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He didn’t see the movie until he returned from Europe, several years later. It was no longer in the theaters, but you could now rent movies prerecorded onto cylinders, and insert them into your TV at home (or, if you had an older model, there was a second creature you could add to your TV so that they seemed to be copulating). The movie was called Road Rage, a Dreamland Pictures release. In it, a maniac liked to drive around shooting people at random from his vehicle. The film was told largely from his point of view. In some scenes, rather than shoot at other cars or pedestrians, he simply drove their vehicle off the road, jumped out of his own vehicle, and attacked them with something more intimate like a knife or claw hammer. Some of these killings were faked. Board was certain that some of them weren’t.

He wasn’t sure how they had intended the movie to end, originally. No doubt, the character he played had been planned to be just another victim. But the victim had turned the tables on the psychopathic lead character. On his TV screen, Board watched himself shooting almost directly at the camera. The view became disorienting as the camera began to fall, but then the angle cut away to a close-up of the road killer’s dying face. His rasping, gurgling death rattle that Board hadn’t hung around to witness personally.

The following scene showed the road killer on a morgue slab, with the film’s detective hero thanking the potential victim for putting a stop to the rampage. The victim in this scene (supposedly an off-duty security guard) was a man who bore a superficial resemblance to Board (crepe hair goatee glued on with spirit gum).

John Board received no mention in the credits, either for his brief acting or camera work. He wasn’t incensed by this. He wouldn’t be going over to Dreamland to demand that Dominic Coltello pay him for his screen time. Anyway, a few months ago Dom Coltello had been gunned down in a restaurant with his mouth full of pasta, apparently by an Assassin from a big West Coast gang. Hence, Board’s return to the States. It might seem unusual that one Assassin chief might want another dead (especially where Coltello had been a Medium, besides), but it made for good crime scene photos. Good human drama. Of course, there was always the possibility that the hit had been ordered by a rival movie studio.

Board wondered if Louise Brooks had ever seen the movie Road Rage. If she had recognized him from a distance, in it. If so, he never saw her again to ask her.

She did make it to Europe eventually…but to Germany, to play Lulu in G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box.

And while Board was still in France, she had married Eddie Sutherland, director of her movie It’s the Old Army Game.