Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (20 page)

One of the city's shiny new electric
streetcars took Jesse from Harrison to Hamlin Boulevard. The ride
was smooth, quiet, and Jesse couldn't help but wonder why the cars
had disappeared from the streets of Los Angeles back home. It
seemed a kind of majestic ancient beast, doomed to be knocked down
from its niche in the food chain by smaller, scrappier
scavenger-creatures.

When the streetcar came to the square he knew
to be his interchange, he stepped off and made his way north on
foot, passing block after block of brick cottages and Germanic
storefronts. There were the signature of a new wave of European
immigrants to the city, around the neighborhood of Humboldt Park.
The smells were more pleasant here. Not the industrial piss and
sweat of the dockside, but rather, the aroma of bread baking, and
wet grass in the morning.

A mile further, and Jesse stood before an
unassuming wooden door at the top of a cobblestone stoop. He walked
to the top of the stoop and rapped on the door three times. He
wasn't sure if this was a walk-in kind of business or not. Since he
didn't see a sign, he decided to play it safe.

He knocked once more. This time, after a long
moment, it opened with a creak.

A tall man in his late sixties emerged from
the darkness, his head topped with a cresting wave of shock-white
hair that made him seem even taller. He had the mouth of a shark,
and the kind of old-age onset that began to imbue some men with an
androgynous, unsettlingly grandmotherly quality. He squinted at
Jesse with what seemed like resent. "Can I help you?"

"Edward Scoble? I'm Jesse. I talked to you
over the telephone a couple of days ago."

Scoble's expression instantly changed to one
of opportunistic glee. His entire face seemed to light up with
delight. "Oh, right, right! Of course, of course, the Man from Back
West. Come on in."

Scoble swung the door wide, revealing his
gangly physique. His arms went wide in a welcoming, presentational
gesture. Jesse wouldn't have been at all surprised if the man had
accompanied it with a loud, "Ta-daa!"

Jesse entered. The first floor of Scoble's
shop was one long, narrow room, with a staircase at the rear. The
space was filled with carnival ephemera: Garishly-painted,
oversized electric signage. Performance booths, and
fortune-teller's boxes. A few trunks of unknown content. The whole
place had the pleasant smell of sawdust and old books. It was a
comforting reprieve from Chicago's stench.

"You can see for yourself, I've got
everything you could want for putting on a fine amusement
show."

"Well, as I mentioned over the telephone,"
Jesse said, "What I'm really interested in is a camera. A motion
picture camera. Yours were the closest one I could find."

A devilish gleam filled Scoble's eye. "Oh,
the Kinetograph. A most remarkable novelty. Let me show you. Wait
right here!"

Scoble scurried off up the stairs and soon
returned with a black and silver box a little smaller than a foot
locker, with a hand crank on its right side. Scoble handed off the
device to Jesse, gingerly, like a mother passing her infant into
the arms of another.

"Wow, this is it, huh?"

"That's it! All the wonders of the Orient,
the most sensual dancers of Arabia, the exotic flora and fauna of
the Congo—all of it can be brought to the wondrous eyes and
pocketbooks of your audiences with This. Little. Box," Scoble said,
his grin revealing that sharkish smile.

"I'm not interested in exploitation," Jesse
responded.

"How's that?"

"I want to bring truth to the people."

A mildly sour look crept across Scoble's
face. "Let me tell you something, since I like you. The public is
fickle." He gave a beat, for good measure. "A year ago you could
show them just about anything so long as it was captured by this
Kinetograph, and they'd pay for a glimpse. But now? Now, I think
you're going to have to give them something they haven't seen
before. Something for them to get excited about."

"Oh, don't worry," Jesse said. "It will be
very exciting."

Jesse had Scoble's attention now, and the old
man seemed to be in no hurry to see his company out. "Come
upstairs, I want to show you something," he said.

The carpeted staircase at the back of the
room had been cordoned off with a velvet rope. Scoble moved one of
the stanchions off to the side, and motioned for Jesse to pass. As
Jesse made his way up past the second floor landing, he stole a
glance at the attached bedroom and bathroom, and realized this was
not just Scoble's shop, but his home.

