Kansas City Noir (22 page)

He came upon the prints in all sorts of ways. He’d used the
Big Reel
newsletter and then the Internet had made it even easier. But mostly Marty knew people. People who worked at film depots, shipping companies, other theater owners, especially back in the day before things got computerized and corporations got involved. Marty knew people who could get him the movies he wanted. And he squirreled away the prints here, behind the screen. Once in a while he’d tell Rance to thread one up (Marty was all thumbs when it came to the projectors), but more often than not, he just liked having them.

“Closing night after the last show, I want you to put all the prints into your truck and bring ‘em over to my place,” he told Rance. He’d just dropped the bomb on Rance that he was selling the place and he said it almost like an afterthought. He’d given no warning. Hadn’t even hinted he was looking for a buyer. After all, Rance was just the projectionist. Marty probably figured he’d find another job easily enough. Or maybe just do something else. Everything was going digital anyway. Projectionists, he’d joked, were a dying breed. It may have been funny to Marty, but not to Rance. It was the truth. Rance was dying. He’d kept that from Marty. Same way Marty’d kept the news of the sale from Rance. It wouldn’t do any good to tell Marty, anyway. Marty didn’t give a shit. He offered no health insurance to employees and what he paid Rance wasn’t enough to afford the premiums. Not that Rance cared about insurance. At least not initially. He’d always been healthy as a horse. He didn’t smoke, he ate right, and he walked to work no matter what the weather. He’d thought he was in pretty good shape until he started feeling lousy and finally bit the bullet to get his first physical in fifteen years, so the spot on his lung came as a helluva shock. Even worse was how little could be done. And then the news he was soon to be out of a job—devastating. So now Marty didn’t know Rance was sick. Marty didn’t know Rance had nothing to lose. Marty didn’t know how dangerous Rance was about to become. These prints were not going to Rance’s truck.

He reached down and grabbed the closest print, two steel canisters containing
Bucktown
, a blaxploitation number starring Fred “The Hammer” Williamson. This was the first print Marty had got hold of. The one that started the collection. Nobody’d figure Marty for this kind of low-rent stuff. You could barely see the Kansas City locations in it because it took place mostly at night and was too goddamned dark to see anything besides an occasional street corner. But then Rance heard the story—Marty got a blowjob from a nightclub-scene extra called Roxie—and realized the guy’s interest in the print was sentimental. It was his memento of the wild 1970s. Like the face that launched a thousand ships, Roxie’s blowjob launched Marty’s collection.

Rance knew the collection was under way when Marty proudly told him he’d been given a print of
Kansas City Bomber
the night after he’d salvaged a print of
The Delinquents
from a dumpster behind the old Calvin Film Studio.

Rance remembered seeing
Kansas City Bomber
for a buck and a quarter at the Capri’s twilight show. Even though people said Raquel Welch had shot some scenes in Kansas City, Rance sure couldn’t spot them. Marty said they must have been cut out and kept the print despite his shot-in-town criteria. It wasn’t much of a picture but it did have the MGM lion at the beginning and Rance loved the way it reverberated in the cavernous space of the Rialto. Rance loved the sound of that roar.

The Delinquents,
on the other hand
,
had some nice car cruising scenes, especially in the credits, and you could see what downtown looked like back when the streets were lit up with countless bars and strip clubs.

The Cool and the Crazy
had even better location scenes, including a sweet shot of the Indian statue overlooking the city, and Marty had snatched up a print of that not long after getting
The Delinquents
. Too bad he’ll never get to see it again, thought Rance as he reached the lobby and turned to the door marked with white-stenciled letters:
Employees Only
. He pushed through the door and went inside.

Rance carried the print into the projection booth. The electrical box was buzzing its constant tone that always grated on Marty but made Rance feel at home. For all intents and purposes, this
was
Rance’s home. He’d worked here, ate here, drank, fucked (only once), and occasionally slept here for over two decades. The place was lovingly hung with posters. And there were a few real collector’s items—a framed letter from Stanley Kubrick with instructions on the projection of
Barry Lyndon
—that had been passed down to him from Uncle Frank. Beyond the 1980s platter system, the splicing bench sat against the back wall, immaculate and organized for maximum efficiency. There were white editor’s gloves but Rance never used them. He liked to feel the edges of the film against his fingertips. He liked holding the film up to the light to see the images. He liked the smell of the stuff. A corny, hand-painted plaque hung over the table saying,
Old Projectionists never die, they just FADE OUT
. It was hard to believe this was his last night in here.

