French Scenes
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves . . .
—Julius Caesar act 1, sc. 2, ln. 1–2
THERE WAS A TIME, YOU READ, when making movies took so many people. Actors, cameramen, technicians, screenwriters, costumers, editors, producers, and directors. I can believe it.
That was before computer animation, before the National Likeness Act, before the Noe’s Fludde of Marvels.
Back in that time they still used laboratories to make prints; sometimes there would be a year between the completion of a film and its release to theaters.
Back then they used actual pieces of film, with holes down the sides for the projector. I’ve even handled some of it; it is cold, heavy, and shiny.
Now there’s none of that. No doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs between the idea and substance. There’s only one person (with maybe a couple of hackers for the dogs’ work) who makes movies: the moviemaker.
There’s only one piece of equipment, the GAX-600.
There’s one true law: Clean your mainframe and have a full set of specs.
I have to keep that in mind, all the time.
* * *
Lois was yelling from the next room where she was working on her movie Monster Without a Meaning.
“We’ve got it!” she said, storming in. “The bottoms of Morris Ankrum’s feet!”
“Where?”
“Querytioup,” she said. It was an image-research place across the city run by a seventeen-year-old who must have seen every movie and TV show ever made. “It’s from an unlikely source,” said Lois, reading from the hard copy. “Tennessee Johnson. Ankrum played Jefferson Davis. There’s a scene where he steps on a platform to give a secession speech.
“Imagine, Morris Ankrum, alive and kicking, 360°, top and bottom. Top was easy—there’s an overhead shot in Invaders from Mars when the guys in the fuzzy suits stick the ruby hatpin-thing in his neck.”
“Is that your last holdup? I wish this thing were that goddamn easy,” I said.
“No. Legal,” she said.
Since the National Fair Likeness Act passed, you had to pay the person (or the estate) of anyone even remotely famous, anyone recognizable from a movie, anywhere. (In the early days after passage, some moviemakers tried to get around it by using parts of people. Say you wanted a prissy hotel clerk—you’d use Franklin Pangborn’s hair, Grady Sutton’s chin, Eric Blore’s eyes. Sounded great in theory but what they got looked like a walking police composite sketch; nobody liked them and they scared little kids. You might as well pay and make Rondo Hatton the bellboy.)
“What’s the problem now?” I asked.
“Ever tried to find the heirs of Olin Howlin’s estate?” Lois asked.
* * *
What I’m doing is called This Guy Goes to Town . . . It’s a nouvelle vague movie; it stars everybody in France in 1962.
You remember the French New Wave? A bunch of film critics who wrote for a magazine, Cahiers du Cinema? They burned to make films, lived, slept, ate films in the 1950s. Bad American movies even their directors had forgotten, B Westerns, German silent Expressionistic bores, French cliffhangers from 1916 starring the Kaiser as a gorilla, things like that. Anything they could find to show at midnight when everybody else had gone home, in theaters where one of their cousins worked as an usher.
Some of them got to make a few shorts in the mid-fifties. Suddenly studios and producers handed them cameras and money. Go out and make movies, they said: Talk is cheap.
Truffaut. Resnais. Godard. Rivette. Roehmer. Chris Marker. Alain Robbe-Grillet.
The Four Hundred Blows. Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Breathless. La Jetée. Trans-Europe Express.
They blew moviemaking wide open.
And why I love them is that for the first time, underneath the surface of them, even the comedies, was a sense of tragedy; that we were all frail human beings and not celluloid heroes and heroines.
It took the French to remind us of that.
* * *
The main thing guys like Godard and Truffaut had going for them was that they didn’t understand English very well.
Like in Riot in Cell Block 11, when Neville Brand gets shot at by the prison guard with a Thompson, he yells:
“Look out, Monty! They got a chopper! Back inside!”
What the Cahiers people heard was:
“Steady, mon frère! Let us leave this place of wasted dreams.”
And they watched a lot of undubbed, unsubtitled films in those dingy theaters. They learned from them, but not necessarily what the films had to teach.
