Kino (9 page)

Lang lifted the eyebrow that didn't hold the monocle and grinned.

Siegfried's fight with the
Lindwurm
was a marvel. The contraption was heavy as a tank and took ten men to move. For endless, claustrophobic days, I had to kick my stump, which was attached to the lever that manipulated the dragon's crocodile tail. We moved the creature's eyes, mouth, legs, and tail, we made it breathe fire and smoke, we pumped the blood that gushed from the wound where Paul Richter, the foppish son-of-a-bitch who played Siegfried, pierced the rubber skin with his sword. We damn near suffocated on the fumes. It was the most grueling work I have done in my life. The only way to bear this wretched work was to stay perpetually high, and every morning, I doled out a generous allotment of cocaine for every man inside the monster.

Word got out. One person introduced me to three others, and soon I was providing
Zement
to the entire production. The cinematographer, the camera and lighting crews, and the costume designers bought huge quantities for their departments, and Steffen started coming to the set to make deliveries. I became the best friend of crew and cast. Thea von Harbou sniffed lines and dictated with such speed that white foam formed in the corners of her mouth. She was full of ideas, she was efficient. Thea was the one with talent.

As the shooting of the dragon scene dragged on, a peculiar bond formed between the ten of us who made it come alive from within. We were the bones of the beast, it was our blood that circulated through its veins, our breath that fanned the flames from its nostrils. We made the creature move and fight. Through the alchemy of Kino, we became the dragon. The dragon taught me the power of the crew, coming together to make a film like the craftsmen who built cathedrals in the middle ages. Everyone's contribution, every single detail, was essential. Inside the dragon, Herr Dokter, we all understood that.

But Fritz Lang didn't know how to marshal the talent at his disposal. In my version of
Die Nibelungen
, the dragon would have killed that
Arschloch
Siegfried and eaten his entrails, but Lang was too stupid and too proud of his silly script to see. He didn't know how to let an idea flourish. Under his rigid dictatorship everything turned into a grotesque, lifeless pageant. Can you understand why the dragon's preordained fate did not sit well with us? It seemed unfair to stage this tremendous battle and not give the creature a chance. Paul Richter, prancing about in his sexy loincloth–it was a lie the monster we had created could not abide. There wasn't a word spoken, but somehow, we reached a decision nonetheless.

Lang's counting method should have left no room for mistakes–one, two, the dragon's eyes roll while Siegfried jumps left, three, a blast of fire as he strikes, four, five, a whip of the tail, and six, he impales the Lindwurm on his sword. It was during what seemed like the hundredth take of Siegfried jumping from rock to rock and striking at our vulcanized rubber skin that I flung the tail into Paul Richter's leg, a move he wasn't expecting till four or five count higher, and delivered a mighty whack that sent him flying backwards into the pond.

All ten of us inside the dragon cheered!

Curses from Lang, laughter from the crew.

A
Dokter
, so old he must have served under Bismarck, came along swiftly. Richter had suffered a contusion and would be unable to work for a week. The shoot was now delayed, the production bleeding money, and Lang was raging with anger. Gruber, who had saved me the last time Lang wanted my head, fingered me as the one responsible. I swear I saw him reach for the gun he kept inside his vest. But Thea was back at Lang's side, reminding him that I provided the
Zement
. In the throes of hyperinflation, I was the one who kept the production going, and he knew it. Even Paul Richter, that oaf, couldn't hold a grudge when we sent Ute the Mole Girl to visit him in his hospital room. Siegfried recovered quickly.

I had learned something crucial: the dragon beat Siegfried, but that's not what
Die Nibelungen
showed. Lang's movies didn't allow room for the incidental; he imposed his will on every element on the set. He was a liar and a fraud. But I had felt the power of the dragon, had tasted the unfettered potential of cinema to create something true and beautiful and dangerous, and I had to have more.

Die Nibelungen
kept shooting into the New Year. To celebrate the end of production–in Hollywood, they call it a wrap party–Ufa turned Grosse Halle into a beer garden, serving up
Bretzel
and Schultheiss to the legions of extras who had all dutifully died for Lang's horrid epic. Later that night, Thea and Fritz hosted a more exclusive affair at their notorious Hohenzollernstrasse apartment. Thea asked me to make sure that cast, studio bigwigs, and investors were properly entertained. Together with Steffen, I supplied bowls of
Zement
, a samovar of opium tea, a hookah packed with Turkish kif, and a dozen Friedrichstadt dancers.

Thea and Fritz had turned their apartment into an exotic museum, stuffed with paintings and art objects, Chinese carpets, Japanese temple flags, sacred vases, Buddhas, shrunken heads, and cabinets filled with trinkets so Lang could brag about his travels. He was a bore, but no matter: we had made it into the inner sanctum, a place I'd only seen in the photo spreads of glossy movie magazines. In the purple library, filled with grimacing South Sea sculptures, I spotted Erich Pommer, the most successful producer in Europe, responsible for
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
and all of Lang's successes. Here was the man I needed to impress! Next to a cage with a large blue-and-red parrot, Thea von Harbou, who listened to an animated Rudolf Klein-Rogge, waved me over. Her black Schnauzer shook his tail at me.

