Remake (11 page)

“Access
me,” she said, and left, finally.

I waited five minutes for her to come back and tell me to be sure and piss, and then another five for the snakes and rabbits to show up, or worse, Fred and Eleanor, dressed in white and dancing side by side. And thinking about what Heada’d said. If it wasn’t a paste-up, what was it? And it couldn’t be a paste-up. Heada hadn’t heard Alis talking about wanting to dance in the movies. She hadn’t seen her, that night down on Hollywood Boulevard, when I offered her a chance at one. She could have been digitized that night, been Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, anybody she wanted. Even Eleanor Powell. Why would she have suddenly changed her mind and decided she wanted to be a dancer nobody’d ever heard of? An actress who’d only appeared in a handful of movies. One of which starred Fred Astaire.

“We’re
this
close to having time travel,” the exec had said, his thumb and finger almost touching.

And what if Alis, who was willing to do anything to dance in the movies, who was willing to practice in a cramped classroom with a tiny monitor and work nights in a tourate trap, had talked one of the time-travel hackates into letting her be a guinea pig? What if Alis had talked him into sending her back to 1954, dressed in a green weskit and short gloves, and then, instead of coming back like she was supposed to, had changed her name to Virginia Gibson and gone over to MGM to audition for a part in
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers?
And then gone on to be in six other movies. One of which was
Funny Face
. With Fred Astaire.

I sat up, slowly, so I wouldn’t turn my headache into anything worse, and went over to the terminal and called up
Funny Face
.

Heada had said Fred Astaire was still in litigation, and he was. I put a watch-and-warn on both the movie and Fred in case the case got settled. If Heada was right—and when wasn’t she?—Warner would turn around and file immediately, but if there was a glitch or Warner’s lawyers were busy with Russ Tamblyn, there might be a window. I set the watch-and-warn to beep me and called up the list of Virginia Gibson’s musicals again.

Starlift
was a World War II b-and-w, which wouldn’t give me as clear an image as color, and
She’s Back on Broadway
was in litigation, too, for someone I’d never heard of. That left
Athena, Fainting the Clouds with Sunshine
, and
Tea for Two
, none of which I could remember ever seeing.

When I called up
Athena
, I could see why. It was a cross between
One Touch of Venus
and
You Can’t Take it with You
, with lots of floating chiffon and health-food eccentrics and almost no dancing. Virginia Gibson, in green chiffon, was supposed to be Niobe, the goddess of jazz and tap or something. Whatever she was, it wasn’t Alis. It looked like her, especially with her hair pulled back in a Greek ponytail. “And with a fifth of bourbon in you,” Heada would have said. And a double dose of ridigaine. Even then, it didn’t
look as much like her as the dancer in the barnraising scene. I called up
Seven Brides
, and the screen stayed silver for a long moment and then started scrolling legalese. “This movie currently in litigation and unavailable for viewing.”

Well, that settled that. By the time the courts had decided to let Russ Tamblyn be sliced and diced, I’d be chooch free and able to see it was just somebody who looked like her, or not even that. A trick of lights and makeup.

And there was no point in slogging through any more musicals to drive the point home. Any resemblance was purely alcoholic, and I should do what Doc Heada said, lie down and wait for it to pass. And then go back to slicing and dicing myself. I should call up
Notorious
and get it over with.

“Tea for Two,”
I said.

Tea
was a Doris Day pic, and I wondered if she was on Alis’s bad-dancer list. She deserved to be. She smirked her way toothily through a tap routine with Gene Nelson, set in a rehearsal hall Alis would have killed for, all floor space and mirrors and no stacks of desks. There was a terrible Latin version of “Crazy Rhythm,” Gordon MacRae singing “I Only Have Eyes for You,” and then Virginia Gibson’s big number.

And there was no question of her being Alis. With her hair down, she didn’t even look that much like her. Or else the ridigaine was kicking in.

The routine was Hollywood’s idea of ballet, more chiffon and a lot of twirling around, not the kind of routine Alis would have bothered with.
If
she’d had ballet back in Mea-dowville, and not just jazz and tap, but she hadn’t, and Virginia obviously had, so Alis wasn’t Virginia, and I was sober, and it was back to the bottles.

“Forward 64,” I said, and watched Doris smirk her way through the title number and an unnecessary reprise. The next number was a big production number. Virginia wasn’t in it, and I started to ff again and then stopped.

