Remake by Connie Willis
“Get drunk,” she said.
“You want Fred drunk?” I said. “I can do that, too. Frame 97-412 and freeze.” Fred Astaire stopped in midturn, smiling. “Frame 97—” I said, and the screen went silver and then to legalese. “The character of Fred Astaire is currently unavailable for fibe-op transmission. Copyright ownership suit ILMGM v. RKO-Warner…”
“Oops. Fred’s in litigation. Too bad. You should have taken that paste-up while you had the chance.”
She wasn’t looking at the screen. She was looking at me, her gaze alert, focused, the way it had been on the Piccolino. “If you’re so sure what I want is impossible, why are you trying so hard to talk me out of it?”
Because I don’t want to see you down on Hollywood Boulevard in a torn-net leotard. I don’t want to have to stick your face in a River Phoenix movie so Mayer’s boss can pop you.
“You’re right,” I said. “Why the hell am I?” I turned to the comp and said, “Print accesses, all files.” I ripped the hardcopy out of the printer. “Here. Take my fibe-op accesses and make all the disks you want. Practice till your little feet bleed.” I thrust it at her.
She didn’t take it.
“Go on,” I said, and pressed it into her unresponsive hand. “Who am I to stand in your way? In the immortal words of Leo the Lion, anything’s possible. Who cares if the studios have got all the copyrights and the fibe-op sources and the digitizers and the accesses? We’ll sew our own costumes. We’ll build our own sets. And then, right before we open, Bebe Daniels’ll break her leg and you’ll have to go on for her!”
She crumpled up the hardcopy, looking like she’d like to throw it at me. “How would you know what’s possible and impossible? You don’t even try. Fred Astaire—”
“Is tied up in court, but don’t let that stop you. There’s still Ann Miller. And Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. And Gene Kelly. Oh, wait, I forgot, you’re too good for Gene Kelly. Tommy Tune. And don’t forget Ruby Keeler.”
She threw it.
I picked the hardcopy up and uncrumpled it. “‘Temper, temper, Scarlett,’” I drawled, smoothing it out. I tucked it in the pocket of her pinafore and patted it. “Now get out there on that stage. It’s show time! The whole cast’s counting on you. Remember you’re going out there a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star.”
Her hand clenched, but she didn’t throw the hardcopy again. She wheeled, skirt flaring like Eleanor’s white one. I had to close my eyes against the sudden image of Fred and Eleanor dancing on the polished floor, the phony stars shimmering in endless ripples, and missed Alis’s exit.
She slammed the door behind her, and the image receded. I opened it and leaned out. “Be so good you’ll make me hate you,” I called after her, but she was already gone.
SCENE: Busby Berkeley production number. Giant revolving fountain with chorus girls in gold lamé on each level, filling champagne glasses in the flowing fountain. Move in to close-up of champagne glass, then to close-up of bubbles, inside each bubble a chorus girl in gold-sequined tap pants and halter top, tap-dancing.
Alis didn’t come back again after that. Heada went out of her way to keep me posted—she hadn’t found a dancing teacher, the Viamount takeover was a done deal, Columbia Tri-Star was doing a remake of Somewhere in Time.
“There was this Columbia exec at the party,” Heada told me, perched on my bed. “He said they’ve been doing experiments with images projected into negative matter regions, and there’s a measurable lag. He says they’re this close”—she did the thumb-and-forefinger bit—“to inventing time travel.”
“Great,” I said. “Alis can go back to the thirties and take dancing lessons from Busby Berkeley himself.”
Only she didn’t like Busby Berkeley, and after taking all the AS’s out of Footlight Parade and Gold Diggers of 1933, neither did I.
