“DAN, DAN…” OUTSIDE ON THE GRAVEL, Timmy Townsend pumped Clark’s hand. A Liberty League badge flashed on his lapel. “It’s a real privilege. An absolute honor.”
Timmy Townsend oozed happy confidence. His eyes shone. His grin was far more disarmingly boyish than any actual boy’s, and he often broke into chuckles as he spoke. It was as if the combination of wealth, looks and charm which he’d almost certainly been born with was continually reoccurring to him.
“Neat little hangout you got here. So, anyway, I just got a call from my secretary telling me the signed contract’s arrived. Seeing as I live down the valley and I got your address, I thought I’d look in and say hi. Is April here right now? Haven’t you got some place in the city you hang out when you’re working?”
Before Clark had a chance to think of a plausible reply, Timmy Townsend was talking again.
“I was just astounded, Daniel—or it’s Dan, right, isn’t it? Dan, yeah, Dan? somehow, I pictured you with a beard—when your latest script landed on my desk. My secretary, love her to pieces, the woman’s a fucking genius, she knew how much I loved that movie about the queen…” He shot a finger at Clark and cocked his thumb.
“The Virgin Queen.”
“Yeah! Absolute work of genius. I’m not shitting you when I say that it’s one of the main reasons I’m working here in this city… Blew me away when I saw it at the showing room at our weekend place in Nassau County when I was a kid. I mean, we Townsends made our money in oil, but the feelies are the hot new ticket. I’ve gotta show you the Senserama facility, Dan. I really have.”
Facility? Clark realized Timmy Townsend simply meant the studio. “Well, sure. That would be great. Sometime if—”
“Hey! Why not right now? I mean, I know you writers are always busy, and I sure don’t want to distract you from your work now that the studio’s money’s riding on it—but, hey Dan…” He chuckled and spread his arms and turned, embracing in the gesture not just Erewhon and its grounds, but all of Woodsville, and the whole bowl of the city that Clark could see shimmering beneath them on this fine morning. “… why the hell not?”
Clark said he’d follow Timmy Townsend in the Delahaye, and gave him some guff about kids smashing a window and him not wanting April to see the damage as the reason why he’d left the car parked around back of the estate.
He decided he was getting a feel for this automobile as he pressed the right button to bring down the top and picked up the studio executive’s green Bentley above the reservoir and followed him down into the city along the switchback bends. He liked the way it handled. The way, as they began to hit traffic, other vehicles gave way and onlookers gawped. The driver’s door clattered and tinkled when you opened it, but you barely noticed the rim of shattered glass once it was shut.
It would have been easy to turn off into a side street and lose Timmy Townsend now that they were heading through the wide avenues of Hancock Park. But he stayed on the guy’s tail. That buzz he’d felt yesterday when he’d entered the offices of York and Bunce, and even more strongly when he stepped out this morning onto Erewhon’s Juliet balcony, was still with him now. And what, the thought returned to him as he glanced back in the rearview mirror and saw a reverse glimpse of the Hollywoodland sign caught between the buildings, did he have left to loose?
Senserama Studios lay on the fringes of the Baldwin Hills. The remains of the old MGM complex wasn’t far off, but that was up for sale or redevelopment, and most of the rest of this area of the city was filled with new estates, golf clubs, country clubs and mansions set back far on green lawns. The high chainlink fence outside the studio was overshadowed by a giant billboard for their latest roadhouse production, a Biblical epic called The Throne of Forever featuring a typically scantily clad Monumenta Loolie. Then came an equally big billboard featuring Senserama president and current State Governor Herbert Kisberg’s face. Brown-skinned, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, white-toothed, and with just the right amount of cosmetic care around the crinkles of his smile, he didn’t look far off being a movie star himself.
The security guy at the entrance raised the barrier and saluted as he let them by. Clark followed Timmy’s Bentley past the hanger-like soundstages signs toward signs marked PRODUCTION, and had to slow for a herd of longhorn cattle crossing the road. He parked outside a three story office amid a line of other Bentleys, Rolls Royces, Lincolns and Cadillacs. Drawn between the extra-wide white lines marked RESERVED FOR AUTHORIZED STUDIO VISITORS, the Delahaye seemed at last to have found its spiritual home.
