Prater Violet (7 page)

The outside of the studio was as uninteresting as any modern office building: a big frontage of concrete and glass. Bergmann strode up the steps to the swinging door with such impetus that I couldn't follow him until it had stopped whirling around. He scowled, breathing ferociously, while the doorman took our names, and a clerk telephoned to announce our arrival. I caught his eye and grinned, but he wouldn't smile back. He was obviously planning his final speech for the defense. I had no doubt that it would be a masterpiece.

Chatsworth confronted us, as we entered, across a big desk. The first things I saw were the soles of his shoes and the smoke of his cigar. The shoes stood upright on their heels, elegantly brown and shiny, like a pair of ornaments, next to two bronze horses which were rubbing necks over an inkstand. Sitting apart from him, but still more or less behind the desk, were Ashmeade and a very fat man I didn't know. Our chairs were ready for us, facing them, isolated in the middle of the room. It really looked like a tribunal. I drew nearer to Bergmann, defensively.

“Hullo, you two!” Chatsworth greeted us, very genial. His head was tilted sideways, holding a telephone against his jaw, like a violin. “Be with you in a moment.” He spoke into the phone. “Sorry, Dave. Nothing doing. No. I've made up my mind.… Well, he may have told you that last week. I hadn't seen it then. It stinks.… My dear fellow, I can't help that. I didn't know they'd do such a rotten job. It's bloody awful.… Well, tell them anything you like.… I don't care if their feelings
are
hurt. They damn well ought to be hurt.… No. Good-bye.”

Ashmeade was smiling subtly. The fat man looked bored. Chatsworth took his feet off the desk. His big face came up into view.

“I've got some bad news for you,” he told us.

I glanced quickly across at Bergmann; but he was watching Chatsworth with the glare of a hypnotist.

“We've just changed our schedule. You'll have to start shooting in two weeks.”

“Impossible!” Bergmann discharged the word like a gun.

“Of course it's impossible,” said Chatsworth, grinning. “We're impossible people around here.… I don't think you know Mr. Harris? He sat up all last night doing designs for your sets. I hope you'll dislike them as much as I do.… Oh, another thing: we can't get Rosemary Lee. She's sailing for New York tomorrow. So I talked to Anita Hayden, and she's interested. She's a bitch, but she can sing. In a minute, I want you to come and listen to Pfeffer's arrangement of the score. It's as noisy as hell. I don't mind it, though.… I've put Watts on to the lighting. He's our best man. He knows how to catch the mood.”

Bergmann grunted dubiously. I smiled. I liked Chatsworth that morning.

“What about the script?” I asked.

“Don't you worry about that, my lad. Never let a script stand in our way, do we, Sandy? Matter of fact, I can lick that ending of yours. Thought about it this morning, while I was shaving. I have a great idea.”

Chatsworth paused to relight his cigar.

“I want you to stay with us,” he told me, “right through the picture. Just keep your ears and eyes open. Watch the details. Listen for the intonations. You can help a lot. Bergmann isn't used to the language. Besides, there may be rewrites.… From now on, I'm giving you two an office here in the building, so I'll have my eye on you. If you want anything, just call me. You'll get all the co-operation you need.… Well, I think that takes care of everything. Come along, Doctor. Sandy, will you show Isherwood his new dungeon?”

*   *   *

THUS, as the result of ten minutes' conversation, the whole rhythm of our lives was abruptly changed. For Bergmann, of course, this was nothing new. But I felt dazed. It was as though two hermits had been transported from their cave in the mountains into the middle of a modern railway station. There was no privacy any more. The process of wasting time, which hitherto had been orientally calm and philosophical, now became guilty and apprehensive.

Our “dungeon” was a tiny room on the third floor, forlornly bare, with nothing in it but a desk, three chairs and a telephone. The telephone had a very loud bell. When it rang, we both jumped. The window commanded a view of sooty roofs and the gray winter sky. Outside, along the passage, people went back and forth, making what seemed a deliberately unnecessary amount of noise. Often, their bodies bumped against the door; or it opened, and a head was thrust in. “Where's Joe?” a stranger would ask, somewhat reproachfully. Or else he would say, “Oh, sorry…” and vanish without explanation. These interruptions made Bergmann desperate. “It is the third degree,” he would groan. “They torture us, and we have nothing to confess.”

