Unlucky Charms
Movieland - Chapter 5
Up in the balcony, a door opens. Meanwhile….
5
Unlucky Charms
It was right around this time that the film broke — or seemed to.
“Kashi?” Tom called up to the projection booth. The house lights came on, casting the red rows in a dry, wilted light.
“I’m working on it,” the young man called back, showing his clean-shaven brown face — he was a Sikh and wore a white turban — at the square window.
Kashi returned back to the projector, his long slender fingers jiggling the reels. Perhaps it was like a computer. He flipped the power switch off and on. That wasn’t even logical. You couldn’t reset software on a machine from the last century that was all hardware. Kashi defaulted to logic. He must define the problem precisely. Either the film was stuck, or the projector was stuck, or they both were stuck. Great. Except the film was a crisp new print, the projectors were immaculate vintage machines, oiled and in mint condition.
“I’m coming up there,” Tom announced when the delay had gone on long enough. “Miriam, might we bring you up now, instead of at the end? Class, Miriam Thorncraft has agreed to speak to us about her father and perhaps … even take a few questions? Yes?”
Graciously the auburn matron came up to the stage as Tom hastened away.
“Okay …well.” She adjusted the mike, putting it back into its holder on the lectern. She was not going to pace about the stage as Tom had. Her showboating days were over, had never been her style at all, merely her daughterly duty. The round face looked over the class for a moment with a pleasant, thoughtful expression.
“Here’s something even Professor Day doesn’t know.” This caught Tom at the door and made him turn around. “My father had it written into contracts that his movies would premiere at the Palatine Theater. He considered this marvelous old house his lucky charm. And, believe me, he was not a superstitious man. He’d mock you to shame if you mistook him for one of these ‘sunbaked California vegetarians,’ as he put it, ‘with their horoscopes and flying saucers.’ But like all of us in the arts, he knew too well not to have anything but a fierce respect for wild luck.”
Kashi was in the middle of an experiment when Tom got up to the projection booth. He had placed the stopped reel in the second projector, and the fresh unspooled ‘Act II’ reel of Twisted in the first projector. He met the professor’s gaze, then flipped both switches. Neither reel would budge.
Kashi vowed to get to the bottom of this. He was a scientist, after all, well almost, being a master’s candidate in UCLA’s computer science program, as well as a supervisor in the AV department where he worked between classes. He now proposed a second experiment: They took a new reel from the shelf where all the films to be shown during the semester were kept, this one from Thorncraft’s first American film, the Selznick-produced The Late Mrs. De Winter, and put it on the suspect projector. The opening credits took off like a shot, symphonic music blaring forth.
“Shut it down,” Tom cried and ran to the small window. “Sorry, Miriam.” The sudden, shattering start had made her flinch as she became for a few moments overlayed with the rolling credits.
She nodded, raising a forefinger to signal she understood.
“I want to try something,” Kashi announced. His honor as the head AV guy was now at stake. Tom watched him rewind the first reel of Twisted, the jammed one, and place it back on the first projector. Then tilting the projector up so the images would play on the ceiling and not be cast down upon Miriam, the film was run from the start, this time sound off.
Amazingly, the reel ran smoothly — right up to the shot of the blizzard whipping up the mountain road, the motel sign shuddering in the gale, its electricity on the fritz:
The camera lingers on the flickering letters, “The Fireside Log Cabins.” The letters are in the shape of neon logs. Overlooking the sign stands a tall, gaunt Victorian house on a hill. Cut to the fireplace of this dark house where the heroine contemplates a small photo in her hand, then drops it into the flames. All at once, every light in the house goes out. She mouths a name (unheard because Kashi muted the sound.) Anxiously, searchingly, the blonde walks into the darkness, passing through rectangles of moonlight streaming through the lace-curtained hall windows, coming to the bottom of a stairs, and here the film freezes as it had before, on the face of the attractive but not quite young woman, looking up into the darkness, above the stairs, with absolute dread.
Kashi admitted he was flummoxed. Tom lifted his glasses to his forehead and frowned over the stubborn, non-working reels as they were laid out on the desk for closer scrutiny. It was as if the whole world of Twisted had been jammed up by something unseen and unknown.
When Tom returned to the auditorium, someone was asking a rude question.
“Is it true your father fell in love with his blonde leading ladies?”
Miriam was unfazed. “The simple, candid answer is …” She looked amused. “Only one. I’ll leave you guessing.”
The class groaned.
“Okay … just between us then. The great blonde love of Edward Thorncraft’s life? My mother, of course.”
Someone out in the seats sighed “Oh, please” loudly under their breath.
Miriam pointed to the opera box at her right, closest to the stage. “My father used to sit up there during previews.” Every head turned “ Oh!” said Miriam. She had just noticed the professor.
“Please go on,“ he said and took a seat on the aisle.