“Rew to music cue,” I said, and watched the production number, counting the frame numbers. A blond couple
stepped forward, did a series of toe slides, and stepped back again, and a dark-haired guy and a redhead in a white pleated skirt kicked forward and went into a side-by-side Charleston. She had curly hair and a tied-in-front blouse, and the two of them put their hands on their knees and did a series of cross kicks. “Frame 75-004, forward 12,” I said, and watched the routine in slow motion.

“Enhance quadrant 2,” and watched the red hair fill the screen, even though there wasn’t any need for an enhancement, or for the slowmo, either. No question at all of who it was.

I had known the instant I saw her, the same way I had in the barnraising scene, and it wasn’t the booze (of which there was at least fifteen minutes’ worth less in my system) or klieg, or a passing resemblance enhanced with rouge and eyebrow pencil. It was Alis. Which was impossible.

“Last frame,” I said, but this was the Good Old Days when the chorus line didn’t get into the credits, and the copyright date had to be deciphered. MCML. 1950.

I went back through the movie, going to freeze frame and enhance every time I spotted red hair, but I didn’t see her again. I ff’d to the Charleston number and watched it again, trying to come up with a theory.

Okay. The hackate had sent her to 1950 (scratch that—the copyright was for the release date—had sent her to 1949) and she had waited around for four years, dancing chorus parts and palling around with Virginia Gibson, waiting for her chance to clunk Virginia on the head, stuff her behind a set, and take her place in
Brides
. So she could impress the producer of
Funny Face
with her dancing so that he’d offer her a part, and she’d finally get to dance with Fred, if only in the same production number.

Even splatted on chooch, I couldn’t have bought that one. But it was her, so there had to be an explanation. Maybe in between chorus jobs Alis had gotten a job as a warmbody. They’d had them back then. They were called stand-ins, and maybe she got to be Virginia Gibson’s because they looked alike, and Alis had bribed her to let her take her place, just
for one number, or had connived to have Virginia miss a shooting session. Anne Baxter in
All About Eve
. Or maybe Virginia had an AS problem, and when she’d showed up drunk, Alis had had to take her place.

That theory wasn’t much better. I called up the menu again. If Alis had gotten one chorus job, she might have gotten others. I scanned through the musicals, trying to remember which ones had chorus numbers.
Singin’ in the Rain
did. That party scene I’d taken all that champagne out of.

I called up the record of changes to find the frame number and ff’d through the nonchampagne, to Donald O’Connor’s saying, “You gotta show a movie at a party. It’s a Hollywood law,” through said movie, to the start of the chorus number.

Girls in skimpy pink skirts and flapper hats ran onstage to the tune of “You Are My Lucky Star” and a bad camera angle. I was going to have to do an enhance to see their faces clearly. But there wasn’t any need to. I’d found Alis.

And she might have managed to bribe Virginia Gibson. She might even have managed to stuff her and the
Tea for Two
redhead behind their respective sets. But Debbie Reynolds hadn’t had an AS problem, and if Alis had crammed her behind a set,
somebody
would have noticed.

It wasn’t time travel. It was something else, a comp-generated illusion of some kind in which she’d somehow managed to dance and get it on film. In which case, she hadn’t disappeared forever into the past. She was still in Hollywood. And I was going to find her.

“Off,” I said to the comp, grabbed my jacket, and flung myself out the door.

MOVIE CLICHE #419: The Blocked Escape. Hero/Heroine on the run, near escape with bad guys, eludes them, nearly home free, villain looms up suddenly, asks, “Going somewhere?”

SEE:
The Great Escape, The Empire Strikes Back, North by Northwest, The Thirty-Nine Steps
.

Heada was standing outside the door, arms folded, tapping her foot. Rosalind Russell as the Mother Superior in
The Trouble with Angels
.

“You’re supposed to be lying down,” she said.

“I feel fine.”

“That’s because the alcohol isn’t out of your system yet,” she said. “Sometimes it takes longer than others. Have you peed?”

“Yes,” I said. “Buckets. Now if you’ll excuse me, Nurse Ratchet…”

“Wherever you’re going, it can wait till you’re clean,” she said, blocking my way. “I mean it. Ridigaine’s not anything to fool with.” She steered me back into the room. “You need to stay here and rest. Where were you going anyway? To see Alis? Because if you were, she’s not there. She’s dropped all her classes and moved out of her dorm.”

