Frames (3 page)

“What do you get from the bobble-head Popeye, memoirs of the early days at Fleischer Studios?”

“I didn’t ask you in here to discuss interior decorating. I bought a theater. The Oracle, in West Hollywood. And that’s not the biggest news.”

The professor removed a stack of original screenplays from a plastic scoop chair and stretched out in it, almost supine with his rumpled head resting on the back and his ankles crossed, unscrewing and screwing back together the pieces of the pipe he was no longer permitted to smoke on campus. With his eyelids at half-mast and his chin drawn into the loose flesh around his neck, he looked like every musty Russian pedagogue Oscar Homolka had ever played. “Best thing you can do for that mausoleum, the humanitarian thing, would be to smack it in the kisser with a wrecking ball.”

“I’m going to restore it.”

“Why?”

Valentino shook his head. “For someone who spends most of his time threshing around in the past, you’re incapable of nostalgia.”

“There’s a difference between preserving history and trying to apply CPR to a corpse. The Golden Age is always the one you missed, and you can no more bring it back than last year’s lapels. Your sentiment isn’t even firsthand. You’re what, thirty-five?”

“Thirty-three.”

“A sprout. You weren’t born when places like the Oracle stopped showing first-run features. Your generation grew up watching Indiana Jones in a concrete bunker at the end of the mall.”

“I have an old soul.”

“My inner child is older than your old soul. Also, you’ve forgotten where you live. You’ve no concept of the bureaucratic nightmare you’re about to enter. You can’t comply with one ordinance without violating three others.”

“I’m glad you didn’t mention the cost.”

“Not to mention the cost. But that’s your five-thousand-pound hog and you can slop it. Don’t ask me for a loan. I’m saving up for a funeral that will blow the doors off this town.” He clamped the pipe between his teeth and held up his hands, like a director framing a shot. “I can see the headline in the
Mirror
now: ‘Who the Hell Did He Think He Was?’”

“The Los Angeles Mirror
folded years ago.”

“My point precisely. Leave the Jurassic to us fossils.”

“Anyway, I don’t need your money. I knocked a hole in my savings to put down a deposit, and I’ve got a four-oh-one K just sitting around drawing interest.”

“Drop in the ocean.”

“Will Rogers told Joel McCrea to bite the bullet and buy a ranch. He said they weren’t making any more real estate. McCrea died a millionaire many times over.”

“No danger of that in your case. The Big One could come tomorrow and dump us all in Davy Jones’s locker.”

“Just as long as my check clears first. I haven’t told you my big news.”

“Bigger than going broke on the scale of William Randolph Hearst?”

“Try
Greed.”

Broadhead unclamped his pipe and pulled it apart. “This is the opposite of greed. It’s financial hara-kiri.”

“Not ‘greed,’ lowercase Roman. Think uppercase italics.”

“Greed?”

“Greed.”

“Greed
as in Erich von Stroheim?
Greed
as in forty-two reels and eight to ten hours’ running time?
Greed
as in thirty of those reels sent straight to the incinerator by MGM in nineteen hundred and twenty-five? That
Greed?”

“That
Greed.”
Valentino frowned. The word was starting to sound strange after so much repetition. “I take exception to the incinerator theory. There were enough cans on the rack to suggest at least four hours of footage. That’s twice as much as anyone’s seen in eighty years.”

“Bah!” said Broadhead, and he’d never sounded more like Oscar Homolka. “You need to spend less time in the processing lab. The acetate’s eating your brain.”

“I don’t blame you for thinking that. You’ve forgotten more about film than I’ll ever know.”

“Flattering, but inaccurate. I’ve forgotten nothing.”

Idle braggadocio, from anyone but the author of
The Persistence of Vision,
the bible of celluloid preservation. The book chronicled Broadhead’s thirty-year quest for the original 1912 version of
Quo Vadis?
produced in Italy; a quest interrupted by the three years he’d spent in prison in Yugoslavia, accused of spying. He was Valentino’s only mentor. Valentino filled the old historian in on the details of his discovery.

