The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (42 page)

—Parker is still ticking, still got some fight in him. He’s missing some pieces, so not
that
much fight. He says to me in a tired voice, “I suppose the fact your grandfather was a gangster makes us meeting like this sort of poetic.”

“You say poetic, I say pathetic. Wait a second . . . You’re a cop?” I mug at him, best as I am able. He chuckles, horribly. I’m groggy. Haven’t had a sip of water in hours. Two days since I last ate. The tips of my fingers and toes are numb and my heart knocks too fast. I'm bruised, possible concussed. My back is sprained. Worst of all, my left thigh is severely lacerated. None of this bodes well.

Beyond this litany of woes looms a bigger problem.

The others have bled out on the ice floor of the crystal cave. All that life coagulated into a crimson slick. The enormous cascade of blood is too hot to completely freeze. It oozes toward the hole in the floor. The pit that has awaited us for a million years.

Parker and I cling to a rough section a few feet upslope. We’ve linked arms and combined our waning strength. The ice is damp and slippery. Inch by inch our purchase loosens and we slide toward doom.

The man who once played Renfield on the silver screen throws back the hood of his bearskin parka and laughs. His hands are bare to the elements, fingernails blackened or gone. I try not to consider what he’s done, what he’s going to do.

He says, “The tragedy is that the Renfield figure wants what the master already has. Immortality. After all my searching, all my supplication, all my obeisance, I have found only a slower way of dying.”

The walls of ice molt crimson. They seep and drip.

My grip fails. Parker groans and slides past me, down the bloody ice chute into the shaft that probably goes straight past hell to China. The groan is just a sound he’s making. It doesn’t touch his eyes. I’ll never get to ask him if he’d gone undercover to bust me or to get a line on Smyth, that alleged murderer of starlets.

A moment later I’m gone too and Smyth whistles to mock my departure—

—And then I die—

—Maybe an eon passed in the void. How would I know? Mostly I spent the time falling like a stone into an abyss. There were interludes where I segued from falling into walking through a vast maze, a hedgerow of obsidian. The sky was also obsidian splintered by jags of white light. The light was so dim and so far away it might’ve been the inverse of itself. Figures moved in the distance. Moses and Maddox. I couldn’t quite catch them to see for certain. Parker paced me by trudging backwards. A bit green around the gills and sickly pale. Breathing, though. I cried out to him and he smiled and drifted away.

Sometimes Smyth’s disembodied voice echoed along the twists and turns: “I didn’t travel into the wilderness to find the dark. I brought the dark with me. The seed is inside everybody, waiting for a chance.”

Another occasion he said, “I went out there to be alone. You got what you wanted, you stupid twit?”

I realized I was probably talking to myself and in those moments of clarity the maze disintegrated and I’d be lying in that grave on the ice between my comrades, or plummeting from the sky in the plane, or kissing Conway at the Phoenix Theatre, or transfixed in a study while
Ardor
squelched and squealed on the wall and stodgy guests gawked at my apparition.

In every case the snow returns, and covers me—

—I wake in the summer to a good-morning blowjob, but the ruined nerves in my leg kill me and the vertigo unmans me and I scream and Conway has to hold me down until I stop. I lie there in a sweat and tell him the fog has lifted. I remember everything in Technicolor.

He cautions that I can’t trust my recollections, claims I returned to Seattle a night before I ever left and then blinks and says he didn’t say anything that crazy. He leaves red marker messages on the mirror:
Where’s her body, Sam?
I confront him and he kisses my ear and says I didn’t get eaten by the Ouroboros and shit out into an alternate universe. Take your meds and do your physical therapy, Sam.
Where’s her body, Sam? Where’s Parker’s body? Where are they, Sam?

If I didn’t die, if this isn’t hell, then what has actually transpired is worse. Always something worse. That first night in the storm does for Moses, his fabulous parka notwithstanding. Maddox may or may not have had life in him. Parker is only strong enough to tow one of us and despite my length, I don’t weigh much. The good cop drags me back to the seashore and we await rescue near the plane’s wreckage. Along the way a diamond-hard sliver of ice or a jagged rock has torn through my overalls and sliced my thigh to the bone. I don’t feel it happen and the blood covers my legs like I’ve a lap full of rubies. We hunker for two days. Parker’s face turns black and his eyes go milky blue. He stays with me a while, and then between buffets from the north wind he’s gone.

