Remake (16 page)

“I thought you might have,” I said. “Her face is too round. Your features wouldn’t match closely enough to get past the ID-lock. It only works where there’s already a resemblance.” I pointed at the screen. “There are two others I found that aren’t on the disk because they’re in litigation.
White Christmas
and
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”

She turned to look at me.
“Seven Brides?
Are you sure?”

“You’re right there in the barnraising scene,” I said. “Why?”

She had turned back to the screen, frowning at Shirley Temple, who was dancing with Alis and Jack Haley in military uniforms. “Maybe—” she said to herself.

“I told you dancing in the movies was impossible,” I said. “I was wrong. There you are.”

As I said it, the screen went blank, and the oldate said loudly, “How about that guy who says, ‘Make my day!’ Do you have him?”

I reached to start the disk again, but Alis had already turned away.

“I’m afraid we don’t have Clint Eastwood either. The scene from
Magnificent Seven
has Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner,” she said. “Would you like to see it?” and busied herself punching in the access.

“Does he have to shave his head?” his friend said.

“No,” Alis said, reaching for a black shirt and pants, a black hat. “The Digimatte takes care of that.” She started setting up the tape equipment, showing the oldate where to
stand and what to do, oblivious of his friend, who was still talking about Charles Bronson, oblivious of me.

Well, what had I expected? That she’d be overjoyed to see herself up there, that she’d fling her arms around me like Natalie Wood in
The Searchers?
I hadn’t done anything. Except tell her she’d accomplished something she hadn’t been trying to do, something she’d turned down standing on this very boulevard.

“Yul
Brynner”
the oldate’s friend said disgustedly, “and no Charles Bronson.”

On the Town
was on the screen again. Alis switched it off without a glance and called up
The Magnificent Seven
.

“You want Charles Bronson and they give you Steve McQueen,” the oldate grumbled. “They always make you settle for second best.”

That’s what I love about the movies. There’s always some minor character standing around to tell you the moral, just in case you’re too dumb to figure it out for yourself.

“You never get what you want,” the oldate said.

“Yeah,” I said, “‘there’s no place like home,’” and headed for the skids.

VERA MILES:
[Running out to corral, where RANDOLPH SCOTT is saddling horse]
You were going to leave, just like that? Without even saying good-bye?

RANDOLPH SCOTT:
[Cinching girth on horse]
I got a score to settle. And you got a young man to tend to. I got the bullet out of that arm of his, but it needs bandaging.
[RANDOLPH SCOTT steps in stirrup and swings up on horse]

VERA MILES: Will I see you again? How will I know you’re all right?

RANDOLPH SCOTT: I reckon I’ll be all right.
[Tips hat]
You take care, ma’am.
[Wheels horse around and rides off into sunset]

VERA MILES:
[Calling after him]
I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me! Never!

I went home and started work. I did the ones that mattered first—restoring the double cigarette-lighting in
Now, Voyager
, putting the uranium back in the wine bottle in
Notorious
, reinebriating Lee Marvin’s horse in
Cat Ballou
. And the ones I liked:
Ninotchka
and
Rio Bravo
and
Double Indemnity
. And
Brides
, which came out of litigation the day after I saw Alis. It was beeping at me when I woke up. I put Howard Keel’s drink and whiskey bottle back in the opening scene, and then ff’d to the barnraising and turned the pan of corn bread back into a jug before I watched Alis.

It was too bad I couldn’t have shown it to her; she’d seemed so surprised the number had made it onto film. She must have had trouble with it, and no wonder. All those lifts and no partner—I wondered what equipment she’d had to lug down Hollywood Boulevard and onto the skids to make it look like she was in the air. It would have been nice if she could see how happy she looked doing those lifts.

I put the barnraising dance on the disk with the others, in case Russ Tamblyn’s estate or Warner appealed, and then erased all my transaction records, in case Mayer yanked the Cray.

I figured I had two weeks, maybe three if the Columbia takeover really went through. Mayer’d be so busy trying to make up his mind which way to jump he wouldn’t have time to worry about AS’s, and neither would Arthurton. I thought about calling Heada—she’d know what was happening—and then decided that was probably a bad idea. Anyway, she was probably busy scrambling to keep her job.