“Beauty of a car,” Timmy said, leaning in. “Weren’t kidding about that door, though. I’d file a police report if I were you.” Then he did one of his characteristic spin-and-turns. “So—welcome to the salt mines… !”
The women sashaying past along the corridors of Accounts and Production made the receptionist at York and Bunce look like Lon Chaney with a hangover. The walls were lined with framed posters of Senserama’s many successes. Any moment now, Clark thought, someone’s going to come up to me and ask who I really am. But it never happened. It was like being onstage. It was like a dream.
He was introduced to vice presidents and deputy managers in charge of this or that. Of course, the way Timmy told it, they were all indispensable—absolutely vital—parts of the Senserama team. Senior or junior, male or female, they all had the same muscular handshake and equally muscular smile.
Timmy’s own office was spacious, and entirely empty of the usual production company mess of overspilling file cabinets and bookcases stuffed with unread scripts. Apart from a golf putter leaning in the corner, it was hard to see what the man did here all day. But there was plenty of evidence of what he got up to outside of Senserama. The walls were covered with glossy ten by eights. Timmy Townsend convincingly cowboyish on the backs of several expensive horses. Timmy Townsend out in the forest with various kinds of game dead at his feet.
“Why don’t I show you were the real work gets done?” Timmy suggested after he’d spun for a while like a kid on a ride in his recliner leather chair.
Just as Clark remembered, it was always a long walk from one part of a studio to another. They crossed roads and backlots under the hot sun. A troupe of kids dressed as fairies pranced by. They saw a woman dressed like a medieval princess carrying a live goose.
“I can’t say enough about what a fan I am of your work, Dan.” Timmy laid his arm across Clark’s shoulder. “That scene in that historic pic you wrote—I mean, the way that French-sounding broad, the one who gets her head chopped…”
“Mary Queen of Scots?”
“That’s her. The way you did that. Absolutely brilliant. I mean, absolutely brilliant. Course, Wake Up and Dream is another biopic, which I sort of liked straight off…”
Clark, who felt he’d earned an interest in Wake Up and Dream, wondered where this was going. He knew that simply “liking” anything in this industry was the equivalent of seeing it as a heap of dogshit. Let alone with addition of a “sort-of ”.
“Do you know, Dan, how many companies were talking of doing Lars Bechmeir about five years ago before his wife went and killed herself? Fucking dozens. But what do you do with that for an ending, eh? And, I’ll be honest, that was my first reaction when I looked at this treatment as well. I thought, uh-oh, a work of total genius and all of that—with your name on it, it has to be—but where the hell are we going in the final reel…? But what you did with that was brilliant. I can see it playing in Pigswill, Idaho.” He gave a squeeze of Clark’s shoulder.
“Thanks.”
“But the way you make it seem like it’s a kind of sacrifice, that she’s doing it for us all—like, well, Jesus. Sheer master stroke. There was talk of a Thomas Edison biopic a couple of years ago with some nobody called Tracey in the lead. Didn’t get off the ground, which leaves the whole high concept guy-with-an-invention theme entirely free. It’s unpissed snow.”
Clark had encountered Timmy Townsend’s type many times before. For all the bullshit, for all the bad deals and back seat handjobs, Timmy clearly still believed as firmly in the dream on which this whole industry floated as did the latest wannabe actress climbing off the Super Chief at Union Station with nothing but a fresh pair of panties and a new hairdo. “Difference with Edison, of course, being that he’s dead. I mean, he is dead, isn’t he? That, and he’d sue. Bechmeir being alive is a whole different ballgame. Not that we actually need his permission, but imagine what a blast it would be if we could get him to come to the premiere.”
“I got a letter from the Trust this morning,” Clark said. “Something about them having no fundamental objection to the project. Gave the name of their attorney, though.”
“Got that letter with you?” He shook his head.
“Better make sure our lawyers get it. But I really don’t think we need worry. Herbert Kisberg’s on the board of the Bechmeir Trust. You won’t believe how up we all already are for this project at Senserama. It’s like the feelie’s already made. Things are just falling together…”
Calling the soundstage they were walking toward merely a building really didn’t do the place justice; it could have housed the Hindenburg. No, Clark decided as they stepped in through a tiny gap in the massive sliding doors, the Hindenberg could have flown around in here.