And in with Mayer’s boss, she meant. “I wasn’t going to see Alis.”

“Where
were
you going?”

It was useless to lie to Heada, but I tried it anyway. “Virginia Gibson was in
Funny Face
. I was going out to try to find a copy of it.”

“Why can’t you get it off the fibe-op?”

“Fred Astaire’s in it. That’s why I asked you if he was out of litigation.” I let that sink in for a couple of frames. “You said it might just be a likeness. I wanted to see if it’s Ms or just somebody who looks like her.”

“So you were going out to look for a pirated copy?” Heada said, as if she almost believed me. “I thought you said she was in six musicals. They aren’t all in litigation, are they?”

“There weren’t any close-ups in
Athena”
I said, and hoped she wouldn’t ask why I couldn’t enhance. “And you know how she is about Fred Astaire. If she’s going to be in anything, it’d be
Funny Face”

None of this made any sense, since the idea was supposedly to find something Virginia Gibson was in, not Alis, but Heada nodded when I mentioned Fred Astaire. “I can get you one,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. “It doesn’t even have to be digitized. Tape’ll work.” I led her to the door. “I’ll stay here and lie down and let the ridigaine do its stuff.”

She crossed her arms again.

“I swear,” I said. “I’ll give you my key. You can lock me in.”

“You’ll lie down?”

“Promise,” I lied.

“You won’t,” she said, “and you’ll wish you had.” She sighed. “At least you won’t be on the skids. Give me the key.”

I handed her the card.

“Both of them,” she said.

I handed her the other card.

“Lie
down”
she said, and shut the door and locked me in.

MOVIE CLICHE #86: Locked In.

SEE:
Broken Blossoms, Wuthering Heights, The Phantom Foe, The Palm Beach Story, The Man with the Golden Arm, The Collector
.

Well, I needed more proof anyway before I confronted Alis, and I was starting to feel the headache I’d lied to Heada about having. I went into the bathroom and followed orders and then laid down on the bed and called up
Singin’ in the Rain
.

There weren’t any telltale matte lines or pixel shadows, and when I did a noise check, there weren’t any signs of uneven degradation. Which didn’t prove anything. I could do undetectable paste-ups with a fifth of William Powell’s
Thin Man
rye in me.

I needed more data. Preferably something full-length and a continuous take, but Fred was still in litigation. I called up the list of musicals again. Alis had been wearing a bustle the day I went out to see her, which meant a period piece. Not
Meet Me in St. Louis
. She had said there wasn’t any dancing in it.
Showboat
, maybe. Or
Gigi
.

I went through both of them, looking for parasols and backlit hair, but it took forever, and ff’ing made me dizzy.

“Global search,” I said, pressing my hand to my eyes, ’dance routines,” and spent the next ten minutes explaining to the comp what a dance routine was. “Forward at 40,” I said, and took it through
Carousel
.

The program worked okay, though this was still going to take forever. I debated eliminating ballet, decided the comp wouldn’t have any more idea than Hollywood did of what it was, and added an override instead.

“Instant to next routine, cue,” I said. “Next, please,” and called up
On Moonlight Bay
.

Bay
was another Doris Day toothfest, so even with the override it took far too long to get through it, but at least I could “next, please,” when I saw there weren’t any bustles.

“Vernon and Irene Castle”
I said. No, that was a Fred Astaire.
The Harvey Girls?

I got more legalese. Was everybody in litigation? I called up the menu, scanning it for period pieces.

“In the Good Old Summertime”
I said, and then was sorry. It was a Judy Garland, and Alis had been right, there wasn’t any dancing in Judy Garland movies. I tried to remember what else she’d said that night in my room and what movies she’d asked for.
On the Town
.

It wasn’t in litigation. But her nemesis, Gene Kelly, was in it, leaping around in a white sailor suit and making it look hard. “Next, please,” I said, and Ann Miller appeared in a low-cut dress, apple cheeks, and Marilyn figure, tapping her way between dinosaur skeletons. Even with makeup and digital padding, Alis couldn’t have been mistaken for her, and I had the feeling that was important, but the clatter of Ann’s taps was making my head pound. I “next, please” ’d to the Meadowville number Alis had said she liked, Vera-Ellen and the overenergetic Gene Kelly in a softshoe. Vera-Ellen was a lot more Alis’s size, she even had a hair ribbon, but she wasn’t Alis either. “Next, please.”