A week anyway. Enough time to give Myrna Loy back her hangover and watch the rest of the musicals. I’d already found most of them, except for
Good News
and
The Birds and the Bees
, I put the
dulce la leche
back in
Guys and Dolls
while I was at it, and the brandy back in
My Fair Lady
and made Frank Morgan in
Summer Holiday
back into a drunk. It went slower than I wanted it to, and after a week and a half, I stopped and put everything Alis had done on disk
and
tape, expecting Mayer to knock on the door any minute, and started in on
Casablanca
.

There was a knock on the door. I ff’d to the end where Rick’s bar was still full of lemonade, took the disk of Alis’s dancing and stuck it down the side of my shoe, and opened the door.

It was Alis.

The hall behind her was dark, but her hair, pulled into a bun, caught the light from somewhere. She looked tired, like she had just come from practicing. She still had on her lab coat. I could see white stockings and Mary Janes below it, and an inch or so of pink ruffle. I wondered what she’d been doing—the “Abba-Dabba Honeymoon” number from
Two Weeks with Love?
Or something from
By the Light of the Silvery Moon?

She reached in the pocket of the lab coat and held out the opdisk I’d given her. “I came to bring this back to you.”

“Keep it,” I said.

She looked at it a minute, and then stuck it in her pocket. “Thanks,” she said, and pulled it out again. “I’m surprised so many of the routines made it on. I wasn’t very good when I started,” she said, turning it over. “I’m still not very good.”

“You’re as good as Ruby Keeler,” I said.

She grinned. “She was somebody’s girlfriend.”

“You’re as good as Vera-Ellen. And Debbie Reynolds. And Virginia Gibson.”

She frowned, and looked at the disk again and then at me, as if trying to decide whether to tell me something. “Heada told me about her job,” she said, and that wasn’t it. “Location assistant. That’s great.” She looked over at the array, where Bogart was toasting Ingrid. “She said you were putting the movies back the way they were.”

“Not all the movies,” I said, pointing at the disk in her hand. “Some remakes are better than the original.”

“Won’t you get fired?” she said. “Putting the AS’s back in, I mean?”

“Almost certainly,” I said. “But it is a fah, fah bettah thing I do than I have evah done before. It is a—”

“Tale of Two Cities
, Ronald Colman,” she said, looking at the screens where Bogart was saying good-bye to Ingrid, at the disk, at the screens again, trying to work up to what she had to say.

I said it for her. “You’re leaving.”

She nodded, still not looking at me.

“Where are you going? Back to River City?”

“That’s from
The Music Man,”
she said, but she didn’t smile. “I can’t go any farther by myself. I need somebody to teach me the heel-and-toe work Eleanor Powell does. And I need a partner.”

Just for a moment, no, not even a moment, the flicker of a frame, I thought about what might have been if I hadn’t spent those long splatted semesters dismantling highballs, if I had spent them out in Burbank instead, practicing kick-turns.

“After what you said the other night, I thought I might be able to use a positioning armature and a data harness for the lifts, and I tried it. It worked, I guess. I mean, it—”

Her voice cut off awkwardly like she’d intended to say something more, and I wondered what it was, and what it was I’d said to her. That Fred might be coming out of litigation?

“But the balance isn’t the same as a real person,” she
said. “And I need experience learning routines, not just copying them off the screen.”

So she was going someplace where they were still doing liveactions. “Where?” I said. “Buenos Aires?”

“No,” she said. “China.”

China.

“They’re doing ten liveactions a year,” she said.

And twenty purges. Not to mention provincial uprisings. And antiforeigner riots.

“Their liveactions aren’t very good. They’re terrible, actually. Most of them are propaganda films and martial-arts things, but a couple of them last year were musicals.” She smiled ruefully. “They like Gene Kelly.”

Gene Kelly. But it would be real routines. And a man’s arm around her waist instead of a data harness, a man’s hands lifting her. The real thing.

“I leave tomorrow morning,” she said. “I was packing, and I found the disk and thought maybe you wanted it back.”

“No,” I said, and then, so I wouldn’t have to tell her good-bye, “Where are you flying out of?”

“San Francisco,” she said. “I’m taking the skids up tonight. And I’m still not packed.” She looked at me, waiting for me to say my line.