The troopers are able to dig Pilot John’s remains from the barbeque pit. They are mystified at the bullet hole in his skull. Bits of glass in there, so the bullet was fired from the ground as he banked the plane for a pass is what they conclude. Helicopter rides, hospital wards, a long white veil over the universe come next. Ice covers the Earth, then recedes and reveals the green. I’ll never walk quite right again. I lose an ear, all my fingernails, my belief in the rational, my sanity.

Night after night I dream of
Ardor
and Renfield in his cell with worms, lice, and flies for sustenance. He gibbers and hoots until the count slips in and maims him, leaves him paralyzed in the shitty rags of his bedding. I follow the camera into his glazed eyeball and come out on the other side inside a cheap motel room in Van Nuys. I’m a fly on the wall during the encounter between Papa Lindstrom and his private dick and Molly Lindstrom. The shouts and the tears are flowing freely when the pimp walks in. Bullets don’t have names on them. The girl and the pimp get bundled into the dick’s Caddy for a long, lonely ride to the landfill.

I don’t have a shred of proof, but the fucking imagery is so vivid, eventually it eats away at me, plagues my waking hours. Lately, I’m convinced that nothing is real, so the unreality of this scenario assumes the same weight as anything else. Conway helps me into the suit I usually wear to funerals and drives me to the Lindstrom estate. I leave him in the car, tell him it won’t be fifteen minutes, and then I hobble inside to say the awful things I’ve got say.

Here’s the test. Here’s where I receive validation or comeuppance. Maybe it’ll be both. For a moment I hesitate on the steps while a goon named Larry approaches. It is lush and green and sweetly humid. Not a glacier in sight—

—Lindstrom charges me with the knife brandished. I’m a step ahead of the game. I drop my cane and snatch the cavalry saber from its ornamental wall hooks. Coming in I’d expected mockery, perhaps indignant outrage, the threat of arrest, and certainly the risk of getting roughed up by one of the old man’s goons. Hell, if they’d simply laughed and phoned the funny farm, it wouldn’t have surprised me. What I don’t account for is how fast the situation escalates into a killing. In retrospect, I can’t blame myself for not entirely buying that the dreams were bona fide. Crazy people believe their own bullshit and so forth.

The snarl, the savage glint in his eyes, this is the murder in L.A. reprised. Man, it’s not as if I’m a fencer, or anything. I make a haphazard swing when he gets close and there goes the knife and two of his fingers under a table. Unfortunately for both of us he doesn’t take a hint. He leans down and retrieves the knife with his left hand and I hobble forward two steps and swipe at him again, both hands wrapped around the hilt. The sword cleaves through his neck without any trouble and his head plops onto the Persian rug and rolls onto its side so those devil-dog eyes are blinking at me.

“Oh, shit,” I say.

The wife doesn’t return and there’s a hell of a mess in the parlor, so I leave. The goon doesn’t intercept me on my way out the door. I do a spit check of my reflection at the car and don’t see any blood on my suit. My hair is mussed and I’m sweating, but that’s me these days. I smile at Conway and tell him to take us home. He doesn’t suspect anything and I retreat into myself with alacrity. My brain wants to shutter the doors and call it a day. I roll down the window and breathe in the smells of grass and leaves.

A cloud swoops in and paces the car. The breeze gains an edge and snow begins to fall. My heart stops. But it’s not snow, it’s hail, and Conway hits the wipers and in a minute or two we’re through it and gliding beneath glorious blue skies. I place my hand over Conway’s and close my eyes and try not to make that transcendental journey to Alaska, or visualize Lindstrom’s mouth working up a voiceless curse.

I figure if this isn’t a dream, the cops will be waiting at the house. And they are.

DON'T A ANSWER the phone.

Don’t answer the door.

Don’t do it. No—really. Don’t.

Too late.

Don’t worry.

You will make it through this.

Stay calm. If you are reading this,

you are here.

You are here because you are in danger

and you are in danger because you are here.

You’ve got a bad case

of the captivity narrative.

This means you are a white female under 30,

and you haven’t had sex or

you only do it with your husband or

you only do it by force.

None of this is your fault.

