ballet, too. All I’ve had is jazz and tap. And I don’t know very many routines yet. And I’m going to have to find somebody to teach me ballroom.”