“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.
Mayer would hardly care, and neither would his tight-assed boss. And nobody else watched liveactions. If the plot didn’t make sense, the hackates who did the remake could worry about it. They’d probably remake the remake anyway. Which was also on the list.
I called it up. High Society. Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly. Frank Sinatra playing Jimmy Stewart. I ff’d through the last half of it, searching for inspiration, but it was even more awash with AS’s. And it was a musical. I went back to Story and tried again.
It was no use. Jimmy Stewart had to be drunk in the swimming pool scene to tell Katharine Hepburn he loved her. Katharine had to be drunk for her fiancé to dump her and for her to realize she still loved Cary Grant.
I gave up on the scene and went back to the one before it. It was just as bad. There was too much exposition to cut it, and most of it was in Jimmy Stewart’s badly slurred voice. I rewound to the beginning of the scene and turned the sound up, getting a match so I could overdub his dialogue.
“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?” Jimmy Stewart said, leaning belligerently toward Cary Grant.
“Mute,” I said, and watched Cary Grant say something imperturbable, his face revealing nothing.
“Insufficient,” the comp said. “Additional match data needed.”
“Yeah.” I turned the sound up again.
“Liz says you are,” Jimmy Stewart said.
I rew’d to the beginning of the scene and froze it for the frame number, and then went through the scene again.
“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?” Jimmy Stewart said. “Liz says you are.”
I blanked the screen, and accessed Heada. “I need to find out where Alis is,” I said.
“Why?” she said suspiciously.
“I think I’ve found her a dancing teacher,” I said. “I need her class schedule.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know it.”
“Come on, you know everything,” I said. “What happened to ‘I think you should help her’?”
“What happened to, ‘I stick my neck out for nobody’?”
“I told you, I found her somebody to teach her to dance. An old woman out in Palo Alto. Ex-chorus girl. She was in Finian’s Rainbow and Funny Girl back in the seventies.”
She was still suspicious, but she gave it to me. Alis was taking Moviemaking 101, basic comp graphics stuff, and a film hist class, The Musical 1939-1980. It was clear out in Burbank.
I took the skids and a bottle of Public Enemy gin and went out to find her. The class was in an old studio building UCLA had bought when the skids were first built, on the second floor.
I opened the door a crack and looked in. The prof, who looked like Michael Caine in Educating Rita, a movie with way too many AS’s in it, was standing in front of a blank, old-fashioned comp monitor with a remote, holding forth to a scattering of students, mostly hackates taking it for their movie content elective, some Marilyns, Alis.
“Contrary to popular belief, the computer graphics revolution didn’t kill the musical,” the prof said. “The musical kicked off,” he paused to let the class titter, “in 1965.”
He turned to the monitor, which was no bigger than my array screens, and clicked the remote. Behind him, cowboys appeared, leaping around a train station. Oklahoma.
“The musicals, with their contrived story lines, unrealistic song-and-dance sequences, and simplistic happy endings, no longer reflected the audience’s world.”
I glanced at Alis, wondering how she was taking this. She wasn’t. She was watching the cowboys, with that intent, focused look, and her lips were moving, counting the beats, memorizing the steps.
“…which explains why the musical, unlike film noir and the horror movie, has not been revived in spite of the availability of such stars as Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. The musical is irrelevant. It has nothing to say to modern audiences. For example, Broadway Melody of 1940…”
I retreated up the uneven steps and sat there, working on the gin and waiting for him to finish. He did, finally, and the class trickled out. A trio of faces, talking about a rumor that Disney was going to use warmbodies in Grand Hotel, a couple of hackates, the prof, snorting flake on his way down the steps, another hackate.
I finished off the gin. Nobody else came out, and I wondered if I’d somehow missed Alis. I went to see. The steps had gotten steeper and more uneven while I sat there. I slipped once and grabbed onto the banister, and then stood there a minute, listening. There was a clatter and then a thunk from inside the room, and the faint sound of music.