"It's the next floor," the man said.

Jesse kept walking. At the top of the
staircase, he saw what the showman had brought him up to see.
Scoble had built a personal screening room. Here, he could
entertain guests while screening the latest minute-long amusements
that he and his competitors were cranking out for the roadshow
market.

"Take as long as you'd like, I've got
everything you can imagine," Scoble said. "I'll fetch us a couple
of drinks. Pick your poison."

"You got any tea?"

Scoble gave a half-cocked nod, and went
downstairs. Jesse spent the afternoon, curtains drawn, viewing
strips of celluloid projected onto the wall. He was studying just
as he had at UCLA. Getting a feel for the cinematic lexicon that an
audience of the day would possess. What inspired their passions?
What made them laugh? Cry? Grow angry?

In one short, a man was watering his garden
when a boy, hidden behind bushes, stepped on the hose, stopping the
flow of water. The man looked down the business end of the hose for
a clog, and when the boy lifted his foot, the backed-up surge of
water blasted the gardener' face. The man then chased the rascal
off-screen.

The entire thing was filmed as one continuous
take from a single, locked-off camera angle. It was incredibly
simple. Despite its banal lack of sophistication, this was the most
successful motion picture ever that had ever been brought to
market, according to Scoble. It was so popular, in fact, they had
to re-shoot it for a second round of prints because the original
was so badly worn.

Jesse knew that if this simple novelty was
the apex of the cinema of the screen, he could do better.

"What if I told you I wanted to make a longer
story?" Jesse posited. "One with more than one recording, and sort
of string them all together? A bigger kind of film, where we can
move through time and location in a way that the live theatre could
never do?"

He noticed he was mimicking
Scoble's own grandiose flair back at the showman. "We can have
drama, and passion, and revenge. And action, I mean real danger and
spectacle! And, and, and we'll get the biggest stars of the stage
to be in it. Tight shots, you know, real close up on their faces
where we can see them really emoting, and we can
feel
right alongside
them."

"I don't know," Scoble said, running a hand
through his uncompromising mane. "If we do that, the actor's faces
will be the size of a doorway. Won't people find that
rather...odd?"

"Even better. They'll tell their friends
they'll never get a better look at their favorite performers, warts
and all."

Scoble's eyes drifted out beyond the
pedestrian confines of those four walls, out towards spectacle and
profits yet unimagined. "An interesting proposition."

Jesse leaned in closer now. He just had to
reel Scoble in, and he knew what language men like him spoke. "I've
already got a silent partner," Jesse said, which was true enough.
"He's backing me, five hundred dollars. Let's go in on this
together—you give me another five hundred, we distribute this thing
nationally. I only ask for the right to first exhibition, next
month."

The profiteer absentmindedly snapped on his
suspenders, a faraway twinkle continuing to hold his eyes captive.
"A most interesting proposition," he murmured once more, under his
breath.

At some point in the middle of that night,
Jesse's pen slipped from his hand as he fell to sleep on the floor.
Pages of handwritten script surrounded him, like the unfinished
thoughts of a madman gripped in the thrall of some conspiracy.

After waking to the early morning light,
Jesse hopped on a streetcar and headed to the telegram office. He
sent a message to the Bridgetown saloon, addressed to "Ol' Eagle
Eyes." This was a secret handshake between Clayburn (the barkeep),
Mr. Black, and whoever was trying to reach the exile. A secret to
which Jesse was now party to.

"
Progress in Windy City goes well
,"
the message read. "
Will return in one week
with footage
."

Scoble had a small, hand-operated printing
press, which he used to advertise his traveling exhibitions in
whatever town happened to be in his crosshairs that day. Jesse used
it to run off a hundred copies of a cattle call for extras. He
posted these flyers all along the power lines and public spaces of
downtown Chicago.