Broadhead put away the pipe and tugged down the points of his sweater-vest, its pattern blurry beneath a layer of spilled ash. He’d been violating the university’s tobacco ban for years, confident in his tenure and reputation as an ornament of the institution. “I thought
I
was a buccaneer. I never committed to buy a house on the evidence of a label on a film can I didn’t even open.”

“I didn’t want to open one under those conditions. You know how unstable that old nitrate stock is. Also I didn’t want to make Anita suspicious and hike the asking price. I made sure the contents came with the building. For all I knew, the next person she showed the place to might have been with MCA or Ted Turner. Or worse, some real-estate developer who wouldn’t know Stroheim from Streisand and throw it all out. I took a leap of faith.”

“Evel Knievel took a leap of faith. You jumped off the Empire State Building. Val, you’ve been daydreaming for years about buying one of these broke-down popcorn palaces and fixing it up. If you thought you needed an excuse, it didn’t have to be the grail.”

“You’re right up to a point. My lease is running out and I need a place with a screening room. But I didn’t imagine seeing that label. You know I’m more down-to-earth than that.”

“Not on recent intelligence. As long as we’re quoting the dead, you may remember what W. C. Fields said.”

Valentino smiled. “‘In this town, you can’t tell where Hollywood ends and the d.t.’s begin.’”

Resting his case, he propped his feet up on his desk, a thing he rarely did in the presence of his personal hero, and let Broadhead ponder while he breathed in the cramped academic atmosphere. It was alien to his own restless nature. He gave it his time in return for the heady uncertainty of never knowing when he might be called upon to abandon everything on a moment’s notice and fly to Rome to retrieve a Fellini outtake or to a landfill in Alaska, quite literally to dig up the lost westerns of Thomas Ince. He had truly married adventure when he’d dropped out of film school to apprentice the ragtag team of professional scrounge artists who had founded the film preservation program. He couldn’t act, direct, or write screenplays, but he could Dumpster-dive with the best.

“Everything’s against it, including timing,” Broadhead said. “The film was four years old when the Oracle opened. By then you couldn’t give away tickets to a silent feature, so what was it doing in storage? I think your realtor salted the mine. She probably did her homework on you after you made the appointment to see the place.”

“That’s diabolical, even for California.”

“Von Stroheim chose the title
Greed
for a reason.”

“Anyway, it can’t hurt to check it out. I want you to go down there with me.”

“Why? I’ve made my pilgrimage for this term: two hundred and forty-six steps one way, and nothing but cretins with iPods on the other end. All I want to do is soak in a hot bath and watch
Survivor.
I won’t be your Sancho Panza.”

“I’m nervous about handling nitrate stock. If I drop a can and the lid pops off and twenty minutes of
Greed
implodes on contact with the air, I’ll wind up sticking my head in an oven. You’ve got decades’ more experience dealing with disappointment.” Valentino took his feet off the desk. “Kyle, I don’t ask you for many favors, just a point of reference now and then.”

“And each point was five years of my life, not counting that shit hole in Zagreb.” The professor dug out his pipe and a leather pouch nearly as traveled as he. “It’s time we laid this chimera to rest. It’s consumed too much money and far too many careers, starting with von Stroheim’s.”

“So the answer’s no.”

“Who said that? My God, man, it’s
Greed.
Pick me up out front.” He struck a match.

**

CHAPTER

3

RIDING UP LA CIENEGA, wearing the flat tweed cap that made him look like an immigrant fresh off the boat, Broadhead sat unnaturally erect, hands gripping the dashboard and gaze fixed on the street. Suddenly he said, “Turn here!”

Valentino, ever the dutiful protégé, made the right turn onto a side street he’d passed ten times a week and had never noticed before, a narrow wandering affair with too many cars parked on it in front of small clapboard houses predating the motion-picture industry: student housing, from the room to let signs and telltale Segway scooters parked on some of the porches. Broadhead directed him to stop before a chalky two-story with basketballs and soccer balls on the lawn like melons in a patch. The professor got out, knocked on the door, and vanished inside. Minutes later he reappeared, holding open the door for a girl to come out.

