O, Africa! Page 7

  “These are bad men, Micah.”

  “Thanks for that, Itz.”

  “Bad?” Mr. Waldo purrs silkily, meeting the brothers in the center of the lobby. “Nah, we ain’t bad. We’re good men. Sweet. Sugarplum fairies.” Then, taking an interest, “This your brother?”

  “Yes. Shake the man’s hand. Izzy.”

  “Isidor Grand.”

  Extending the thick-callused hand. “Byron Marcus Waldo, charmed t’make your acquaintanceship.”

  “It wasn’t smart of you to come here,” Micah says.

  “Smart?!” Bumpy says, delivering sharp kicks to the stomach of the sixty-year-old doorman. “Who! Ain’t! Smart?!”

  Izzy runs with flapping forearms to the doorman’s aid, sliding between Ellsworth’s pointed shoe and the prone figure just in time to intercept another blow. Bumpy hoists Izzy to his feet, holding him by the tie like it was a noose.

  “C’I cut this cherry blossom?”

  “You wouldn’t hurt someone wearing glasses, would you?”

  “You ain’t.”

  Izzy reaches into his bag and pulls onto his face a fake pair of frames.

  “Devil his due.” Bumpy laughs, releasing him. “He got me there!”

  “You shouldn’t have brought this business here,” says Micah, ignoring the sideshow.

  “Leaving aside you in no position to instruct how I conduct myself, and that El-Ray and I go wherever we please in this motherfucker, I ain’t come bringing business. Santa Claus comes bearing gifts.” And here Mr. Waldo presents Micah with a small ivory-colored gift box. The box is of a size that might hold an engagement ring and is tied with a girl’s red bow. “Now, what could be in this here?” Rattling it, acorn sounds resonating off Rorschach-patterned marble. “Could be something you want? Or something Mr. Waldo want? … Could be one of your boys’ fingers? Or they toes? Hey, El-Ray, which little piggy is this?”

  “Pinkie-toe piggy the best!” Dragging Izzy into the center of the lobby by his shirt collar, heels squeaking over tile. “Pinkie-toe piggy ran all the way home!”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  “I didn’t.” Mr. Waldo placing the box in Micah’s hands.

  “Listen, look.” Micah fumbles for his wallet. “I have money. I can get the money.”

  “It’s not lettuce interest me.”

  “What is it you want, then?”

  “I want in. All my pencils are sharpened, my ice cubes are smooth, and I want in.”

  “I’m not certain I follow.”

  “I want you ’splain to me, Mr. Movie-Man, how it is you get from a couple cans of junkyard tin to people twenty, thirty feet tall up there on that silver screen?”

  “The mechanics of projection are actually quite simple.” Izzy’s professional exuberance overtaking him. “The filmstrip passes through the—”

  “You misunderstand me.” Waving the science away like a lady with a fan in a balcony box. “It was a question of a more rhetorical nature. I got no quarrel with you personal, y’understand. No quarrel with the Moses people. Way I see it, niggers and the Moses people have lots in common, looking to find a way in. Wig men landed here, but niggers and the Moses people, we made this motherfucker.”

  “Made it, yessir!”

  “And we making it still, here, right now. But what I don’t understand is you got a mechanism reach millions. Millions people at a single go. And the best you come up with some crazy-ass cracker in a pair of glasses running ’round setting himself on fire, all other kinds of tomfoolery?”

  “I think he’s talking about Henry.”

  “Thanks, Itz.”

  “Seems you don’t understand just what it is you got! Paul Robeson—a giant—has to run off to Limeyland to actualize himself, and here you is with actors slipping themselves over banana peels? Well, it occurred to Mr. Waldo, nobody never made a movie ’bout the story of the African continent, what all my little ancestors been through, slave times and sharecroppers, so forth and et cetera, up through to the present day. You follow?”

  “I believe I’m beginning to.”

  “So I got to thinking. And El-Ray here, El-Ray’s blessed with a touch of the poet, and we worked out a little scenario.”

  “That true, Bumpy?” Micah asks the fledgling screenwriter.

  “Don’t call me Bumpy,” he says, releasing Izzy and handing the cameraman several neatly folded pages, upon the first of which is typewritten:

  O, AFRICA!