She was right about there not being any dancing in his movies. There was a glimpse of tapping feet in 42nd Street, a rehearsal going on in the background of a plot exposition scene, a few bars in “Pettin’ in the Park” for Ruby, who danced about as well as Judy Garland. Otherwise it was all neon violins and revolving wedding cakes and fountains and posed platinum-haired chorus girls, every one of whom had probably been a studio exec’s popsy. Overhead kaleidoscope shots and pans and low-angle shots from underneath chorus girls’ spread-apart legs that would have given the Hays Office fits. But no dancing.
Lots of drinking, though—speakeasies and backstage parties and silver flasks stuck in chorus girls’ garters. Even a production number in a bar, with Ruby Keeler as Shanghai Lil, a popsy who’d done a lot of hooch and a lot of sailors. A hymn to alcohol’s finer qualities.
Of which there were many. It was cheap, it didn’t do as much damage as redline, and if it didn’t give you the blessed forgetfulness of chooch, it stopped the flashing and put a nice soft-focus on things in general. Which made it easier to work on Mayer’s list.
It also came in assorted flavors—martinis for Topper, elderberry wine for Arsenic and Old Lace, a nice Chianti for Silence of the Lambs. In between I drank champagne, which had apparently been in every movie ever made, and cursed Mayer, and deleted beakers and laboratory flasks from the cantina scene in Star Wars.
I went to the next party, and the one after that, but Alis wasn’t there. Vincent was, demonstrating another program, and the studio exec, still pitching time travel to the Marilyns, and Heada.
“That stuff wasn’t klieg after all,” she told me. “It was some designer chooch from Brazil.”
“Which explains why I keep hearing the Beguine,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Nothing,” I said, looking around the room. Vincent’s program must be a weeper simulator. Jackie Cooper was up on the screen, in a battered top hat and a polka-dot tie, blubbering over his dead dog.
“She’s not here,” Heada said.
“I was looking for Mayer,” I said. “He’s going to have to pay me double for The Philadelphia Story. The thing’s full of alcohol. Sherry before lunch, martinis out by the pool, champagne, cocktails, hangovers, ice packs. Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart. The whole cast’s stinking.”
I took a swig from the crème de menthe I had left over from Days of Wine and Roses. “The visuals will take at least three weeks, and that doesn’t include the lines. ‘I have the hiccups. I wonder if I might borrow a drink.’”
“She was here earlier,” Heada said. “One of the execs was hitting on her.”
“No, no, I say, ‘I wonder if I might borrow a drink,’ and you say, ‘Certainly. Coals to Newcastle.’” I took another drink.
“Should you be doing so much alcohol?” Heada, the chooch queen, said.
“I have to,” I said. “It’s the bad effect of watching all these movies. Thank goodness ILMGM’s remaking them so no one else will be corrupted.” I drank some more crème de menthe.
Heada looked at me sharply, like she’d been doing klieg again. “ILMGM’s doing a remake of Time After Time. The exec told Alis he thought he could get her a part in it.”
“Great,” I said, and went over to look at Vincent’s program.
Audrey Hepburn was up on the screen now, standing in the rain and sobbing over her cat.
“This is our new tears program,” Vincent said. “It’s still in the experimental stage.”
He said something to his remote, and the screen split. A computerized didge-actor sobbed alongside Audrey, clutching what looked like a yellow rug. Tears weren’t the only thing in the experimental stage.
“Tears are the most difficult form of water simulation to do,” Vincent said. The Tin Woodman was up there now, rusting his joints. “It’s because tears aren’t really water. They’ve got mucoproteins and lysozymes and a high salt content. It affects the index of refraction and makes them hard to reproduce,” he said, sounding defensive.
He should. The didge-woodman’s tears looked like Vaseline, oozing out of digitized eyes. “You ever program VR’s?” I sa
“A virtual? Sure. I can do helmet and full-body data. Is this something you’re working on for Mayer?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Could you have the person take, say, Ginger Rogers’s place, so she’s dancing with Fred Astaire?”
“Sure. Foot and knee hookups, nerve stimulators. It’ll feel like she’s really dancing.”
“Not feel like,” I said. “Can you make it so she actually dances?”