While Jesse corralled the human scenery,
Scoble visited a local Chicago playhouse and wrangled up the
troupe's supporting players to star in the film for a flat fee.
Scoble, like most men of his age and profession, knew more than one
person who owned him a favor. Making the most of this, he hustled
Chicago's playhouses for a recognizable name willing to star in his
project. But the "flickers" were a vulgar medium, and Scoble was on
the long-tail of his career. Who he ended up with was Floyda Marsh,
a soprano diva who was also past her sell-by date. Her career had
peaked on Broadway in the Reconstruction era, before her gradual
tectonic shift westward brought her to an extended engagement in
Chicago.

Jesse didn't have a part for her, but
Scoble's enthusiasm—real or feigned—compelled him to write her in.
Marsh would play Madame Ferris, a Bridgetown socialite who could no
longer bear to stand by idly while the commoners had their land
taken from under their feet. She would lead a charge of
ill-equipped but spirited rebels, and meet a dramatic, sacrificial
end. Jesse assured the opera singer that it would be a suitably
tragic and memorable fate.

Happily, the weather that week was amenable
to their ambitions. Clear skies kept the cards from seeming
hopelessly stacked against them. Scoble's Kinetoscope was
incredibly light-hungry, like all motion picture cameras of the
day, and shooting at night was out of the question. Even an
overcast sky could render a take muddy and unusable. On top of
that, Jesse had to gauge whether he was cranking the camera's
manual frame advance evenly, something he never had to worry about
in film school.

Jesse and Scoble reserved their first day of
shooting for camera testing, to ensure any fickleness had been
teased out of the machinery. Removing their first day's prints from
the camera was to be a touch-and-go affair. Jesse insisted he do it
himself, so he went to Scoble's windowless water closet on the
second floor, camera in hand, and closed the door behind him. In
the dark, he felt for the latch on the camera's side and unlocked
it, praying that he wouldn't feel a chewed-up angel-hair mess of
celluloid inside. To his relief, the film was still properly
spooled, and he was able to remove it and place it inside a
canister.

He developed the filmstock in this improvised
dark room, running the negatives through developing fluid and
tacking the filmstrips to dry. Then he ran the footage through the
impresario's projector, and witnessed cinema breathe life and
motion into the motionless. Wind rustled trees, a train crossed a
bridge, mother and child walked the streets of downtown Chicago.
All of it rendered and exposed perfectly. But these were, after
all, just tests, and the next day, Jesse embarked on a filmmaking
pursuit the likes of which the world had never seen.

Their first day of production was spent in an
empty lot on the outskirts of the city, overrun with weeds and
Chicago snakeroot. In Jesse's script, this was where the rebels met
to plot their sabotage of the gleaming new factory built by "Mr.
King," the film's evident stand-in for Wayne.

If Jesse's experiences at film school had
taught him one thing, it was to factor into the schedule twice as
much time as he thought he'd need. This proved just as excellent
advice in 1897 as it did in 1970. The shoot was slow going, but
cast and crew developed a sense of flow, bit by bit.

As the shadows grew long and the midwest air
picked up a chill, Jesse felt good about calling it a day. They'd
managed to get most of what he'd planned, and he didn't want to
risk shooting anything they wouldn't be able to use. He thanked the
cast, and sent them off to rendezvous at sunup the next
morning.

Scoble held out a hand to shake.
"Congratulations, sonny," the old man said.

Jesse couldn't help himself. Giddy, he and
Scoble broke out into laughter and hollering, and he put his arms
around the showman in a celebratory bear hug.

The next day, they returned
to that forgotten field of overgrowth, feeling good about their
prospects. The cast were having a good time, and all were anxious
to be able to see some part of what they were laboring on. Jesse
insisted it would be worth the wait, and they obliged him, though
he knew they couldn't grasp the significance of what they were
doing. Not even Scoble could, for he still saw
The Robbery of Bridgetown
as little
more than an elaborate carnival distraction.

Something changed that over the course of the
night, however, while Jesse slept a well-earned rest and the
following morning's papers rolled off the presses. Local beat
reporters had begun to pick up whispers about something percolating
on the fringes of Chicago. Word had gotten out that Floyda Marsh
had canceled her opera shows for the week, and that half the city's
repertory players had likewise disappeared. It didn't take long for
the press to pin this to the strange attraction being assembled by
an unknown playwright and a carnival king.