Someone did something that put you here:

Your forefathers raped the land.

Your husband stole America.

Your father oppressed the poor.

Your sister had sex in the house.

You will be taken from your home

or you will be forced to leave it.

If you hear music,

you are in a horror movie.

That means you get a knife to fight back with.

If you hear music

and the people holding you captive

are wearing jackets that say “ATF”

you are in Waco,

That means you are Joan of Arc.

If you are eating dinner with your husband

in early America

and there’s a knock at the door

and it’s Native Americans with weapons,

you’re Mary Rowlandson.

If you are eating dinner with your boyfriend

in late California

and there’s a knock at the door

and it’s white people with masks and weapons,

you’re Patricia Hearst.

If you are eating dinner with your boyfriend

in the living room

and he is killed by people with masks and weapons

when you bring the dishes to the kitchen,

you’re in a horror movie.

Here’s how to survive:

Watch as everyone around you dies.

Scream until your eyes work.

They will work when you pick up a weapon.

They will work when something changes:

Maybe the Native Americans are just like you.

Maybe money, your father, is the great tyrant.

Pick up a weapon and gain sight.

You will fight back or die.

You will fight back.

You will become a girl who is a boy.

The story runs all the way

to daybreak, when you can be a girl

again and everything

will be returned home.

Even us.

Until then, everything

is electric projection

and we are

your captive audience.

OKAY, YOU COULD say it was my fault. I’m the one. Me, Walter Paisley, agent to stars without stars on Hollywood Boulevard. I said “spare a thought for Eddy” and the Poe Plague got started . . .

It’s 1959 and you know the montage. Cars have shark-fins. Jukeboxes blare the Platters and Frankie Lyman. Ike’s a back number, but JFK hasn’t yet broken big. The Commies have put
Sputnik
in orbit, starting a war of the satellites. Coffeehouses are full of beards and bad poetry. Boomba the Chimp, my biggest client, has a kiddie series cancelled out from under him. Every TV channel is showing some Western, but my pitches for
The Cherokee Chimp
,
The Monkey Marshal of Mesa City
, and
Boomba Goes West
fall on stony ground. The only network I have an “in” with is DuMont, which shows how low the Paisley Agency has sunk since the heyday of
Jungle Jillian and Her Gorilla Guerrillas
(with Boomba as the platoon’s comedy-relief mascot) and
The Champ, the Chimp, and the Imp
(a washed-up boxer is friends with a cigar-smoking chimpanzee and a leprechaun).

American International Pictures is a fancy name for James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff sharing an office. They call themselves a studio, but you can’t find an AIP backlot. They rent abandoned aircraft hangars for soundstages and shoot as much as possible out of doors and without permits. At the end of the fifties, AIP are cranking out thirty to forty pictures a year, double features shoved into ozoners and grindhouses catering to the Clearasil crowd. They peddle twofers on low-budget juvenile delinquency (
Reform School Girl
with
Runaway Daughters!
), affordable science fiction (
Terror from the Year 5,000
with
The Brain Eaters!
), inexpensive chart music (
Rock All Night
with
The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow!
), cheapskate creatures (
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
with
The Undead!
), frugal combat (
Suicide Battalion
with
Paratroop Command!
) or cut-price exotica (
She-Gods of Shark Reef
with
Teenage Cave Man!
). When Jim and Sam try for epic, they hope a marquee-filling title—
The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent—
distracts the hot-rodders from sub-minimal production values and a ninety-cent sea serpent filmed in choppy bathwater.

The AIP racket is that Jim thinks up a title—say,
The Beast with a Million Eyes
or
The Cool and the Crazy
—and commissions lurid ad art, which he buries in hard-sell slogans. He shows ads to exhibitors, who chip in modest production coin. Then, a producer is put on the project. Said producer gets a writer in over the weekend and forces out a script by shoving peanuts through the bars.
Someone
has to direct the picture and be in it, but so long as a teenage doll in a tight sweater screams on the poster—at a monster, a switchblade, or a guitar player—no one thinks too much about them. Sam puts fine print into contracts that makes sure no one sees profit participation and puffs cigars at trade gatherings.