  A Historical-Tragical Motion Picture

  Scenario in Four Parts

  by

  Byron Marcus Waldo

  &

  Ellsworth Raymond Johnson

  “O, Africa!,” Izzy marvels, staring down at the cover page. “Good title. What’s the story?”

  “I trust you read that later and find out,” Bumpy says with goodly authorial pride. “Let’s just say a person can get a lot of reading done upstate. Learn oneself some history, locate oneself some politics.”

  “It’s just funny about the title.”

  “That shit ain’t funny.” Bumpy shrugs. “There are no accidents, motherfucker. Little nigger associate of yours been running his mouth all over town about how the fat man’s planning an expedition.”

  “Yes, it’s true,” says Izzy, surprising himself by committing to the idea. “We’re considering going to Africa as soon as we finish our latest picture.”

  “No we’re not.” Micah grinding out an imaginary cigarette on his brother’s shoe. “Listen, Mr. Waldo, Ellsworth, I appreciate what it is I think you’re suggesting here, but you need to understand the reason I got into this business is because it beats working.”

  “No it ain’t,” Mr. Waldo says. “You better than that. Don’t you understand? You got a tool! Sympathy, too. Why else you making time with that sweet princess up in Harlem? Early’s sister?”

  “Mr. Waldo connecting the dots!” Bumpy in gospel tones, punching his own head for emphasis. “Mr. Waldo is a man of wisdom!”

  “I understand. Tired of white meat, go for the drumstick,” Mr. Waldo says. “Stealing that sweet jelly from good ol’ boys like El-Ray here.”

  “Where my jelly?” Bumpy hopping from foot to foot. “Where my jelly at?!”

  “You mean Rose?” Micah says, his voice crossing its fingers. “I’ve got a dozen others like her. She doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Red, Red, Red.” Shaking his head back and forth, Mr. Waldo cups the filmmaker’s cheek with a hand as hard and dry as tortoiseshell, a hand that eclipses half of Micah’s face. “I spotted the two you together at the Honeypot. Lookit, sonny boy, I seen my share of fellas trolling round uptown, want to know what a black jelly bean taste like. But that ain’t how you look at her. You’re like a five-year-old running home with a Popsicle on a hundred-degree day. You want to lick her till she’s gone, but you’re protective, too. Nah, Red, you ain’t dropping her so fast.”

  “Mr. Waldo,” Bumpy says, “how about we pack Double-Dutch’s wife and kids in the Model A, take them on a tour of his favorite haunts up in Niggerland?”

  “I’d prefer it if you didn’t do that.”

  “That’s your preference, huh?” Mr. Waldo deadpans. “Well, that’s worth more than thirteen thousand dollars. But like I said previous, this ain’t about lettuce. Lemme ask you something, Ginger. You think it’s an accident brought us together? You think it’s an accident brought you to my card table? You think it’s an accident brought that sorry-ass pipsqueak into my orbit talking about making movies in Africa? You think it’s an accident my first job come to New York was flipping light switches for Hasids on Saturdays? You think it’s an accident Lincoln named Abraham? Why you think the Moses people invented Hollywood? It’s on account of Chooka, your crazy-Jew Festival of Lights. Moses people got knowledge about light!”

  “Let there be light!” From the choir. “First order of business: Let there be light!”

  “You a member the chosen people, Ginger. And you just been chosen for this moth
erfucker.”

  And then, incredibly, Mr. Waldo and his associate abandon the scene they’ve created in the lobby, stepping out into the midday scorch to begin strolling down the street on this fine Juneteenth day. They walk in their outrageous getups without shame, as if it were 125th and Lenox, tipping their hats to mink-stoled society ladies, dog walkers, hot-dog vendors, and Central Park kibitzers as they go. Micah looks at Izzy, who looks down at his brother’s hand holding the gift box. The ribbon is pulled. The box opens. Inside, swathed in cotton, a tiny green Christmas light.

  FOUR

  “You rewrote it?” asks Micah, sitting on a stool, glossy strips of celluloid surrounding him and Izzy like salamis hanging from a delicatessen ceiling. Days had passed since their encounter with Mr. Waldo and Bumpy in the lobby. And, while it was a relief for the brothers to distract themselves with work, this wasn’t the first time in their professional lives that the editing room came to feel like a bunker to which they could retreat from worry and adult responsibilities.