He thought about it awhile, frowning at the screen. The Tin Woodman had disappeared. Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart were at the airport saying good-bye.
“Maybe,” Vincent said. “I guess. We could put on some sole-sensors and rig a feedback enhance to exaggerate her body movements so she could shuffle her feet back and forth.”
I looked at the screen. There were tears welling up in Ingrid’s eyes, glimmering like the real thing. They probably weren’t. It was probably the eighth take, or the eighteenth, and a makeup girl had come out with glycerine drops or onion juice to get the right effect. It wasn’t the tears that did it anyway. It was the face, that sweet, sad face that knew it could never have what it wanted.
“We could do sweat enhancers,” Vincent said. “Armpits, neck.”
“Never mind,” I said, still watching Ingrid. The screen split and a didge-actress stood in front of a didge-airplane, oozing baby oil.
“How about a directional sound hookup for the taps and endorphins?” Vincent said. “She’ll swear she was really dancing with Gene Kelly.”
I drank the rest of the crème de menthe and handed him the empty bottle and then went back up to my room and hacked away at The Philadelphia Story for two more days, trying to think of a good reason for Jimmy Stewart to carry Katharine Hepburn and sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” without being sloshed, and pretending I needed one.
Mayer would hardly care, and neither would his tight-assed boss. And nobody else watched liveactions. If the plot didn’t make sense, the hackates who did the remake could worry about it. They’d probably remake the remake anyway. Which was also on the list.
I called it up. High Society. Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly. Frank Sinatra playing Jimmy Stewart. I ff’d through the last half of it, searching for inspiration, but it was even more awash with AS’s. And it was a musical. I went back to Story and tried again.
It was no use. Jimmy Stewart had to be drunk in the swimming pool scene to tell Katharine Hepburn he loved her. Katharine had to be drunk for her fiancé to dump her and for her to realize she still loved Cary Grant.
I gave up on the scene and went back to the one before it. It was just as bad. There was too much exposition to cut it, and most of it was in Jimmy Stewart’s badly slurred voice. I rewound to the beginning of the scene and turned the sound up, getting a match so I could overdub his dialogue.
“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?” Jimmy Stewart said, leaning belligerently toward Cary Grant.
“Mute,” I said, and watched Cary Grant say something imperturbable, his face revealing nothing.
“Insufficient,” the comp said. “Additional match data needed.”
“Yeah.” I turned the sound up again.
“Liz says you are,” Jimmy Stewart said.
I rew’d to the beginning of the scene and froze it for the frame number, and then went through the scene again.
“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?” Jimmy Stewart said. “Liz says you are.”
I blanked the screen, and accessed Heada. “I need to find out where Alis is,” I said.
“Why?” she said suspiciously.
“I think I’ve found her a dancing teacher,” I said. “I need her class schedule.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know it.”
“Come on, you know everything,” I said. “What happened to ‘I think you should help her’?”
“What happened to, ‘I stick my neck out for nobody’?”
“I told you, I found her somebody to teach her to dance. An old woman out in Palo Alto. Ex-chorus girl. She was in Finian’s Rainbow and Funny Girl back in the seventies.”
She was still suspicious, but she gave it to me. Alis was taking Moviemaking 101, basic comp graphics stuff, and a film hist class, The Musical 1939-1980. It was clear out in Burbank.
I took the skids and a bottle of Public Enemy gin and went out to find her. The class was in an old studio building UCLA had bought when the skids were first built, on the second floor.
I opened the door a crack and looked in. The prof, who looked like Michael Caine in Educating Rita, a movie with way too many AS’s in it, was standing in front of a blank, old-fashioned comp monitor with a remote, holding forth to a scattering of students, mostly hackates taking it for their movie content elective, some Marilyns, Alis.
“Contrary to popular belief, the computer graphics revolution didn’t kill the musical,” the prof said. “The musical kicked off,” he paused to let the class titter, “in 1965.”