We were seldom together for long. The telephone, or a messenger, would summon Bergmann away to confer with Chatsworth, or the casting director, or Mr. Harris, and I would be left with an unfinished scene and his pessimistic advice “to try and think of something.” Usually, I didn't even try. I stared out of the window, or gossiped with Dorothy. We had a tacit understanding that, if anybody looked in, we would immediately pretend to be working. Sometimes Dorothy herself left me. She had plenty of friends in the studio, and would slip away for a chat when the coast seemed clear.

Nevertheless, under the pressure of this crisis, we advanced. Bergmann was reckless, now. He was ready to pass even the weakest of my suggestions with little more than a sigh. Also, I myself was getting bolder. My conscience no longer bothered me. The dyer's hand was subdued. There were days when I could write page after page with magical facility. It was really quite easy. Toni joked. The Baron made a pun. Toni's father clowned. Some inner inhibition had been removed. This was simply a job. I was doing it as well as I could.

In the meanwhile, whenever I got a chance, I went exploring. Imperial Bulldog had what was probably the oldest studio site in London. It dated back to early silent days, when directors yelled through megaphones to make themselves heard above the carpenters' hammering; and great flocks of dazed, deafened, limping, hungry extras were driven hither and thither by aggressive young assistant-directors, who barked at them like sheep dogs. At the time of the panic, when Sound first came to England and nobody's job was safe, Bulldog had carried through a hasty and rather hysterical reconstruction program. The whole place was torn down and rebuilt at top speed, most of it as cheaply as possible. No one knew what was coming next: Taste, perhaps, or Smell, or Stereoscopy, or some device that climbed right down out of the screen and ran around in the audience. Nothing seemed impossible. And, in the interim, it was unwise to spend much money on equipment which might be obsolete within a year.

The result of the rebuilding was a maze of crooked stairways, claustrophobic passages, abrupt dangerous ramps and Alice-in-Wonderland doors. Most of the smaller rooms were overcrowded, underventilated, separated only by plywood partitions and lit by naked bulbs hanging from wires. Everything was provisional, and liable to electrocute you, fall on your head, or come apart in your hand. “Our motto,” said Lawrence Dwight, “is: ‘If it breaks, it's Bulldog.'”

Lawrence was the head cutter on our picture: a short, muscular, angry-looking young man of about my own age, whose face wore a frown of permanent disgust. We had made friends, chiefly because he had read a story of mine in a magazine, and growled crossly that he liked it. He limped so slightly that I might never have noticed; but, after a few minutes' conversation, he told me abruptly that he had an artificial leg. This he referred to as “my stump.” The amputation had followed a motor accident, in which his wife had been killed a month after their marriage.

“We'd just had time to find out that we couldn't stand each other,” he told me, angrily watching my face to see if I would be shocked. “I was driving. I suppose I really wanted to murder her.”

“I don't know what the hell you imagine you're doing here,” he said, a little later. “Selling your soul, I suppose? All you writers have such a bloody romantic attitude. You think you're too good for the movies. Don't you believe it. The movies are too good for you. We don't need any romantic nineteenth-century whores. We need technicians. Thank God, I'm a cutter. I know my job. As a matter of fact, I'm damned good at it. I don't treat film as if it were a bit of my intestine. It's all Chatsworth's fault. He's a romantic, too. He will hire people like you. Thinks he's Lorenzo the Magnificent … I bet you despise mathematics? Well, let me tell you something. The movies aren't drama, they aren't literature—they're pure mathematics. Of course, you'll never understand that, as long as you live.”

Lawrence took great pleasure in pointing out to me the many inefficiencies of the studio. For instance, there was no proper storage room for scenery. Sets had to be broken up as soon as they had been used; the waste of materials was appalling. And then, Bulldog carried so many passengers. “We could do a much better job with two-thirds of our present staff. All these assistant directors, fussing about and falling over each other … They even have what they call dialogue directors. Can you imagine? Some poor stooge who sits around on his fat behind and says ‘Yes' whenever anybody looks at him.”