Women in period dress, shackled slaves and Klu Klux Clansmen lounged, chatting, sweating, smoking and fanning themselves with scripts. Scaffolding rang. Transformed hummed. Klieg lights clanged on and off. Frazzled looking technicians clustered in agitated debate. They were shooting, Timmy shouted over the clamor, a drama set in the precivil war deep south which was to be called either White Gables or The Cotton House. Even though Gone With the Wind had been such a notorious flop, Senserama still reckoned that there was money in the whole Dixie/Confederate thing.
Clark was introduced to the director, a fat, distracted man with a straggly beard who emanated a stronger version of the tired body funk which pervaded the entire set. The guy seemed vaguely familiar—he was almost sure he’d once done a screen test for him—but there was little chance that anyone here would ever bother to recognize a reclusive screenwriter, let alone a guy who’d last worked as an actor in the ancient days of the talkies. The director turned to bellow through his bullhorn that this was the last take before lunch. Clark knew that meant there would almost certainly be another. Some things might change in this industry. Others didn’t.
Two thirds through the shooting script of White Gables or The Cotton House, our southern belle had escaped from the clutches of the rebel slaves with the help of some brave Klu Klux Clansmen. Now alone and destitute, she had finally made it back to the house of her birth. In this scene, the actress—whose name Timmy had purred with appropriate reverence—was required to stagger along the front path to the door of the spackleboard mansion, her gasping and emoting progress tracked by several cameras, an overhead boom and a feelie iconoscope.
Her face already transformed into the pallid mask which the lighting and the monochrome filmstock would transform into a vision of longsuffering beauty, and wearing a suitably torn and dirtied ballgown, she put aside Harper’s Monthly and stepped up to the first taped marker on the soundstage floor as the shot was readied. Technicians called their okays. But for the dull electric humming and the subdued whirr of the camera motors, the entire set fell silent, and the director called action.
As always, the take itself—the actual business of the actress crawling up the fake path towards the fake steps to throw herself down before the fake front door—seemed anticlimactic. This might be a big scene, but it would need cuts of the door, cuts of our heroine’s tear-glinting face, a swelling soundtrack, and probably overdubbing of her gasps and sighs, not to mention some enhancement of the feelie track, before any selfrespecting audience would be convinced.
Clark stood behind the iconoscope operator. Then he took a couple of steps back; even before the power had been upped to its full level, he felt a familiar crawl in the pit of this belly. He’d never really liked these things. Bechmeir field receivers were frail and complex devices; trolley-mounted contraptions of precision steel and copper fronted with bulging eyes of silver-treated glass which seemed to peer blindly into the scene which they were recording. Inside were electron guns and magnetic focusing coils and step-up transformers which fed a massive Uher wire recording machine along fat lengths of cable, and also threw a faint representation up on a cathode ray tube for the iconoscope operator to follow what the machine was seeing. All in all, they were pretty much up there on the pinnacle of what the human species could achieve. But he’d always got that crawling, snagged-nail-across-steel feeling when he was close to them, and being back here on a soundstage more than reminded him that it hadn’t gone away. He found this faint green image projected onto the operator’s viewscreen especially disturbing. As the actress moved, a vaguely human shape, a flame seen through misted glass, shivered and sparked across the screen.
Then the director called and everything was powered down and the actress returned to her magazine as he conferred with the technicians and then, although still seriously dissatisfied in the manner of all directors Clark had ever encountered, called for a print, which meant that the studio would now invest the several hundred dollars required to process and synchronize the film into a viewable rough cut. With all this expensive equipment, the highly trained people paid to do little most of the time but stand around and wait—the sheer, abject waste—you could see at close hand on a feelie set where all the money went.
“Smoke?” Townsend offered a gold cigarette case as they stood by a catering truck with some chattering Mexican extras dressed as Eskimos.
Clark shook his head. “I got these.” He tapped a Lucky Strike out.
“This is something, eh?”
“Yeah.” He felt almost relaxed. They’d just had coffee and bacon rolls, and it was good to be back out in the cool and quiet of the open air.
“Looking a bit peaky if you don’t mind me saying so, ol’Danny boy.”
“I was up late.”
“Out celebrating the contract? I mean, you and your wife?”
“Matter of fact, we were.”