Roger Corman is only one of a corral of producers—Bert I. Gordon and Alex Gordon are others—on AIP’s string, but he’s youngest, busiest, and cheapest. After, to his mind, wasting half his budget hiring a director named Wyott Ordung on a 1954 masterpiece called
The Monster from the Ocean Floor
, Roger trims the budgets by directing most of his films himself. He seldom does a
worse
job than Wyott Ordung. Five critics in France and two in England say Roger is more interesting than Cukor or Zinnemann—though unaccountably
It Conquered the World
misses out on a Best Picture nomination. Then again, Mike Todd wins for
Around the World in 80 Days
. I’d rather watch Lee Van Cleef blowtorch a snarling turnip from Venus at sixty-eight minutes than David Niven smarm over two hundred smug cameo players in far-flung locations for three or four hours. You don’t have to be a contributor to
Cayenne du Cinéma
or
Sight & Sound
to agree.

After sixty to seventy films inside four years, it gets so Roger can knock ’em off over a weekend. No kidding.
Little Shop of Horrors
is made in three days because it’s raining and Roger can’t play tennis. He tackles every subject, within certain Jim-and-Sam-imposed limits. He shoots movies about juvenile-delinquent girls, gunslinger girls, reincarnated-witch girls, beatnik girls, escaped-convict girls, cave girls, Viking girls, monster girls, Apache girls, rock-and-roll girls, girls eaten by plants, carnival girls, sorority girls, last girls on earth, pearl-diver girls, and gangster girls. Somehow, he skips jungle girls, else maybe Boomba would land an AIP contract.

The thing is everybody—except Sam, who chortles over the ledgers without ever seeing the pictures—gets bored with the production line. Another week, and it’s
Blood of Dracula
plus
High School Hellcats
, ho hum. I don’t know when Roger gets time to dream, but dream he does—of bigger things. Jim thinks of bigger
posters
, or at least different-shaped posters. In the fifties, the enemy is television, but AIP product
looks
like television—small and square and black and white and blurry, with no one you’ve ever heard of wandering around Bronson Cavern. Drive-in screens are the shape of windshields. The typical AIP just lights up a middle slice. Even with
Attack of the Crab Monsters
,
The Amazing Colossal Man,
and
The She-Creature
triple-billed, kids are restless. Where’s the breathtaking CinemaScope, glorious Technicolor, and stereoscopic sound? 3-D has come and gone, and neither Odorama nor William Castle’s butt-buzzers are goosing the box office.

Jim or Roger get a notion to lump together the budgets and shooting schedules of two regular AIP pictures and throw their all into one eighty-five minute superproduction. Together, they browbeat Sam into opening the cobwebbed checkbook. This time, Mike Todd—well, not Mike Todd, since he’s dead, but some imaginary composite big-shot producer—will have to watch out come Oscar season. So, what to make?

In England, they start doing horror pictures in color, with talented actors in starched collars and proper sets. Buckets of blood and girls in low-cut nightgowns are included, so it’s not like there’s art going on. Every other AIP quickie has a monster in it, so the company reckon they’re expert at fright fare. There’s your answer. Roger will make a classy—but not
too
-classy—horror. Jim can get Vinnie Price to star. He’d been in that butt-buzzing William Castle film for Columbia and a 3-D
House of Wax
for Warners, and is therefore a horror “name,” but his career is stalled with TV guest spots on debatably rigged quiz programs or as fairly fruity actors touring Tombstone on Western shows. After Brando, well-spoken, dinner-jacketed eyebrow-archers like him are out of A pictures. What Jim and Roger don’t have is a clue as to what their full-color, widescreen spooktacular should be
about
. They just know
Revenge of the Crab Monsters
or
The Day after the World Ended
won’t cut it.

Enter Walter Paisley, with a Signet paperback of
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
. No, it isn’t altruism—it’s all about the client.

Boomba’s out of work and eating his weight in bananas every single day. Bonzo and Cheetah have a lock on working with Dutch Reagan and Tarzan, so my star is unfairly shut out of the town’s few chimp-friendly franchises unless he’s willing to do dangerous vine-swinging, crocodile-dodging stunts those precious primates want to duck out of. Therefore, I’m obliged to scare up properties suitable as vehicles for a pot-bellied chimpanzee. I ponder a remake of
King Kong
, with a chimp instead of a gorilla, but RKO won’t listen. I pitch a biopic of Major Sam, America’s monkey astronaut, but that goddamn Russian dog gets all the column inches.