  “A light editing job.” Izzy holding a black strip up to a crook-armed architect’s lamp, considering it, and discarding the frames in a nearby bin. “I just added some shot descriptions, technical cues, that sort of thing.”

  “The slave picture? Do they know you worked on it?”

  “God no!” Threading film through the Moviola. “They’re your associates, Micah. I wouldn’t even know how to contact them.”

  “Listen, even if we were to try to make it, no one would see it. Remember a little picture called Intolerance? The one where Griffith thought it’d be a good idea to rebuild ancient Rome?”

  “It was Babylon.” Testy, facedown in the viewer. “And yes, I remember Intolerance. It’s a mad film, but I love it.”

  “Right, and it finished him off! And y’know why? Because it was an idea picture. And people don’t go to the movies for ideas, Izzy. You want to send a message, try Western Union.” Micah points to an adjacent wall upon which are tacked three ancient telegrams that Marblestone had sent to the brothers soon after they’d signed on with Imperial. The first of them reads, REMEMBER: IT’S SHOW BUSINESS. NOT SHOW FUCKING NICE.

  A debt was hanging over him. Micah, who above all cherished freedom and flight, was weighed down by the prospect of having to make decisions not entirely of his own volition, afflicted by a terrible sense of the shuttering of possibilities. (He suspected that aging must be something like this: a persistent feeling of things closing off, of walls inching in.) Money. Career. Reputation. Family. Sex. The Future. These were the tarot cards he had for years enjoyed shuffling, teasing out how potentialities might be revealed through recombination and juxtaposition, only now to find the deck handled by others. Stationing himself in the tight cuboid of the editing room only amplified Micah’s claustrophobia. Marblestone’s money woes hanging over him, his mistress’s inchoate demands pressing in on him, his dealings with Mr. Waldo hardly over, Micah forced himself to file each of these worries away for now, hunkered down, and turned his best professional attention to the editing of Quicktime.

  Traditionally a five-month window existed between a film’s production and its release, but Henry Till pictures had a tighter editing schedule. With his evangelical belief in honoring what audiences found funny, the performer had pioneered the practice of preview screenings. That meant Micah and Izzy needed to have a rough assembly of Quicktime ready in just six weeks in order to screen for a test group, weigh feedback, hold reshoots if necessary, and have the picture locked in time for prints to be struck and delivered for the October premiere.

  They are editing one of the Coney Island sequences. Till and Mildred are relegated to the Thunderbolt’s rickety last carriage. As the roller coaster traces its sine curve, Till is smacked in the face with a variety of objects from up front: a woman’s stole, a half-eaten hot dog, a burning cigarette, and, finally, a man’s toupee. The sequence had been a difficult one to shoot: five go-rounds on the coaster with Spiro facing the actors, operating a camera rig bolted backward to the next car, and abashed Billy Conklin seated beside him, tossing miscellany at the star’s million-dollar face. Now came a fury of assemblage, judging the best takes from hundreds of feet of work print—alternating between long shots of the coaster, medium shots of the carriage, tight shots of Till, and reaction shots of Mildred—for maximum spatial coherences, velocity, and laughs.

  “Well, it so happens the scenario they came up with is pretty good,” Izzy volunteers. “Certainly not like anything we’ve worked on before.”

  “Even if I agree with you”—Micah offering Izzy an alternate take—“the third act degenerates into a crazy kind of revenge picture.”

  “A black exploitation film!” Izzy exclaims, verging on word coinage, discarding one take for excessive camera wobble, another on account of overexposed flash frames. He makes his selection and marks with a black grease pencil held between gloved fingers the start and end of the shot—sixteen uniformly spaced squares, just two-thirds of a second.

  “But you’re forgetting something,” Micah says, crossing the words “Till, Hot Dog” from a shot list scribbled on a chalkboard. “No one will go to see it.”

  “I don’t know. There might be interest in this kind of thing. Look at Gance, or Murnau, or Eisenstein, or Dreyer, or Oscar Micheaux.”

  “I do look at them. I look at those guys every chance I get. But we’re not in the same league as they are. We’re not even in the same industry as they are.”

  “Why not?” Izzy protests. “Why couldn’t we be?”