A bit baffled, she complied. “Paramount, Metro, Columbia, they were all rather terrified of father. He gave them hit after hit so they would think twice before sending him a memo. Still, the head office had ways to signal its nervousness about an ending. Now, my father was all about audience manipulation, as I’m sure you know, and he would request a sneak preview of his current film, insisting on this theater. Why the Palatine? Because of those marvelous opera boxes. They’re terrible for viewing a film, most movie theaters don’t have them, but they were right for what father wanted to do. You see my father was quite recognizable from TV, even his silhouette was famous. Edward Thorncraft Presents would always begin with his shadow in profile, so he couldn’t very well stroll the aisles, even in the dark, without being spotted. He instead sat up there in that opera box, slipping in after the film began, watching the audience in the reflected light, seeing — he loved this phrase — if his ‘punches were landing.’ The audience was asked to rate the film. Father collected all the audience cards and then would trumpet how well the ending went off to the studio heads.
“Still, sometimes adjustments were made. That’s how the notorious psychiatrist scene was tacked on to Twisted, the picture we may yet see today. Thomas? Should I go on?”
“Please do. So how did Twisted wind up with that famously hated final scene, Miriam?”
She shook her finger at him good-naturedly. “Your professor is being coy. He tells the story beautifully in his book on the film. Actually, I agreed with the studio. The audience did need an explanation. The revelations about Raymond and Ruby were too unorthodox for the day. Father, for one of the few times, took my young-girl’s opinion seriously, but he inserted the scene grudgingly, piling on his famous black humor. That’s why the psychiatrist is such a smarmy character, all that awful oily hair, the silly pipe, taking such smart-aleck enjoyment in reciting his sexual analysis of poor crazy Raymond and his murder sprees.
“Thomas, I believe you called the scene ‘Dad’s revenge on the Boy Next Door.’ My father was of that World War II ‘Dad Generation,’ who felt mocked and sidelined by the young, long-haired sons of the sixties, the generation Raymond belonged to. But father went too far, his black humor backfired. The psychiatrist scene had to be cut back because, ironically, the audience became bored. The material made them skittish. There was nervous tittering in the theater. Ah, there’s a question.”
A young man stood up, the better to be heard. “You said those opera boxes are hopeless for movies. Will you be restoring them too?”
“The Palatine has been declared a landmark” explained the auburn matron. ‘The building can not be changed in any substantial way, even if I were callous enough to want to get rid of those elegant opera boxes. They are here because the Palatine used to have stage shows. As you know, my committee is bringing this treasure back to life. The balcony, that ceiling, those poor broken maidens outside in such shameful disarray … we still have more fundraising events to do, but the Palatine is coming back! And I suspect the stage shows might return as well, as they were in the past, one-offs on special premiere nights.
“There used to be an orchestra pit right here, a full orchestra playing ‘Liebestraum’ and ‘The William Tell Overture"‘ during the silents, and then ukulele ditties during the stage shows — Oh, I have a wonderful story. Do we have time, Thomas?”
The class replied for him, yes, yes, and he nodded magnanimously.
“I knew the man who built this theater. In fact, I would say he was the one person who had the biggest impact on my life.”
Tom frowned in his seat. Not the great artist, her father?
“He taught me all about this theater and its history. Arthur Aubrey, remember that name. Look it up … what’s the term now? … google it. Everyone called him Aubrey. One name only, he was that sort of man. Anyway, when sound came in, the stage shows went out, except on big premiere nights. Come the forties, and the stage shows were rarely done at all. But when Selznick brought my father over from England, Aubrey, a fellow Englishman, pulled out all the stops. At the premiere of father’s first American film, The Late Mrs. De Winter, Aubrey introduced him from this stage to an audience packed with all the glittering people of Hollywood.
“After which, Agnes Morehead and Loretta Young recreated a scene from the film. They were not the original actors so they made a skit of it, as one did on these Palatine premiere nights. A skit with rather outrageous sapphic overtones. It’s the scene where the women enter the spooky boudoir of the first wife, sifting through her French underwear spun by blind nuns. I understand the bit about the nuns going blind brought the house down.”
Scattered titters greeted this antique fragment of a risqué joke.
Another student raised her hand. Tom noticed it was the harried middle-aged woman in the front row who had asked the rude question about blonde leading ladies.
“Ms. Thorncraft, I’ve read that you take care of your brother. That you raised him like a son, with your own sons. Is that true? Does he still live with you?”
Tom stood, about to put an end to this. He knew about the brother. As he approached the stage he was surprised to find Miriam again unfazed.
“Yes, he does live with me, I’m happy to say,” she replied serenely. “My, you’ve done your homework! My brother is …” Miriam began to beam. “Gosh, a very special person. He is also a very private person, so I won’t be taking any more questions about him. Thank you.”
“And thank you, Miriam. Everyone, Miriam Thorncraft.”
When the applause subsided, Tom adjusted the lectern mike, looked up gravely, and gave the class the bad news.
Preview: A moan in the dark…a moan from behind the screen. Then… There… in her own supernatural spotlight, the beautiful, haunted blonde. An echo many readers will recognize by a different name.
Moving along nicely.