He turned to the monitor, which was no bigger than my array screens, and clicked the remote. Behind him, cowboys appeared, leaping around a train station. Oklahoma.
“The musicals, with their contrived story lines, unrealistic song-and-dance sequences, and simplistic happy endings, no longer reflected the audience’s world.”
I glanced at Alis, wondering how she was taking this. She wasn’t. She was watching the cowboys, with that intent, focused look, and her lips were moving, counting the beats, memorizing the steps.
“… which explains why the musical, unlike film noir and the horror movie, has not been revived in spite of the availability of such stars as Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. The musical is irrelevant. It has nothing to say to modern audiences. For example, Broadway Melody of 1940 …”
I retreated up the uneven steps and sat there, working on the gin and waiting for him to finish. He did, finally, and the class trickled out. A trio of faces, talking about a rumor that Disney was going to use warmbodies in Grand Hotel, a couple of hackates, the prof, snorting flake on his way down the steps, another hackate.
I finished off the gin. Nobody else came out, and I wondered if I’d somehow missed Alis. I went to see. The steps had gotten steeper and more uneven while I sat there. I slipped once and grabbed onto the banister, and then stood there a minute, listening. There was a clatter and then a thunk from inside the room, and the faint sound of music. The janitor?
I opened the door and leaned against it.
Alis, in a sky-blue dress with a bustle, and a flowered hat, was dancing in the middle of the room, a blue parasol perched on her shoulder. A song was coming from the comp monitor, and Alis was high-stepping in time with a line of bustled, parasoled girls on the monitor behind her.
I didn’t recognize the movie. Carousel, maybe? The Harvey Girls? The girls were replaced by high-stepping boys in derbies and straw hats, and Alis stopped, breathing hard, and pulled the remote out of her high-buttoned shoe. She rewound, stuck the remote back in her shoe, and propped the parasol against her shoulder. The girls appeared again, and Alis pointed her toe and did a turn.
She had piled the desks in stacks on either side of the room, but there still wasn’t enough room. When she swung into the second turn, her outstretched hand crashed into them, nearly knocking them over. She reached for the remote again, rew’d, and saw me. She clicked the screen off and took a step backward. “What do you want?”
I waggled my finger at her. “Give you a little advice. ‘Don’t want what you can’t have.’ Michael J. Fox, For Love or Money. Bar scene, party, nightclub, three bottles of champagne. Only not anymore. Yours truly has done his job. Right down the sink.”
I swung my arm to demonstrate, like James Mason in A Star Is Born, and the chairs went over.
“You’re splatted,” she said.
“‘Nope.’” I grinned. “Gary Cooper in The Plainsman” I
I tried to hand her the bottle.
She took another protective step toward the monitor. “You’re drunk.”
“Bingo,” I said. “‘Very drunk indeed,’ as Audrey Hepburn would say. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. A movie with a happy ending.”
“Why’d you come here?” she said. “What is it you want?”
I took a swig out of the bottle, remembered it was empty, and looked at it sadly. “Came to tell you the movies aren’t real life. Just because you want something doesn’t mean you can have it. Came to tell you to go home before they remake you. Audrey should’ve gone home to Tulip, Texas. Came to tell you to go home to Carval.” I waited, swaying, for her to get the reference.
“Andy Hardy Has Too Much to Drink” she said. “He’s the one who needs to go home.”
The screen faded to black for a few frames, and then I was sitting halfway down the steps, with Alis leaning over me. “Are you all right?” she said, and tears were glimmering in her eyes like stars.
“I’m fine,” I said. “‘Alcohol is the great level-el-ler,’ as Jimmy Stewart would say. Need to pour some on these steps.”
“I don’t think you should take the skids in your condition,” she said.
“We’re all on the skids,” I said. “Only place left.”
“Tom,” she said, and there was another fade to black, and Fred and Ginger were on both walls, sipping martinis by the pool.