It’s like seeing D. W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance and listening to an old Leonard Cohen album at the same time. What you’re seeing doesn’t get in the way of what you’re thinking. The words and images made for cultures half a century apart mesh in a way that makes for sleepless nights and new ideas.
And, of course, every one of the New Wave filmmakers was in love, one way or another, with Jeanne Moreau.
* * *
I’m playing Guy. Or my image is, anyway. For one thing, composition, sequencing, and specs on a real person take only about fifteen minutes’ easy work.
I stepped up on the sequencer platform. Johnny Rizzuli pushed in a standard scan program. The matrix analyzer, which is about the size of an old iron lung, flew around me on its yokes and gimbals like the runaway merry-go-round in Strangers on a Train. Then it flew over my head like the crop duster in North by Northwest.
After it stopped the platform moved back and forth. I was bathed in light like a sheet of paper on an old office copier.
Johnny gave me the thumbs-up.
I ran the imaging a day later. It’s always ugly the first time you watch yourself tie your shoelaces, roll your eyes, scratch your head, and belch. As close, as far away, from whatever angle in whatever lighting you want. And when you talk, you never sound like you think you do. I’m going to put a little more whine in my voice; just a quarter-turn on the old Nicholson knob.
The movie will be in English, of course, with subtitles. English subtitles.
* * *
(The screen starts to fade out.)
Director (voice off): Hold it. That’s not right.
Cameraman (off): What?
Director (also me, with a mustache and jodhpurs, walking on-screen): I don’t want a dissolve here. (He looks around.) Well?
Cameraman (off): You’ll have to call the Optical Effects man.
Director: Call him! (Puts hands on hips.)
Voices (off): Optical Effects! Optical Effects! Hey!
(Sounds of clanking and jangling. Man in coveralls ((Jean-Paul Belmondo)) walks on carrying a huge workbag marked Optical Effects. He has a hunk of bread in one hand.)
Belmondo: Yeah, Boss?
Director: I don’t want a dissolve here.
Belmondo (shrugs): Okay. (He takes out a stovepipe, walks toward the camera p.o.v., jams the end of the stovepipe over the lens. Camera shudders. The circular image on the screen irises in. Camera swings wildly, trying to get away. Screen irises to black. Sound of labored breathing, then asphyxiation.)
Director’s voice: No! It can’t breathe! I don’t want an iris, either!
Belmondo’s voice: Suit yourself, Boss. (Sound of tearing. Camera p.o.v. Belmondo pulls off stovepipe. Camera quits moving. Breathing returns to normal.)
Director: What kind of effects you have in there?
Belmondo: All kinds. I can do anything.
Director: Like what?
Belmondo: Hey, cameraman. Pan down to his feet. (Camera pans down onto shoes.) Hold still, Monsieur Le Director! (Sound of jet taking off.) There! Now pan up.
(Camera pans up. Director is standing where he was, back to us, but now his head is on backwards. He looks down his back.)
Director: Hey! Ow! Fix me!
Belmondo: Soon as I get this effect you want.
Director: Ow! Quick! Anything! Something from the old Fieullade serials!
Belmondo: How about this? (He reaches into the bag, brings out a Jacob’s Ladder, crackling and humming.)
Director: Great. Anything! Just fix my head!
(Belmondo sticks the Jacob’s Ladder into the camera’s p.o.v. Jagged lightning bolt wipe to the next scene of a roadway down which Guy ((me)) is walking.)
Belmondo (v.o.): We aim to please, Boss.
Director (v.o.): Great. Now could you fix my head?
Belmondo (v.o.): Hold still. (Three Stooges’ sound of nail being pried from a dry board.)
Director (v.o.): Thanks.
Belmondo (v.o.): Think nothing of it. (Sound of clanking bag being dragged away. Voice now in distance.) Anybody seen my wine?
(Guy ((me)) continues to walk down the road. Camera pans with him, stops as he continues offscreen left. Camera is focused on a road sign:)
Nevers 32 km
Alphaville 60 km
Marienbad 347 km
Hiroshima 14497 km
Guyville 2 km
* * *
END OF SAMPLE
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