HE WAS EVERYTHING you ever wanted in a Brad: affable, congenial, polite, deferential. He wore a wide grin and one of those white-man Afros. He was obsequious in a committed way, so that it looked like a calling. He created the impression that he could look me right in the eye and kiss my ass at the same time without undue hardship or inconvenience to himself.
He was Brad. Young Brad. Cromwell’s Brad.
“It’s an honor. A real honor to meet you in person at last,” he told me as he shook my hand.
We were in Cromwell’s office at Burbank Studios, but since Cromwell was in Europe, Brad played the part of the sorcerer’s apprentice.
I’d been in Cromwell’s office before, when he had another young Brad working for him, and it bothered me then, just as it bothered me now, that the office was so modest by Hollywood standards. You wanted Cromwell, I wanted Cromwell, to have one of those huge, ostentatious offices, so that I could despise him just for the kind of office he had. It was always the same problem with Cromwell. If you wanted to hate him, you couldn’t hate him for the trappings of power he exhibited, because in that regard, by Hollywood standards, he was almost a Buddhist monk. If you really wanted to hate Cromwell, you had to find and define something at the center of his personality. The risk there was that whatever it was you found to hate at the center of Cromwell might be identical to what lay at the center of your own being. Cromwell was somewhere in Europe, but his presence in absentia was more substantial than Brad and I put together.
Brad, a perfect combination of hustler and hostess, took it upon himself to talk enough for both of us. He told me things about myself, he told me things about himself. Being an underling, he conveyed the impression while he talked that I was under no obligation to listen. Every once in a while, he laughed out loud at something. The gurgle in his voice while he laughed, like someone drowning in his own blood, had a cheerful, energetic quality.
“Shall we?” Brad finally asked and jumped off the corner of Cromwell’s desk, where he had been sitting.
“Let’s,” I replied.
I had been here many times before, in the service of Cromwell and others, and I knew where the screening room reserved for me was located, but Brad insisted on taking me there himself.
We had to leave the building and walk across the vast Burbank lot. It was close to three P.M. Close to the heat of the day. Through the heat ribbons, the sand-colored buildings on the studio lot shimmered like the mirages that were manufactured inside them. Brad kept talking.
We walked past astonishingly beautiful girls, young starlets or starlets in the making, as beautiful as apparitions. They were or seemed to be all in between auditions or interviews with casting agents on the lot. In between jobs. In between all kinds of things. They all seemed to have been created by biogeneticists for certain body parts currently in demand.
Young. So young. All of them.
Even now, in my condition, they eyed me and not the young, rather attractive Brad at my side. I fit the type of man they thought had the influence and the power. All Brad had was youth and good looks. He was no better off than they were, and they knew it. But I was fat, sweaty, middle-aged. I was the very image of some wealthy industrialist turned studio head and therefore, in their young, street-wise eyes, the man to know.
The screening room was cool, very plush, intimate, the seats wide and comfortable. The configuration of the seats and the type of seats were reminiscent of the first-class section on a Boeing 747.
Brad, having urged me to enjoy, left. I took out my cigarettes. I came prepared. Two packs.
I lit one while the projectionist dimmed the lights slowly to black. I felt goose bumps all over my body, as I always did at these times. Although I wasn’t there to fix anything really, merely going through the formality of seeing the excised footage, habit was habit, and from years of habit the fixer in me surfaced and fixed his eyes on the screen. Sitting in a dark screening room and waiting for the reels of film to roll was like being in a darkness like no other. Anything could happen when the projector began turning. It was like sitting in darkness and waiting to be born, or waiting to die, or waiting for something less definite but more terrifying and exhilarating than either.
The wheels of the projector kept turning. The reels of film rolled on.
I sat alone in the screening room, watching scene after scene and take after take of scenes that had been deleted from the film.
Normally in these situations there was an editor or an editor’s assistant in the projection booth who made sure that the cut footage I was seeing had been arranged in its proper chronological order. This time, there was nobody in the projection booth except the union projectionist. The editor of the film and his assistants, I later discovered, had all resigned, out of respect for Mr. Houseman. As a result, the projectionist, having no idea which scene followed which, kept slapping on reels of film in no particular order. We began somewhere in the middle and skipped around from there, backward and forward.
Fortunately I had seen the completed film so many times in my apartment in New York that I had it almost memorized, shot by shot and line by line, so that I could make intelligent guesses where in the film the various scenes were supposed to have been before Mr. Houseman deleted them from the completed work.