This was where it all happened. Up here in the booth. No projectionist, no movie. He was the last link in the chain from concept to script to production to post. It all climaxed up here with him. You can keep your movie stars. The projectionists were the real heroes of the pictures. The secret heroes who fixed whether a movie lived or died, whether it was hated or loved. He’d heard all the stories. How the guy showing
Bonnie and Clyde
had turned down the volume during the gunshots so it was all nice and even … and nearly been fired for it. Or how a civic-minded projectionist working a drive-in show in Kansas had said, “No smut here,” and cut out the vile scene in
Midnight Express
when the girl shoved her titties up against the glass. Rance didn’t blame him. If he’d directed that movie he’d have skipped all that shit in the middle and got right to the escape and revenge and spent a little more time torturing those fucking Turkish prison guards.

Even better was what had happened when
Prime Cut
premiered over in Lawrence during the heyday of the hippies and student radicals. Marty had a print of
Prime Cut
because a lot of it was shot around the stockyards in the West Bottoms, at the Muehlebach Hotel and along the Missouri River. But the big chase scene was shot outside Lawrence at the Douglas County Fair. When the sequence started up and Lee Marvin was rescuing Sissy Spacek, there was the local sheriff, ol’ Rex Johnson himself, up on the screen. The hippies in the audience roared with laughter. They booed and jeered like
he
was the villain, not Gene Hackman. Somebody even threw popcorn. It was a disaster. The hippies had ruined the show. Before the next showing took place, the projectionist snipped the sheriff out of the print and the movie went just fine. He showed those fucking hippies who was running things. He saved the movie. Up in the booth, the projectionist was king. Here at the Rialto, Rance was king. And like a king, the title of projectionist had been passed down to him when he was still a boy.

His Uncle Frank had been a union projectionist since the ‘50s. Rance was six when Uncle Frank stepped in to help his mom after the old man walked out. Frank was better than a father because he wasn’t around all the time, only when you needed him. He let Rance into the booth all the time, but the really big thing happened when he was eight and he went with Frank to the Royal to see a preview screening being projected by Frank’s buddy Walt. Rance and Frank slipped into the booth just before the show started and Rance sat on a stool, boosted up by a phone book, and watched the movie through a small glass window.

The movie was
The Wild Bunch.
It was the bloodiest, dirtiest, most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. The theater was packed with people expecting to see a Hollywood western with movie stars like William Holden and Ernest Borgnine. There was a national teacher’s convention going on that week and dozens of ladies, in town for the weekend, had been given complimentary tickets. There were hippies too. Uncle Frank had pointed them out to Rance as they moved through the crowded lobby. Hippies taking a break from smoking dope or burning American flags. Hippies hoping to get out of the heat, putting their grimy feet up on the seats in front of them and making fun of a cowboy movie.

Boy, did they get a surprise. Once the bunch started shooting the shit out of the town of Starbuck, people started leaving the theater. With every gunshot, every glorious eruption of crimson, every slow-motion tumble, another one would leave. One of the teachers let out a scream when a woman was shot in the back. Another tripped and fell in the aisle, trying to get out before Crazy Lee’s tongue went all the way inside that old lady’s ear. And outside in the alley, one of the hippies had bent over and barfed all over the pavement. An usher had come into the booth with the news, and as much as Rance wanted to see that hippie hurling his guts out, he would have had to stop watching the picture and he couldn’t do that. For two and half hours he sat there, mesmerized, in the projection booth, watching the movie from way back and high up, looking down on the crowd, some screaming, some covering their eyes, others enraptured, and at the end of it he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life in the booth. He’d see the world from up here. He’d travel through space and time from up here. He’d watch every human emotion, every laugh, sob, howl, and scream from up here. He’d see it all.

Rance’s phone rang, startling him back to himself. It was Marty. “When you getting over here?”

“In a while. I’m still cleaning the popcorn machine.”

“I told Claire to do that.”

