“Hey, buddy—”
“Come on, mister, up or down, in or out. We paid good money.”
“Efficiency and integrity around like the gases and elements. How we do our homework, every mother’s son of us. Enjoy the picture.”
“Come on, will you?”
“Yes, yes, I’m going.” I backed up the aisle. On the screen—Freebie and the Bean—cars were screeching around corners and slamming through plate-glass windows, flipping over guard rails, and landing on cars below like bombs dropped from planes. “We’re all Americans. Look, look. Do you spot the motifs? This couldn’t have happened before the Yom Kippur war and the energy crisis. We’ve become disenchanted with our automobiles. This too will pass.”
“Fella, if you don’t shut up—” a man said. Lockwire was beside me and I beside myself.
“Enjoy the picture. You know? I think Burt Reynolds once lived in Oklahoma. I think I read that somewhere.”
“Hey, Ben,” Lockwire said, “what is it? Come on.”
“Lockwire,” I whispered, “did someone report me to the manager?”
I retreated with him up the aisles, my face to the screen and quiet now, as he gently held me. “Take it easy, Ben,” he said. “Take it easy.”
“Yes. I will,” I said softly. We were standing at the back near the doors. “Wait. Just a minute. Wait. I just want to see this part.”
On the screen it said, “Cinema I Feature Presentation,” and then there was the big animated image of a sort of gear, like the sprocket flywheel of a wristwatch, or like a kid’s mandalic picture of sunshine. It turned around and around, ticking to weird electronic whistles and beats. “Yes. This is the part.” It was supposed to represent a projector spinning off film like line from a fishing reel. It was the logotype of Cinema I, Cinema II, and all over America in the eastern time zone and the central, mountain, and Pacific ones, people were watching it, as if Greenwich Mean Time itself were unwinding, unwinding. But it was the gears, the gears with their deep notches and treacherous terrible teeth that held me, that translated the zippered nerves which were just then coming unstuck again, the remission remissed, in my hands and fingertips, in the stripped caps of my knees and the scraped tines of my ears, loose as rust, as nuts and bolts in the blood.
It was to be his last remission, and he was to remember it like a love affair, like some guarded, precious intimacy, parsing it like a daydream, an idyll, the day he broke the bank at Monte Carlo. (And would dream about it, too, the dreams realistic but with a certain cast of sepia-tone nostalgia, like dreams of dead parents, bittersweet with love and recrimination.)
Lockwire had thought he’d gone crazy of course, and in a way he had, though not crazy so much as heroically excited — M.S. is a stress disease — his febrile talk like the aura of migraine, the incoherics of inspiration. But in a minute he was all business: More than ever. His plans and off-the-cuff schemes a desperate attempt to make a connection to his health, fear’s black coffee.
This is what he said:
“I want smoking permitted back of the first ten rows. There’s to be no public announcement. You’ll continue to run the ‘Fire Regulations Prohibit Smoking in Any Part of This Theater’ footage, but don’t do anything about enforcement. In the beginning you can have one or two of the ushers light up. This will serve as a signal. When the inspector registers a complaint, offer him a self-perpetuating free pass. If he doesn’t go for it, call the Fire Commissioner. Discuss it with him. Mention one thousand dollars. If he gives you static, go back three spaces, play it their way.
“Candy: I want vending machines put in. No gum, of course. Gum fucks up a theater. Just good, relatively inexpensive stuff. Name brands. You can keep the soft-drink and popcorn apparatus where it is, but replace the candy with paperback versions of the books the movies are based on. With records of the score if it’s a good one. The Sting, for example, Love Story. As a matter of fact, stock up on all the good movie music. Get an inventory together. And movie mags: Silver Screen, Photoplay. Posters are very big. Get in some Robert Redfords, Marlon Brandos, W. C. Fieldses, that sort of thing. Why should the headshops get all the play? Let’s get off our asses, Lockwire. I want to make Cinema I, Cinema II a goddamned Grauman’s Chinese, a regular little Merchandise Mart of the spin-off. Use those shops in museums where they sell postcards, art books, and twenty-five-buck reproductions of famous statuary as your model, those goofy imported handmade toys. We’ll make the candy girl — that redhead — our curator. Take her uniform away. Get her a smock and a patch that goes on the shoulder that says ‘Volunteer,’ or ‘Friends of Cinema I, Cinema II.’ Something like that.”
“But…”
“I’m way ahead of you. You’re thinking about the movies, what happens if we try to turn the place into an art house. We don’t. We run the same stuff. Blockbusters. Every movie a picture. You even hear Al Pacino, Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Paul Newman, Redford, you grab. They make a James Bond sequel you raise your finger, jerk your earlobe. And after the Academy Awards don’t fart around with reruns, ads in the paper ‘Nominated for Seven Academy Awards.’ Forget that crowd. Go on to the next blockbuster. Roll it! You got TV?”
“TV?”
“TV. Television. You got TV?”
“Well, certainly. Of course. Who doesn’t have T—”
“In your office?”
“In my office? No. Not in my office.”
“Get a little Sony. Watch Merv. Watch Johnny. Watch Mike. Get up early in the morning. Watch Barbara, watch Gene. They told us about The Exorcist. They told us about Last Tango. They told us about Harry and Tonto. What, you think it’s only the energy czars go on those programs? Stop, look, and listen, Lockwire. If you hear about it twice, it’s a blockbuster. Three times and it’s S.R.O. They have a lot to tell us.”
“To tell us.”
“To tell them. Us. Them. They have the franchise on the public taste. I don’t know how they do it. Magicians. But they know. They know and know. An exhibitor can learn more from those five guys than from forty junkets to the screening rooms of Los Angeles and New York. I’ll give you a tip. Don’t ever for one minute trust your own taste. Don’t trust mine. Where do you think I’d be today if I trusted my taste? Trust theirs — Barb’s and Johnny’s, Gene’s and Mike’s. Trust Merv’s. Those fellows are geniuses!”
“We’ve been doing pretty well. I’ll show you the figures.”
“You don’t have to. The figures are beautiful. I could qvell from the figures. You’d show me figures I’d go ‘hubba hubba,’ I’d follow them blocks and buy them a beer. We’re talking business — turnover, overhead, buy cheap, sell high.
“I want free passes in every thousandth popcorn box. If they say the secret word at the box office, give them double their money back. Invent, inaugurate, introduce, make up. Let there be ‘Special Daylight Savings Time Matinee’; package deals — they pay two-fifty for the show at Cinema I, you take off seventy-five cents for a ticket to Cinema II. Cards. Print up reaction cards. They fill in the blanks, you give them a fifty-cent rebate. Four stars, three, two, one, a half. Let them feel like critics. You do different categories: lighting, best performance by an animal, an Indian, a bad guy, an orphan over nine. Stuff about costumes, crap about sex.