Leila’s scenes were not the only ones that had been cut. Everybody in the film lost something in the editing room, but nobody lost as much as she did.
In the original scheme of things, as the vanished scenes clearly revealed, hers was one of the pivotal parts of the movie. In that conception, she was to have been the town observer and commentator on the unfolding dream of the two lovers and their story. Originally, the whole film was to have been a flashback of Leila’s character, allowing her to comment intermittently upon the action we were seeing.
It was as if, in that original conception, Mr. Houseman, who was the sole screenwriter as well as the director, had lacked confidence in the central love story or had failed to predict, until he began putting the film together, the power that the little love story would assume. The device of the waitress storyteller, a kind of lovable busybody narrator, was there to allow him at crucial points in the film to leave its seriousness and pain by cutting back to her and giving the audience a little respite and a laugh or two before returning to the tragedy of the love story.
But as he worked on the film in the editing room and observed, as he could not fail to have observed, the power that the little love story began to assume, he mercilessly deleted everything that stood in its way. He no longer wanted relief, comic or otherwise, to detract from the love story itself. He no longer needed, nor would tolerate, an observer or a commentator. Therefore he had no more use for the waitress or for the actress who played her.
Her one tiny moment in the film, the scene in the restaurant, was left in place because Mr. Houseman had shot the scene of the two lovers in such a way that he could not cut her out of the scene and thereby out of the film altogether. Had he shot an alternate take from another angle, there would have been no Leila at all in the film. And, needless to say, no Leila at all in my life.
Leila’s acting (as the wheels of the projector kept turning and the reels of deleted scenes rolled on) was not what I had thought it would be. She was not a potentially great and as yet undiscovered actress. In truth, she was in the wrong field, because she was essentially not an actress at all.
But it was all too easy for me to understand how any director, how all her previous directors, could be smitten by Leila in real life. Her inner life in real life was so rich and textured and so overwhelmingly true to the moment at hand, that any director would assume that such naked truth would play beautifully on the screen.
It didn’t.
What was so right and powerful and at times heartbreaking in the three-dimensional realm of real life was all wrong and over the top on the screen. Leila’s tragedy as an actress was that she was only real and right in real life.
Acting is not, despite persistence of talk to the contrary, being true to yourself. Acting is the art of assuming the burden of truth and the limitations of being somebody else, and Leila had no capacity for being true to anyone but herself.
Every scene in which she appeared meant too much to her. It should not have meant that much to the character she played to go home and pick up her little daughter in her arms and tell her about the things she had seen and heard during the day. But Leila was not playing that character. She was not playing any character. She was not acting. Having that little girl in her arms meant too much to her, far too much, and on the screen it showed as something embarrassingly exaggerated. In real life, the same scene would have been very touching and moving. On screen, it wasn’t. The same was true for every other scene in which she appeared. Observing the gradually deteriorating love story of our two lovers in the movie seemed to pain her more than it did them. Her heart seemed to be breaking for people whose hearts were not breaking at all.
It must have been a shock to Mr. Houseman to see how much she lost in translation to the screen.
Some of her moments were comic, but not comic on purpose, not funny in a good way. If she had a future in films, it was in roles in which she would be properly misused. In films that were entertaining and demeaning distortions of the human experience (the kinds of films I rewrote), her depth of feeling, if exploited properly, could be turned into belly laughs. Few things are funnier, if the context is right, than somebody on the screen to whom everything in life means so much.
The reels of film rolled on. I saw several scenes with several very good actors that had been totally cut out. A policeman. A priest. A wonderful scene with a wonderful actor playing the part of a Little League coach. Gone. All three. I saw many variations of scenes that had been cut and many variations of those that had been kept.
The Old Man’s reputation was that he shot a lot of film, filmed many takes, and this deleted footage bore out the truth of his reputation. As much as I loved the film the first time I saw it in my living room in New York, I found myself loving it even more when I realized (as the wheels of the projector kept turning) what he had gone through in order to create his masterpiece. Considering his age and his illness, I could only marvel at his capacity for completely reconceiving his film in the editing room and finding a way to create a great work of art despite the fact that he had written and shot a relatively pedestrian movie. Such relentless pursuit of perfection was incomprehensible to me.
The lights finally came on. There was no more film to see.
It was dark outside, almost as dark as it had been inside the screening room. The studio lot was deserted. In the distance, I saw my rented car.