“I sent her home. Told her I’d do it. You really want to pay her for another hour?”

“Goddamnit, Rance, what do I care if she costs me another eight bucks? I got the buyer coming over for the prints!”

“I’ll be over soon as I can. Maybe an hour.”

“An hour? Jesus.”

“The sooner I get off the phone, sooner I’ll be there.” Rance knew that’d piss him off.

“Hurry up.” Marty hung up.

Rance smirked. Shook his head.
The buyer
. Right. Some fucking kid, a nephew of one of Marty’s poker buddies, goes off to Hollywood, sells some movie scripts, and is now a film collector. He’s rolling in dough and Marty’s about to make a killing off this rich kid with money to burn on thirty-five-millimeter prints. The world goes digital and this kid is buying prints. Marty probably tried to sell him the projector to go with them. “If you buy these movies, I’ll sell you the projector for cheap.” Apparently the kid only wanted the prints.

Rance was hauling up the last of the prints, two cans containing
In Cold Blood,
when the phone rang again. Marty liked that
In Cold Blood
had lots of clean, black-and-white shots of Kansas City. Rance couldn’t care less about that. The movie was ponderous and went way too easy on those two killers. And Robert Blake reminded him of his old man. What
was
interesting about
In Cold Blood
was that one of the Finney County sheriff’s detectives who’d worked the real-life murder case became a projectionist once he’d retired. Rance met him when he was visiting relatives in Kansas. He’d just walked into the projection booth at the airport drive-in in Hutchinson, and as soon as he started talking projectors with the old guy, all sorts of interesting things came up. They wrote letters back and forth and not long before he passed away he sent a box via special delivery to Rance.

The phone rang again. Rance put down the cans and answered it. Before he could speak, the dull voice on the other end said, “I’m almost there.”

“Good, because he’s waiting at his house,” Rance shot back. “Come up the fire escape in back. I propped the door open.”

Rance carried the prints into the booth and when he put them down again he was breathing heavily. It used to be so much easier carrying these things. But then everything used to be easier. He felt tired and worn out. Like this place. He didn’t want to see it turned into something else, like what had almost happened to the Brookside and
had
happened to the Fine Arts, now a gutted shit box of a shell used for wedding receptions. He wondered if Marty was doing this just to spite him. Marty was like that. Well, not this time. Rance was lacing up the final reel.
He
was ending this show, not Marty. He was ending Marty too.

He went to the splicing table and opened a drawer under the watchful eyes of Brigitte Bardot, who looked down from the
Contempt
poster on the wall. It was like they were both staring at the drawer. And the snub nose .38 within. This pistol wasn’t just called a detective’s special, it had actually been one. Etched under the chamber were the words
Finney County S.D.
A gift from the old detective at the drive-in sent special delivery from one “brother of the booth” to another. Rance picked up the gun and it somehow felt heavier than usual, just like the film cans. He heard the squeaking of door hinges and peered out the projection window to see the lanky young man enter through the fire exit. Rance called out, “I’m up here, Ace.”

Ace didn’t stick around any longer than he had to. The less said between them the better. The last thing Rance gave him was a roll of movie posters, which Ace hadn’t expected but welcomed. Rance closed the fire exit after him and imagined what Marty’s face would look like when he realized Rance wasn’t coming over. Rance wished he could see it for himself but knew that was not to be. He walked back up the aisle a final time and into the lobby.

The platters were spinning in the booth, but the film wasn’t going through the projector. Tonight’s feature was unspooling onto the floor, celluloid filling the booth like rising floodwaters. Rance backed into the booth, pouring a trail of gasoline across the red-and-gold carpet, emptying the red plastic container. His feet clanged against one of the now empty film cans of Marty’s precious collection. The building wouldn’t survive the flames, but the cans would remain and Marty would know exactly what they used to contain. They were strewn all over the booth, surrounded by endless strands of shimmering film. Rance unscrewed the lid to another gasoline can and moved through the waist-deep swamp of film. He poured the juice over the splicing bench, doused the projectors, anointed the tendrils of film all around him, and spattered the now bare walls with gas. He wouldn’t have dreamed of destroying the posters so he’d passed them on to Ace, who had once been a projectionist himself. Passed on to another “brother of the booth.”