In desperation, I ask an intern who once had a few weeks of college about famous, out-of-copyright stories with monkeys in ’em, and get pointed at “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Okay, so, strictly, the killer in that yarn is an orangutan not a chimpanzee—but every film version casts a guy in a ratty gorilla suit, so Boomba is hardly wider of the author’s original intent. I know of AIP’s horror quandary, and a light bulb goes on over my head. I dress Boomba up in a fancy suit and cravat and beret for the Parisian look and teach him to wave a cardboard cutthroat razor. I march the chimp into Jim and Sam’s office just as Jim and Roger are
looking glumly at a sketch artist holding up a blank board which ought to be covered with lurid artwork boosting their break-out film.

Tragically, Boomba compromises his employment prospects by crapping his velvet britches and grabbing for Sam’s foot-long cigar, but my Poe paperback falls onto the desk and Roger snatches it up. He once read some of the stories, and thinks he particularly liked “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Sam objects. The kids who go to AIP pictures have to study Poe in school and will therefore naturally hate him. But Jim remembers Universal squeezed out a couple of Poe pictures and racked up fair returns back in the Boris and Bela days. Then, Sam—who gives every appearance of actually having
read
“The Fall of the House of Usher”—says you can’t make a horror movie without a monster and there’s no monster in the story. “The house,” says Roger, eyes shining, “the
house
is the monster!” Jim and Sam look at each other, thinking this over. Boomba is forgotten, chewing the cigar. Then, management buys Roger’s line. The house
is
the monster.

Important issues get settled. Is there a part for Price? Yes, there’s someone in the falling house called Roderick Usher. Is there a girl? Roderick has a sister called Madeline. Paging through the paperback, they discover Poe doesn’t say Madeline
isn’t
a teenager in a tight sweater. I suggest the thin plot of the eighteen-page story would be improved if a killer chimp escaped from the Rue Morgue and broke into the House of Usher to terrorize the family. No one listens.

Jim and Roger run with “The Fall of the House of Usher.” They happily read out paragraphs in Vinnie Price accents. The sketch artist covers his board with a falling house, Vinnie lifting a terrified eyebrow, a buried-alive babe in a tight shroud, coffins, crypts, skeletons, an atomic explosion (which gets rubbed out quickly), and slogans ripped from Poe prose. “He buried her alive . . . to save his soul!” “I heard her first feeble movements in the coffin . . . we had put her living in the tomb!” “Edgar Allan Poe’s overwhelming tale of EVIL and TORMENT!”

I see my slice of the deal vanishing along with Sam’s cigar. Eddy is dead and long out of copyright, so there’s no end for him. This cheers Sam up, since he’d been all-a-tremble at the prospect of having to buy rights to some horror book from some unwashed writer.

So, just when it would take a steam-train to
stop
AIP making
The Fall of the House of Usher
, I mention I am the agent for the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore and can easily secure permission—for a nominal fee—for the use of the author’s name, which they have registered as a trademark. For a few moments, the room is quiet and no one believes me. Sam is skeptical, but I tell him the reason Poe’s middle name is so often misspelled is to evade dues payable to the EAPSoB. He mulls it over. He swallows it, because it makes sense to him. He’s ready to argue for going with
Edgar Allen Poe’s House of Asher
as a title before Jim and Roger shout him down. Sam doesn’t care about critics, but little slivers of Jim and Roger do, so they’re ready to strike a deal on the spot. I have a pre-prepared contract, which needs crossings-out, as it’s for a monkey as actor rather than an august body as trademark-leaser, but will still do.

As soon as I’m out of the office, I
found
the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore and start paperwork on trademark registration. It turns out I’m not even the first in the racket. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mark Twain, or their heirs, have beaten me to it. The deal may not be 100% kosher, but AIP’s check clears. Probably, they just want to shut me up, since I’m theoretically responsible for bringing them the property. Hey, it’s my drugstore paperback. They offer me an “associate producer” credit, but forget to include it on the film. Maybe it’s lost in the five minutes of swirling multi-colored liquids tacked on after the house has burned down and tumbled into the tarn. But, from then on, I’m part of the Poe package.