I laughed. “That's what I'm going to do.”

But Lawrence wasn't in the least embarrassed. “I might have known it,” he said disgustedly. “You're just the right type. So bloody tactful.”

His deepest scorn was reserved for the Reading Department, officially known as Annex G. The back lot of Imperial Bulldog sloped down to the river. Annex G had originally been a warehouse. It reminded me of a lawyer's office in a Dickens novel. There were cobwebbed shelves, rows and rows of them, right up to the roof; and not a crack anywhere wide enough to insert your little finger. The lower rows were mostly scripts; scripts in duplicate and triplicate, treatments, rough drafts, every scrap of paper on which any Bulldog writer had ever scribbled. Lawrence told me that the rats had gnawed long tunnels through them, from end to end. “They ought to be dumped in the Thames,” Lawrence added, “but the River Police would prosecute us for poisoning the water.”

And then there were books. These were the novels and plays which the studio had bought to make into pictures. At any rate, that was what they were supposed to be. Had Bulldog ever considered filming
Bradshaw's Railway Timetable for 1911?
Well, perhaps that had come originally from the Research Department. “But will you explain to me,” said Lawrence, “why we have twenty-seven copies of
Half Hours with a Microscope,
one of them stolen from the Woking Public Library?”

Rather to my surprise, Lawrence approved of Bergmann and admired him. He had seen several of the pictures Bergmann had directed in Germany; and this, of course, delighted Bergmann, although he would never admit it. Instead, he praised Lawrence's character, calling him
“ein anstaendiger Junge.”
Whenever they met, Bergmann addressed him as “Master.” After a while, Lawrence started to reciprocate. Whereupon Bergmann, never to be outdone, began to call Lawrence “Grand Master.” Lawrence took to calling me “Herr Talk-Director.” I called him “Herr Cut-Master.”

I was careful, however, not to inform Bergmann of Lawrence's political opinions. “All of this fascist-communist nonsense,” said Lawrence, “is so bloody old-fashioned. People rave about the workers. It makes me sick. The workers are just sheep. Always have been. Always will be. They choose to be that way, and why shouldn't they? It's their life. And they dodge a lot of headaches.… Take the men at this place. What do they know or care about anything, except getting their pay checks? If any problem arises outside their immediate job, they expect someone else to decide it for them. Quite right, too, from their point of view. A country has to be run by a minority of some sort. The only thing is, we've got to get rid of these damned sentimental politicians. All politicians are amateurs. It's as if we'd handed over the studio to the Publicity Department. The only people who really matter are the technicians. They know what they want.”

“And what do they want?”

“They want efficiency.”

“What's that?”

“Efficiency is doing a job for the sake of doing a job.”

“But why should you do a job, anyway? What's the incentive?”

“The incentive is to fight anarchy. That's all Man lives for. Reclaiming life from its natural muddle. Making patterns.”

“Patterns for what?”

“For the sake of patterns. To create meaning. What else is there?”

“And what about the things that won't fit into your patterns?”

“Discard them.”

“You mean, kill Jews?”

“Don't try to shock me with your bloody sentimental false analogies. You know perfectly well what I mean. When people refuse to fit into patterns, they discard themselves. That's not my fault. Hitler doesn't make patterns. He's just an opportunist. When you make patterns, you don't persecute. Patterns aren't people.”

“Who's being old-fashioned now? That sounds like Art for Art's sake.”

“I don't care what it sounds like.… Technicians are the only real artists, anyway.”

“It's all very well for you to make patterns with your cutting. But what's the use, when you have to work on pictures like
Prater Violet?
”

“That's Chatsworth's worry, and Bergmann's, and yours. If you so-called artists would behave like technicians and get together, and stop playing at being democrats, you'd make the public take the kind of picture you wanted. This business about the box office is just a sentimental democratic fiction. If you stuck together and refused to make anything but, say, abstract films, the public would have to go and see them, and like them.… Still, it's no use talking. You'll never have the guts. You'd much rather whine about prostitution, and keep on making
Prater Violets.
And that's why the public despises you, in its heart. It knows damn well it's got you by the short hairs.… Only, one thing: don't come to me with your artistic sorrows, because I'm not interested.”