“Are you all right?” the tender-hearted girl called anxiously.
“Si. Si. Do not move, Signorina.” He picked himself up hastily. “Stay exactly as you are, or we shall never recapture this moment.” He walked toward her, his arms outstretched in front of him, the hands tilting this way and that as if he were considering how to frame an in- valuable painting.
“Whatever do you mean?” Penny asked, frozen by the tone of command in his voice. As he came closer, she saw that he was a swarthy man with flashing white teeth, not too tall and somewhat roly-poly.
“You are she! This is it! We are saved!” he said excitedly. “Perfecto! Perfecto!”
“I don’t smoke,” Penny said. “And even if I did, I don’t think cigars are for ladies.”
“No-no-no-no. I mean you. The little park. The fountain. The fountain. Ah, si, the fountain! Wild, primitive, uninhibited femaleness in the fountain in the night in the city. They will call me a genius!”
“Huh?” Penny was bewildered.
“But of course! You do not understand. You do not recognize me.” This last sentence was spoken with an air of both wonderment and injury.
“I’m afraid I don’t. Should I? Who are you?”
“I am Smutti!” he announced with a dramatic sweep of the polo coat.
“I’m a little grubby myself. But I wouldn’t advise you to try this fountain.”
“No-no-no! I am Francali Smutti, the great Italian movie director. Surely you must have seen some of my films.”
“Oh, sure,” Penny said, trying to be polite. “But— uh—-just to refresh my memory, what were the names of some of them?”
“The Kiddy-Car Thief; 691/2; Bris, Italian Style. You have seen them, no?”
“No,” Penny had to admit, hanging her still soggy head.
“How charming! How refreshing! How sweet and naive and untouched you are. There you stand, naked in mink, dripping from your midnight dip in the fountain. That is life! Realism! In the raw! Such is the stuff of which my movies are made. Si! Beauty and the fountain! I can see it now! Photography, very low-key. You rise nude from the fountain and don your mink. Ahh, the symbolism of it! Innocence corrupted by the trappings of an acquisitive culture. It will fill the art houses. The critics will love it!”
“It really isn’t much of a fountain,” Penny observed timidly.
“To you it may be nothing. But to my trained eye — I tell you, it may not be La Trevi, this may not be Rome, and you may not be Anita Ekberg, but nevertheless, this scene shall do for me what that one did for Fellini! It will be a cinematic tour de force! And you will be as famous as Ekberg.”
“Gee, I don’t know,” Penny said.
“Do not hesitate. I want to sign you to a contract immediately. Work on the picture has already started, but now I will have to change my thinking so that you shall be the star of it. Yes, here, now, rising like some phoenix from these liquid flames, a star is born! Come.” Francali Smutti grabbed Penny by the arm and led her to the Ferrari.
“Well, all right,” the darling girl agreed, swept off her feet by his dynamic magnetism. “By the way, what’s the name of this movie?” she asked as he held the door of the car open for her.
“La Merda Vita!” Smutti’s hand spelled it out in flashing neon lights against the blackness of the sky.
“Oh. What does that mean in English?”
“ ‘Dung of the Herring.’ It will be a true commentary on the true tawdriness of true life—as captured by the semi-documentary eye of the camera inspired by my genius.”
“What’s the name of the company that’s making it?” Penny queried idly.
“Pornographic Pictures, Inc. I allow myself to work for them only because they are highly selective in the distribution of my films.”
“It sounds like your work is awfully exciting,” Penny said as the Ferrari shot down the street and carried them deeper into Little Italy. “How did you ever get to be a movie director, anyway?”
“I worked my way up. I started as a boy, hanging around the studio, going out for pizza for the big shots, many menial tasks. Finally they put me on as a grip. Slowly, arduously, painstakingly, I worked my way up until I was an assistant director to the great Lasagna himself. From him I learned the art of being spicy and filled at the same time. And then came my big chance.”
“What was that?”
“Lasagna, a true genius, was making the first Italian Western.”
“Oooh! That sounds delicious. I love omelets.”
“No-no! I mean a cowboy movie. Anyway, as his assistant, it was my task to shoot all the trick shots. One of these had the hero of the film leaping from the roof of a low window onto the back of a horse. It was to be a long shot, with the camera panning to catch all the action. Now, it was against Lasagna’s policy to do anything that wasn’t absolutely realistic. To use a stunt man for this sequence was therefore unthinkable. Our male lead had to make this leap himself.”
“How exciting!”
“Si. But, unfortunately, he missed the horse.”
“How awful.”
“Si. He broke his ankle.”
“How devastating. What did you do?”
“What could I do? I called the doctor. The ankle was set. A cast was put on it. Chaps were used to cover the cast. And I was all ready to shoot the scene again.”
“Did he land in the saddle this time?” Penny asked Freudianly.
“No. The coward simply refused to jump. Refused, mind you! Actors! Pah!”
“But what did you do?”
“My genius asserted itself. We sat him on the horse and attached wires to him. These wires were painted so that they would be invisible against the background. Then we hauled him from the horse up to the roof. After that, I sped the film up and reversed it so that it looked just as if he had jumped from the roof to the back of the horse.”
“That was ingenious,” Penny said, wide-eyed.
“Si. That’s what the critics said. And it made my reputation. Thanks to that one scene, I was given a film of my own to direct.”
“Really? The studio was that impressed?”
“Si. They were. Because, you see, the hand of fate had guided my genius. While I was busy supervising the actor, unnoticed by me, the horse was relieving himself. The result was that when the picture was released with the film reversed, the droppings of the stallion were shown being returned to their place of origin. Such symbolism! The critics raved! They even compared me to Bergman and Rosselini. And the symbolism was all unconscious on my part. But then the best symbolism always is.”
“And so your career was launched.”
“And so my career was launched,” Smutti agreed. “The very next day following the reviews, the head of Pornographic Pictures, Sam Mafia himself, called me into his office and signed me to a long-term contract to direct my own pictures. My apprenticeship was over.” Smutti braked the Ferrari to a halt. “But yours is just beginning,” he told Penny. “And now that we are here, it can truly begin.” He led her up the steps of a rundown tenement house.
Ushered through the door, on the other side of it Penny found a completely different world. All the walls had been torn out of the first two floors of the tenement to make one huge movie set. Cameras and lights were everywhere. And in the center of this cinematic confusion, occupying about two-thirds of the area, was a lavish replica of the interior of a luxurious Italian villa.