  Micah points to the wall upon which is pinned the second of Marblestone’s yellowing imperatives—REMEMBER: THE PROPERTY MAKES THE ARTIST. THE ARTIST DOES NOT MAKE THE PROPERTY.

  They are sitting on stools in front of a pair of upright Moviolas, huge industrial devices that look like oversize sewing machines. Indeed, there was something of the seamstress’s art involved in film editing, its terminology reminiscent of needlework: threading, cutting, splicing, pieces hanging from pins over trim bins; women’s work done with pencils and tape, glue and gloves, scissors and razor blades. For all its old-fashioned qualities, however, editing represented to Izzy the theoretical essence of cinema—the single aspect of moviemaking that could not be duplicated elsewhere.

  Izzy was happy to relinquish control of the film shoots to Micah—with his nose for sniffing out and synthesizing the best of his collaborators’ talents, his gift for sustaining a buzzing, partylike atmosphere on the set—and preferred the relative solitude of the editing room. It was here that the film returned to him, here where he could sift through shots like a frontiersman panning for gold, here where a procession of meaning could be welded together. Here where Izzy wielded the higher math.

  And it was math: the work he performed pinned to the Moviola as theoretical in nature as it was commercial or artistic. Moreover, the grammar of film editing—the demands it exacted of viewers—was making its influence felt everywhere. Things were moving faster. Connections were becoming increasingly unspoken, subliminal. Izzy felt the impact of the new medium when tacking through the streets of Manhattan, pelleted by lighted signs and billboards, or flipping through the pages of one of the glossy new magazines, advertisements stacked atop one another like wooden blocks. He recognized cinema’s imprimatur in the general daily sense one had that the thing you were engaged in doing could, at any moment, be supplanted by activities more vivid and enthralling. These crowding pressures left Izzy feeling lonely and uneasy, and he often questioned if the practice of his chosen medium was entirely healthy.

  Izzy maintained a prayerful climate in the editing room because he knew he was mucking around with immutable forces. That here, working his temporal sorcery, he had entered deep into time’s tickwise passage. That here time was made a liquid, fungible thing. Just twenty years before, Albert Einstein—a figure who, with his frizzy mop of hair and pool-eyed expressiveness, looked incidentally not unlike a comic film star—had worked out his theory of special relativity, and t
hough Izzy would be hard-pressed to explain the mechanics of the idea, he knew that his own work existed on a continuum with the physicist’s. The central conceit was the same. Perspective changes the object. Newtonian notions no longer apply. Distance and time are dependent upon the observer. Looking at something changes it.

  “You talk to Arthur?” Izzy asks.

  “No, I’ve been dodging his calls while he’s here,” Micah says. “But I spoke with Abernathy, and from the sounds of it, Marbles’s story is legit. On the Ferris wheel, how bad did he say things are?”

  “Bad,” Izzy answers, pointing to the third and final of the mogul’s proverbs—REMEMBER: PRODUCERS DO NOT PRODUCE BECAUSE THEY ARE PRODUCTIVE. PRODUCERS PRODUCE BECAUSE THEY KEEP PUTTING UP THE MONEY, THE FUCKING IDIOTS.

  To a disquietingly audible trio of popped joints (back, knee, elbow), Micah lifts himself from his spot and begins pacing, thinking. “The Harlem goons aside and taking Marblestone’s money problems out of it, what I can’t figure is why you’re so keen on this all of a sudden. You’ve always been a cautious fellow, Itz, and this has the makings of a very difficult trip. What gives?”

  What Izzy couldn’t explain to Micah—because his brother suffered from a surfeit of it—was that the answer was love. Or the opposite of love, which Izzy knew to be not hate but self-abnegation. He had decided that if there could not be love, at least let there be change, renewal, self-discovery, adventure, something, some wild blood transfusion to act as consolation. The prospect of being away from everything he knew—from New York and Los Angeles, from little editing rooms and fastidiously appointed bachelor apartments—in exchange for some alien, sun-blasted realm came as a great comfort to him. Since Marblestone had first mentioned it, after Izzy had gotten over the incident with Howard, he had thought of little else.

  “It’d be different,” Izzy downplays. “It’d be a new kind of picture for us. And you’re forgetting—the Isidor Grand Savings and Loan is officially closed for business. You might not have any choice in the matter.”