“Must get together with you both. There’s a party tomorrow night at Herbert Kisberg’s place. You both absolutely must come. Say, by the way,” he added, dabbing a spot of grease from his cheek with a handkerchief which matched his mustard necktie, “what you said a few weeks back in your letter…”
Letter? “Yeah?”
“You know—about sending me that new draft with an entirely different approach to Wake Up and Dream.”
“Is that how I put it?”
“Pretty much word for word.”
“Can I ask you, Timmy—I’m just keeping track—what color is the draft you’ve got?”
Timmy Townsend thought deeply for a moment. which looked like something he wasn’t used to doing. “White, I think. Yeah. I’m certain of it.”
“You’ve never seen this blue draft which I said I’d send next?”
“No. Absolutely not. ’Course, I’d be more than happy to take a fresh look at wherever you’re at. I mean, we’re bound to need some rewrites…” Timmy Townsend waved a finger. “But I know you writers. Nothing’s ever quite the way you want it. But, believe me, Dan what you got already is fucking dynamite. Start dicking around with that and the whole thing might blow up.”
He was led across other dusty backlots to Post Production. In these offices the complex patterns of sounds, images and feelings were put together to create the final illusion.
A woman was singing operatically in a sound booth in one of the audio suites. Another was laughing. Sound engineers beyond glass screens turned dials and fed wire reels through the heads of recording machines. On the floor above, the scene wasn’t so dissimilar, at least superficially, as feelie engineers pondered cathode ray tubes or consulted frequency charts of the range of human emotions, although once more Clark felt his skin begin to crawl. Here, still as nothing more than a representation of a signal cast against luminous glass, was Bet Doonsday’s aura, and here was Slowly Simpson’s. To Clark, they looked more like shimmering green butterflies flown out of some unpleasant dream. Of course, a real star needed a strong and consistent aura—that sense of presence which you got when certain people entered a room—although it was an open secret in the industry, Timmy confided, that they were given artificial help in this area during the recording process, just the way they were with padded bras, stack heels—and added echo on the voice soundtrack. More and more these days, they were calling in specialists to provide that kick of happiness or terror which made a great feelie seem real.
Clark was shown where these extra tracks were laid down. Here, inside the wire rabbit hutch of a Faraday cage to keep out interference, a woman who could do happiness like no one else was laughing. Who cared if she had a face like the backside of a bus? And here a bearded man who’d spent his childhood being brutalized in a basement was screaming so hard before the cataractic eye of an iconoscope that his face seemed about to rip apart. This was raw emotion, pure and simple, and eminently marketable, which could be mixed into any kind of feelie which needed that extra punch. Many of these recordings, Timmy explained, would be sold on to other studios. Or, increasingly, to a wide range of other outlets. The commercial demand was growing so fast it was hard to keep pace.
“We and Motorola are already talking to Sears. Think how it would work in a food hall—not to mention the lingerie department, eh?” Timmy nudged Clark’s ribs. “The use of feelie tracks in retail is going to go massive. We’ve already got nibbles from Howard Johnson’s. It’d be like the scent of baking bread at a bakers, only a hundred times better… But I really can’t let you go without trying some of our finished product.”
The feelie showing room had the usual plush chairs and reek of stale cigarsmoke which Clark associated with all showing rooms, but there were no loudspeakers, no screen, and no projection housing at the rear. All that stood between the open red curtains was a wide frame of thinly woven metal. Without the screen which would normally have been hung in front—and but for the rising buzz of the transformers and the fat wires which terminated around it—you might have thought this Bechmeir field generator to be a giant frying griddle.
The lights were dimmed in the traditional way, then Timmy clicked his finger to signal that someone should feed through the reels. Clark thought of that wraith he’d seen dancing between the two charged plates back at Erewhon, but here the field was spread across the breadth of a theater. Even before that pre-thunder buzz had increased and the black space before him began to glow, something cold and strange brushed past him. If such a sensation exists, this, he was absolutely certain, was how it felt to have someone—or something—walk across your grave.
The equipment here, of course, was all state of the art: new valves, high volts, maximum wattage. Push the field signal much higher, Timmy explained, sat beside Clark in a shuffle of nervous energies so bright you almost expected to see him start glowing as well, and people got nausea and headaches. Higher still, and you’d give them burns until you eventually fried their heads. The Virgin Queen was a relatively old feelie, and Clark had seen it in an old theater played on antique equipment. This was cutting edge.
