[Continuing chapter three]
"What the hell happened?" Hogan sounded brusque, but he couldn't quite keep the grin from his face.
"I think I crashed," Casey said. "How'd it look?" Casey was propped on a mixture of blankets and cushions that had been set against one of the location crew's heavy wooden boxes, to the side of one of the hangars at the Glendale field. He'd been brought back by a studio truck and had only just settled down when Hogan's DH-4 sputtered to a stop a few yards away. Several of the cast and crew had accompanied Casey to his makeshift infirmary, and Jerry Straebo was on the way over from the production office as Casey returned Hogan's grin.
"It looked beautiful," Hogan said. "I pray that the film is all right. But seriously, what happened up there?"
"Misjudged my speed," Casey said. "I was coming in too fast, so I blipped the engine. I got distracted and held the switch down too long. And that Tommy had a Gnome."
"Yep," Mitch said. The mechanic looked thoughtful.
"I don't understand." That was Desiree Farrell. Where'd she come from? Casey wondered. And why? The last thing he wanted was to be reminded of how she'd distracted him, nearly terminally.
"Gnomes don't have throttles or carburetors," Casey said. "The only way you can easily control their speed is by shorting out the electricity to the sparking plugs. That's what a blip switch does. Unfortunately, the engine keeps spinning when you do that. And as long as it spins, it sucks fuel into its crankcase, and the crankcase sprays it into the cylinders. If there's no spark, the gas just gets spat out again. Gnomes only have one valve, and all that gas being spat out through that single valve can collect in the cowling. When I released the switch and the plugs started sparking again, the spark lit off that gas."
"Which exploded," Mitch said.
"That explains the flash I caught," Hogan said.
"Most times, a flash is all you get," Casey said. "This time there was enough fuel being spat out that the flames caught on the dope, and that was that."
"Dope?" asked Eve Adams, eyes wide. I’ve become the main attraction, Casey thought. Like in a circus sideshow.
"Not cocaine, surely." That was Conrad Hart, himself dressed in flying togs. Presumably he was about to shoot a scene requiring him to sit nobly in a cockpit. Why would you think we meant that kind of dope? Casey asked himself.
"Nitrocellulose," Mitch said. "Tightens up the linen covering the plane, makes it waterproof."
"And flammable as all hell," Hogan said. "I'm amazed you got down in one piece."
"So am I," Casey said. "I am in one piece, right?"
"How bad does it hurt to breathe?" Hogan asked.
"It hurts a bit, but I don't think I've broken anything," Casey said. He wouldn't have admitted it even if he had broken something. He couldn't afford to stop working.
"Then you're in one piece as far as I'm concerned," Hogan said. "Look, why don't you take a breather? I can work around you for the rest of the day, provided you think you'll be able to double up on Monday. Why don't you take the afternoon off?"
"I think that's a great idea," Desiree said. "Come and watch us work, Casey. If you think you do exciting work, you haven't lived yet. Just wait until you see how your blood tingles as you watch us get ready to say the same idiot sentence for the forty-third time."
"Must you be so disrespectful, Desiree?" Straebo asked. "Do we not pay you enough to speak idiot sentences as many times as we think necessary?"
"Don't take it so hard, Jerry," she said. "You know that deep down I love you like a brother." She laughed, and Straebo flustered, seemingly unsure of how to respond.
"Let's get back to work, people," he said after a moment. "We still have two set-ups to get through, and I'd like to do them while we're still in the nineteen-twenties." One by one the movie people drifted away, leaving Casey to watch as, in the distance, a handful of men from the crew put out the fire. He stared at the smoking wreck of the Tommy for a few minutes more, then carefully got to his feet and followed the actors to the set.