“See?” Thea said. “I knew you'd be useful.”

Klein-Rogge excused himself to follow Ute the Mole Girl down a corridor.

“Making a movie is like constructing a creature,” I told Thea. “The cast is the face, the director the brain, the cinematographer the eyes and the crew the hands. You,
meine sehr geehrte Frau
, provide the heart.”

Thea smiled. “It appears that your domain is the nose.”

I proffered the tin of cocaine. Two
Tauentziengirls
in flapper dresses had talked Lang into taking down wooden African masks from their showcases on the library wall, Carl Meyer had procured some bongo drums, and together, they began an obscene tribal dance. A small crowd gathered to watch them. Lang, Pommer, and Richter sucked on cigars and clapped along to the jungle beat. Margarete Schön, who had played Kriemhild, joined the dancers.

I had another sniff and took the risk. “Can I ask you something, Frau von Harbou? Something that has been bothering me about
Die Nibelungen
. If you're going to make a movie in two parts, shouldn't one of them have a happy ending?”

“Don't be a
Dummkopf
,” Thea said. “
Die Nibelungen
is a story about inexorable tragedy. The first sin entails the last atonement. There can be no happy ending.”

“Sounds gloomy!” Steffen, drawn by the syncopated bongo beat, had come dancing into the room. “You and your tragedy. I can't believe that's what people want. Look around! They want beautiful women and a good time! Why are you trying to depress them with tragedy?”

“My, my.” Thea smiled, gesturing for another bump. “Your friend can dance and insult the highest paid movie writer in Europe at the same time. I suppose you have better ideas, my red-faced dervish?”

“I don't,” Steffen said. He pointed his thumb in my direction. “But he does. That's why they call him Kino.”

“They do?”

I gave Steffen a look–this wasn't how I would have approached it. “Well yes,” I admitted. “They do. If anyone gave me the chance, I could do great things. I am full of ideas.”

“He has ideas!” A familiar voice barked over the drums, loud enough to make them hesitate and stumble. Lang had noticed me talking to his wife and turned away from the jungle dance. The drumming stopped. Every head turned. “Extras, drug dealers, and pimps have ideas now?” Lang said. He projected as if he were making a toast. “What is this business coming to?”

Erich Pommer let out a belly laugh. He was bleary-eyed and in a jolly mood. “Now, now Fritz! Isn't this the young man who kept your production on schedule? Let him talk. You know I'm always looking for talent in unlikely places. Lubitsch is gone; we need to think quick if we're going to stay ahead of the Americans! This
Schelm
here calls himself Kino and says he has ideas? I want to hear them!” He folded his hands over his belly. “Talk.”

Suddenly I was the center of attention, my mind raging from the cocaine. Pommer was calling my bluff. Here was a room full of Ufa-
Bonzen
, producers, actors, directors, Thea, Lang, Richter, Klein-Rogge, even Steffen, waiting for me to deliver on the name I'd given myself. I had nothing, but I knew that there was nothing worse than saying nothing, that I had to say anything at all, and say it with confidence. Everything else would follow if I just took that first step into the void. I looked around the room, my eyes came to rest on a picturesque oil painting of a windmill, and–

“The Tulip Thief,” I said.

As simple as that.

“The what?”

It was a title and a promise:
Tulpendiebe
. That word was all I had, but it contained everything that followed. It arrived complete; I just had to unpack it. And that's what I did, right there, start to finish, on the spot, in front of the most powerful people in the Weimar film industry: fields and fields of flowers, the sailor, the Duke, Lilly, the stolen tulip bulb, the burning windmill, the entire story right up to the final shot.

When I was done, there was a moment of uncertain silence before Thea clapped her hands. “Bravo,” she said, and her approval gave the rest of the guests permission to show theirs. Lang turned his face into a blank mask, Steffen winked at me, and Pommer nodded, as if to say that
Tulpendiebe
was a movie he wouldn't mind watching–perhaps even producing.

“Very American,” he said, slurring the second word. From his mouth, it was a compliment. “Come see me in my office on Monday.” Then he dropped his glass of beer and fell backwards into a wooden sculpture with a gigantic erection that Lang claimed he'd traded for a smoked ham with a tribe of cannibals in Papua New Guinea.

There you have it, Herr Dokter: proof. If you have enough faith in the imagination, nothing is impossible. I invented myself as director, and that's what I became. From the moment I stepped into that void and said the word
Tulpendiebe
, everything aligned just right. My wildest dreams were becoming reality, and there were no limits.

Over the course of one golden year, I made my movie, cast a beautiful actress, fell in love, and made her my wife. How could I have known that Penelope was my salvation and my undoing at once, the spark that ignited
Tulpendiebe
and a miserable mistake that would ruin my career?

Oh my Lilly, my Penny! I'd give anything to see her again the way she looked in twenty-seven, when I first laid eyes on her, four beer steins balanced in each arm. Impossible to conceive now, isn't it, Herr Dokter, that the appalling, hysterical
Dreckfotze
who delivered me here was once the Duke's luminous daughter, the most exquisite face on German screens? I wanted to make her immortal, to burn the image of her face overlooking a sea of flowers straight into history, but I can't make Penny into Lilly again anymore than I can grow another leg.