And I had plenty to choose from. If there’s anything the movies are good at, it’s good-byes. From “Be careful, darling!” to “Don’t let’s ask for the moon when we have the stars,” to “Come back, Shane!” Even,
“Hasta la vista
, baby.”

But I didn’t say them. I stood there and looked at her, with her beautiful, backlit hair and her unforgettable face. At what I wanted and couldn’t have, not even for a few minutes.

And what if I said “Stay”? What if I promised to find her a teacher, get her a part, put on a show? Right. With a Cray that had maybe ten minutes of memory, a Cray I wouldn’t have as soon as Mayer found out what I’d been doing?

Behind me on the screen, Bogart was saying, “There’s no place for you here,” and looking at Ingrid, trying to make the moment last forever. In the background, the plane’s propellers
were starting to turn, and in a minute the Nazis would show up.

They stood there, looking at each other, and tears welled up in Ingrid’s eyes, and Vincent could mess with his tears program forever and never get it right. Or maybe he would. They had made
Casablanca
out of dry ice and cardboard. And it was the real thing.

“I have to go,” Alis said.

“I know,” I said, and smiled at her. “We’ll always have Paris.”

And according to the script, she was supposed to give me one last longing look and get on the plane with Paul Henreid, and why is it I still haven’t learned that Heada is always right?

“Good-bye,” Alis said, and then she was in my arms, and I was kissing her, kissing her, and she was unbuttoning the lab coat, taking down her hair, unbuttoning the pink gingham dress, and some part of me was thinking, “This is important,” but she had the dress off, and the pantaloons, and I had her on the bed, and she didn’t fade, she didn’t morph into Heada, I was on her and in her, and we were moving together, easily, effortlessly, our outstretched hands almost but not quite touching on the tangled sheets.

I kept my gaze on her hands, flexing and stretching in passion, knowing if I looked at her face it would be freeze-framed on my brain forever, klieg or no klieg, afraid if I did she might be looking at me kindly, or, worse, not be looking at me at all. Looking through me, past me, at two dancers on a starry floor.

“Tom!” she said, coming, and I looked down at her. Her hair was spread out on the pillow, backlit and beautiful, and her face was intent, the way it had been that night at the party, watching Fred and Ginge on the freescreen, rapt and beautiful and sad. And focused, finally, on me.

MOVIE CLICHE #1: The Happy Ending. Self-explanatory.

SEE:
An Officer and a Gentleman, An Affair to Remember, Sleepless in Seattle, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Shall We Dance, Great Expectations
.

It’s been three years, during which time China has gone through four provincial uprisings and six student riots, and Mayer has gone through three takeovers and eight bosses, the next to last of whom moved him up to Executive Vice-President.

Mayer didn’t tumble to my putting the AS’s back in for nearly three months, by which time I’d finished the whole
Thin Man
series,
The Maltese Falcon
, and all the Westerns, and Arthurton was on his way out.

Heada, still costarring as Joan Blondell, talked Mayer out of killing me and into making a stirring speech about Censorship and Deep Love for the Movies and getting himself spectacularly fired just in time for the new boss to hire him back as “the only moral person in this whole poppated town.”

Heada got promoted to set director and then (that next-to-last boss) to Assistant Producer in Charge of New Projects, and promptly hired me to direct a remake. Happy endings all around.

In the meantime, I programmed happy endings for Happily Ever After and graduated and looked for Alis. I found
her in
Pennies from Heaven
, and in
Into the Woods
, the last musical ever made, and in
Small Town Girl
. I thought I’d found them all. Until tonight.

I watched the scene in the Indy again, looking at the silver tap shoes and the platinum wig and thinking about musicals.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
isn’t one. “Anything Goes” is the only number in it, and it’s only there because one of the scenes takes place in a nightclub, and they’re the floor show.

And maybe that’s the way to go. The remake I’m working on isn’t a musical either—it’s a weeper about a couple of star-crossed lovers—but I could change the hotel dining room scene into a nightclub. And then, the boss after next, do a remake with a nightclub setting, and put Fred (who’s bound to be out of litigation by then) in it, just in one featured number. That was all he was in
Flying Down to Rio
, a featured number, thirtyish, slightly balding, who could dance a little. And look what happened.