She loped toward the car. Valentino scrambled out from under the wheel.

“This is Fanta,” Broadhead said.

Fanta was an athletic-looking five-ten in jeans, flip-flops, and a sweatshirt barely hanging on by her collarbone. Glistening black hair fell like a spill of graphite to her tan shoulders. Her grip was dry and firm. “I’m totally psyched, Mr. Valentino. I hope to intern with the film preservation program next summer.” Self-assurance bubbled through the shallow Valley Girl voice.

“Just Valentino,” he managed to say. She was stunning— and very young. “I left behind the
mister
when I crossed the state line.”

She laughed out of proportion to the humor of the remark.

“Fanta breezed through the spring term with a four-point-oh,” said Broadhead. “She’s with the archery team. We need young muscles to carry away the booty, or pull me out when I step through a rotten floorboard. Your old soul won’t answer.”

“Shotgun!” She hopped in on the passenger’s side.

Broadhead bent to open the rear door. Valentino put a hand on his shoulder, stopping him. “How old is Fanta?”

He frowned. “I don’t know. Nineteen or twenty, I suppose. She’s a junior.”

“Kyle, she’s named after a soft drink!”

“I don’t think you’re in a position to pass judgment on people’s names.”

“How long has it been since Elaine died?”

Understanding came up like thunder under the tweed cap. “Not that long. My God, never
that
long. What kind of old goat do you think I am? Her father was my teaching assistant my first year here. He died on the U.S.S.
Cole.”

“How much did you tell her?”

“Just that you bought a white elephant of a theater and found something of possible interest to the university. You can tell her as much or as little as you want. She’s in prelaw, studying to represent the industry in cases of copyright infringement. Ethics is one of the courses she aced last spring.”

“I’m sorry.” Valentino withdrew his hand. “It’s this town. Sometimes you see things that make you want to hire a crop duster and spray the whole place with saltpeter.”

“Well, you can count me out. Elaine gave me as much in that department as a man could ever want, and devotion besides. I’d still be rotting in jail if she hadn’t camped out on the State Department steps for three years.”

“Forgive me.”

The professor fluttered his lips rudely and unlatched the door. “Glad to see you’ve got something on your mind other than the flickers. There may be hope for you.”

During the drive, Fanta showed a healthy interest in the scenery rolling past her window, a refreshing change from so many of her peers, who insulated themselves from the world, jabbering on cell phones and listening to music no one else could hear, over minimal headsets like the kind they gave out in coach class—”cretins with iPods,” as Broadhead called them. Valentino caught her making faces at a delighted little girl in the backseat of a station wagon at a stoplight. Turning onto Boxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, he felt encouraged to conduct a guided tour.

“Wallace Beery lived there.” He pointed at an estate entirely hidden behind a twelve-foot concrete wall. “He tied with Fredric March for Best Actor in nineteen thirty-two; the only time that ever happened in the history of the Academy. In real life, Beery wasn’t nearly as lovable as the characters he played,” he confided.

“He was a son of a bitch.”

He glanced at her, startled by both the comment and its bright delivery.

“I’m a Hollywood brat,” she said. “My great-grandmother was a script supervisor at MGM. ‘Script girls,’ they called them then.” She giggled. “Jackie Cooper accidentally shot him in the foot with a prop pistol on the set of
Treasure Island.
The crew gave him a standing ovation.”

Broadhead chuckled maliciously. “You don’t want to go toe to toe with Fanta over antiquated showbiz gossip. She was her great-grandmother’s favorite, and she listened.”

“Maybe I’d be safer switching to a subject I don’t know much about. Dr. Broadhead tells me you’re studying copyright law.”

“Kyle,” Broadhead corrected. “If you can ditch your title in Lake Tahoe, I’m not going to lug mine off campus.”