With a faint crackling, the space before him filled into hazy curtain—a thing of no color at all at first, which danced and shifted as if caught in an invisible wind. Then the wind seemed to grow stronger—he could feel the chill of it—and the curtain flashed agitations of color, and those colors reached to something deep within. This, he thought, as spectral landscapes of plasm pulsed and faded before him, was how God must have imagined the universe before it existed. As a thing of pure spirit, as an outpouring of nothing but soul.
What Clark witnessed passed through the entire spectrum of emotions. Though the greens of happiness and the blues of contentments to the darkest reds of anger and the falling blacks of grief. And it wasn’t just humanity. Every living thing was alight in this different existence, this new way of seeing the world. Trees swayed in leafy waterfalls. Animals glowed like coals. But the auras of people were the true glory of creation in their flickering complexity. We aren’t simply moths or butterflies, Clark realized. We are all angels.
He saw the lantern blaze of a kid finding his presents on Christmas morning. He saw the dulling flicker of an old woman whose last friend has died. He saw a mother’s grief and the jarring fires of hatred. He saw the joy of a funfair, and tumbled from there into glorious coronas of unconditional love. But that fairground bumper-car tang was still sharp on the back of his tongue, and his hair pricked and his skin felt odd and slick within his clothes. With that hissing, with that crackling like distant fireworks, with that sparky, acidic smell and a feeling at the bottom of your belly that you got when the train you were in seemed momentarily to be moving when it wasn’t, the colors came and went. Greens and reds and flares of pure white, yes, but also the paler shades of everyday existence—those papery yellows and faded pinks and washed out blues of the workaday world. He saw them tumbling around him in strange snowfalls, and thought again of Daniel Lamotte, this guy whose life he was suddenly living, and the lost story that he was somehow chasing.
But the reels were still playing, and Timmy was still ablaze with enthusiasms. “You see this one here, Dan. Now, this is a real doozie. Our engineers have been working on it for months and it’s been a tricky little bastard, but we finally reckon we’ve got it right. Can you tell what it is? Can you guess? ’Course you can! It’s patriotism pure and simple. Just a question of mixing the right amounts of pride and down-home-sentiment, and then a touch of ambition, and then a whole lot more outright anger underneath it all than you’d probably expect. Can you see it? Can you feel it? Doesn’t that get your balls tingling and something coming up right there in the back of your throat like your momma’s just given you the biggest hug? Not giving away any secrets, old fella, when I tell you that Herbert Kisberg’s going to be announcing himself as a presidential candidate for the Liberty League in the next few days, and we’ll be using this recording in the fall rallies for sure. Even had a nibble from our friends across the pond. You know what that lot are like already with the salutes and the uniforms. Imagine how apeshit the crowds would go with this running when Adolph or Benito step up on stage. And imagine how much we could charge… !”
Then came a final waft of salt air like the stirring of a subterranean ocean, and the field generator faded to static gray. Clark was dazed and blinking like a sleeper awakening from a week long bender when finally Timmy led him back out into the sunlight, but the different world he’d glimpsed floating up there before him wouldn’t go away. He could feel the auras of the feelie houses seeping out around him like the smog which was rising up from the freeways to haze this late afternoon. He could taste the sour nickel tang at the back of his throat, and a crawl under his fingernails like he’d been trying to drag himself out from under the earth.
A new world had been forming itself around him, and he’d barely noticed. It was a world where every white American could own the latest Cadillac and streamline fridge—and where all the black, brown and the yellow ones made obliging servants. Armies of these happy Aryans would soon be sitting at home relaxing in the aura of a Buddhist master, or laughing uncontrollably, or fuming with righteous anger, at whatever on their new feelie radiogram was currently spilling out. They would always eat hungrily at their drive-in diners, and shop with a genuine passion for new things, and worship with true reverence, and lounge through midsummer heatwaves in the delicious feel of being cool. Soon, they would be able to spend their entire lives rutting like teenagers in the first flush of love with all worry and pain extinguished until they died smiling, surrounded by their relentlessly adoring family…
“You won’t be a stranger now, will you?” Timmy asked as Clark climbed back into the Delahaye in the Production parking lot. “Where’s the best place to contact you, Your house up in Woodsville…” A look of you writer’s puzzlement crossed his broad face. ”Or that place on Bunker Hill… ?”