Where? I thought. There hasn’t been a dancing teacher in Hollywood in twenty years. Or a choreographer. Or a musical. CGs might have killed the liveaction, but they hadn’t killed the musical. It had died all by itself back in the sixties.
“I’ll need a job to pay for the dancing lessons, too,” she was saying. “The girl you were talking to at the party — the one who looks like Marilyn Monroe — she said maybe I could get a job as a face. What do they do?”
Go to parties, stand around trying to get noticed by somebody who’ll trade a pop for a paste-up, do chooch, I thought, wishing I had some.
“They smile and talk and look sad while some hackate does a scan of them,” I said.
“Like a screen test?” Alis said.
“Like a screen test. Then the hackate digitizes the scan of your face and puts it into a remake of A Star Is Born and you get to be the next Judy Garland. Only why do that when the studio’s already got Judy Garland? And Barbra Streisand. And Janet Gaynor. And they’re all copyrighted, they’re already stars, so why would the studios take a chance on a new face? And why take a chance on a new movie when they can do a sequel or a copy or a remake of something they already own? And while we’re at it, why not star remakes in the remake? Hollywood, the ultimate recycler!”
I waved my hand at the screen where ILMGM was touting coming attractions. “The Phantom of the Opera,” the voice-over said. “Starring Anthony Hopkins and Meg Ryan.”
“Look at that,” I said. “Hollywood’s latest effort — a remake of a remake of a silent!”
The trailer ended, and the loop started again. The digitized lion did its digitized roar, and above it a digitized laser burned in gold: “Anything’s Possible!”
“Anything’s possible,” I said, “if you have the digitizers and the Crays and the memory and the fibe-op feed to send it out over. And the copyrights.”
The golden words faded into fog, and Scarlett simpered her way out of it towards us, holding up her hoop skirt daintily.
“Anything’s possible, but only for the studios. They own everything, they control everything, they—”
I broke off, thinking, there’s no way she’ll give me a pop after that little outburst. Why didn’t you just tell her straight out her little dream’s impossible?
But she wasn’t listening. She was looking at the screen, where the copyright cases were being trotted out for inspection. Waiting for Fred Astaire to appear.
“The first time I ever saw him, I knew what I wanted,” she said, her eyes on the wall. “Only ‘wanted’ isn’t the right word. I mean, not like you want a new dress—”
“Or some chooch,” I said.
“It’s not even that kind of wanting. It’s… there’s a scene in Top Hat where Fred Astaire’s dancing in his hotel room and Ginger Rogers has the room below him, and she comes up to complain about the noise, and he tells her that sometimes he just finds himself dancing, and she says—”
“ ‘I suppose it’s a kind of affliction,’ ” I said.
I’d expected her to smile at that, the way she had at my other movie quotes, but she didn’t.
“An affliction,” she said seriously. “Only that isn’t it either, exactly. It’s… when he dances, it isn’t just that he makes it look easy. It’s like all the steps and rehearsing and the music are just practice, and what he does is the real thing. It’s like he’s gone beyond the rhythm and the time steps and the turns to this other place… If I could get there, do that…”
She stopped. Fred Astaire was sauntering toward us out of the mist in his top hat and tails, tipping his top hat jauntily forward with the end of his cane. I looked at Alis.
She was looking at him with that lost, breathless look she had had in my room, watching Fred and Eleanor, side by side, dressed in white, turning and yet still, silent, beyond motion, beyond—
“Come on,” I said, and yanked on her hand. “This is our stop,” and followed the green arrows out.
SCENE: Hollywood premiere night at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Searchlights crisscrossing the night sky, palm trees, screaming fans, limousines, tuxedos, furs, flashbulbs popping.
We came out on Hollywood Boulevard, on the corner of Chaos and Sensory Overload, the worst possible place to flash. It was a DeMille scene, as usual. Faces and tourates and freelancers and ravers and thousands of extras, milling among the vid places and VR caves. And among the screens: drops and freescreens and diamonds and holos, all showing trailers edited a la Psycho by Vincent.
Trump’s Chinese Theater had two huge dropscreens in front of it, running promos of the latest remake of Ben-Hur. On one of them, Sylvester Stallone in a bronze skirt and digitized sweat was leaning over his chariot, whipping the horses.
You couldn’t see the other. There was a vid-neon sign in front of it that said Happy Endings, and a holoscreen showing Scarlett O’Hara in the fog, saying, “But, Rhett, I love you.”
“Frankly, my dear — I love you, too,” Clark Gable said, and crushed her in his arms. “I’ve always loved you!”
“The cement has stars in it,” I said to Alis, pointing down. It was too crowded to see the sidewalk, let alone the stars. I led her out into the street, which was just as crowded, but at least it was moving, and down toward the vid places.
Hawkers from the VR caves crushed flyers into our hands, two dollars off reality, and River Phoenix pushed up. “Drag? Flake? A pop?”
I bought some chooch and popped it right there, hoping it would stave off a flash till we got back to the dorm.
The crowd thinned out a little, and I led Alis back onto the sidewalk and past a VR cave advertising, “A hundred percent body hookup! A hundred percent realistic!”
A hundred percent realistic, all right. According to Heada, who knows everything, simsex takes more memory than most of the VR caves can afford, and half of them slap a data helmet on the customer, add some noise to make it look like a VR image, and bring in a freelancer.
I towed Alis around the VR cave and straight into a herd of tourates standing in front of a booth called A Star Is Born and gawking at a vid-pitch. “Make your dreams come true! Be a movie star! $89.95, including disk. Studio-licensed! Studio-quality digitizing!”
“I don’t know, which one do you think I should do?” a fat female tourate was saying, flipping through the menu.
A bored-looking hackate in a white lab coat and James Dean pompadour glanced at the movie she was pointing at, handed her a plastic bundle, and motioned her into a curtained cubicle.
She stopped halfway in. “I’ll be able to watch this on the fibe-op feed, won’t I?”
“Sure,” James Dean said, and yanked the curtain across.
“Do you have any musicals?” I asked, wondering if he’d lie to me like he had to the tourate. She wasn’t going to be on the fibe-op feed. Nothing gets on except studio-authorized changes. Paste-ups and slash-and-burns. She’d get a tape of the scene and orders not to make any copies.
He looked blank. “Musicals?”