* * * *
Try as he might, Casey could not make himself be interested in the process of movie-making. Though he’d started out with high hopes, within ten minutes he’d become utterly bored. Straebo had had Desiree and Conrad Hart repeat the same brief scene over and over; to Casey the thing had been done right the first time. After a half-hour, the only thing Casey found himself wondering about was how actors and director could possibly work in such small chunks of story while holding the thread of the larger tale in their heads. They didn’t even shoot scenes in any kind of order; the scene Desiree was making was, she’d told him, set near the beginning of the picture. The crash he’d just done would appear about half-way through. The scene that had been shot this morning, while he was preparing for the crash, was one of the last in the movie.It made no sense to Casey. Compared with this, the life of a front-line pilot was bliss. Yes, people were trying to kill you. But at least you were following a comprehensible routine. Unable to stay interested in the repetition with his ribs hurting the way they did, he wandered away and watched the activity at Wilson Aero Services until the shouts of the crew told him that the filming was finally finished. For one scene, anyway.
“How do you do that?” he asked Desiree when she walked past him toward the tent that was serving as an impromptu dressing room.
“Do what?”
“Know how you’re supposed to be behaving in a scene like that. How long was that scene going to be? Twenty seconds? I understand what you meant about saying the same sentence over and over. So how do you keep it straight? When I see a movie, it all looks like everything happens one event after the other.”
“That’s how it’s supposed to look.” Desiree looked carefully at him. “You really want to know about this?”
“I’m not sure. It’s just that it looks so damnably dull to me. I can’t help figuring there must be something in it that I don’t see, but that you do.”
“It’s something you learn,” she said. “Certainly it’s nothing like being on the stage. I have to laugh whenever I look at the big Broadway stars the studios have brought out here to teach us how to talk. I’ve been watching them for six months now, and only a handful of them—Brett’s one, thank God—are picking it up. So you’re not the only one who’s wondering.”
“Doesn’t seem to me you need anyone to teach you how to talk.”
“That’s not the way our bosses see it,” Desiree said. “They’re terrified of sound.”
“Sound as in ‘talkies’?”
“That’s right. Monarch wants to get out of Poverty Row. That means talkies, because talkies are what people want to see. Sound is no flash in the pan, in spite of what Chaplin or Thalberg might want to hope.
“We’re not alone, either. Just about everybody in Hollywood is making talkies this season, and some studios are making most of their pictures talkies. Bloody Al Jolson.”
Casey nodded. “The Jazz Singer.”
“If it had just been The Jazz Singer, nobody would care. He hardly talked at all in that one. But you add in The Singing Fool—even something as awful as The Lights of New York—and silent pictures are in trouble, Casey. Studios are spending fortunes installing sound stages and recording systems—not because they love the idea of talkies, but because nobody dare risk being left behind.”
“I’m not sure why this is making actors nervous. It’s just another way of making a picture, isn’t it?”
“Do you have any idea, Casey, how few people in this city have any experience on the stage?” Desiree was smiling, but her eyes were dark and looking at him with a directness that made him wonder how it was she hadn’t wound up a regimental sergeant-major. “Most of us haven’t a clue how to read a line aloud. We’ve spent our time before the cameras improvising or muttering banalities or even cursing like sailors. We don’t know how to talk; we’ve never had to. And now we’re all scared to death we’ll sound like a leaky radiator when our audience finally hears us. That’s why those Broadway people are here. And the end result is that we’ve got people who can talk but can’t act for the camera, and we’ve got people who can act for the camera but can’t talk.
“It’s true that making a movie is nothing like acting on stage. But it’s equally true, I think, that making a talkie is nothing like making the kind of picture I’m used to.”
“This is your first, then.”
“Yes. And I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I was last able to say that.” She laughed at his expression, and almost in spite of himself Casey wound up laughing too.
“You sounded fine to me,” he said. It was true; Desiree might be nervous about talkies, but you couldn’t tell by her voice. It was warm and throaty and just deep enough to hint at something dangerous and decadent if he could only persuade her to—
Casey blinked. Change the subject, you idiot.
“You were going to tell me about Howard Hughes yesterday,” he said after a very long moment.
“That’s right. I was.” Casey couldn’t tell from her inflection whether she’d forgotten about him or was just leading him on. “It can’t be now, though, Casey. Much as I’d love to spend some time with you.” He felt himself flushing again, damn it. “I’ve got to get changed,” she continued. “I’m supposed to be a nursing sister in the next set-up. Or an actress playing a nursing sister. I suppose it all comes to the same thing. At any rate, you will stay and watch, won’t you?”
In spite of himself Casey nodded yes.
No comments:
Post a Comment