Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival Page 15

  "You can see for yourself, I've got everything you could want for putting on a fine amusement show."

  "Well, as I mentioned over the telephone," Jesse said, "What I'm really interested in is a camera. A motion picture camera. Yours were the closest one I could find."

  A devilish gleam filled Scoble's eye. "Oh, the Kinetograph. A most remarkable novelty. Let me show you. Wait right here!"

  Scoble scurried off up the stairs and soon returned with a black and silver box a little smaller than a foot locker, with a hand crank on its right side. Scoble handed off the device to Jesse, gingerly, like a mother passing her infant into the arms of another.

  "Wow, this is it, huh?"

  "That's it! All the wonders of the Orient, the most sensual dancers of Arabia, the exotic flora and fauna of the Congo—all of it can be brought to the wondrous eyes and pocketbooks of your audiences with This. Little. Box," Scoble said, his grin revealing that sharkish smile.

  "I'm not interested in exploitation," Jesse responded.

  "How's that?"

  "I want to bring truth to the people."

  A mildly sour look crept across Scoble's face. "Let me tell you something, since I like you. The public is fickle." He gave a beat, for good measure. "A year ago you could show them just about anything so long as it was captured by this Kinetograph, and they'd pay for a glimpse. But now? Now, I think you're going to have to give them something they haven't seen before. Something for them to get excited about."

  "Oh, don't worry," Jesse said. "It will be very exciting."

  Jesse had Scoble's attention now, and the old man seemed to be in no hurry to see his company out. "Come upstairs, I want to show you something," he said.

  The carpeted staircase at the back of the room had been cordoned off with a velvet rope. Scoble moved one of the stanchions off to the side, and motioned for Jesse to pass. As Jesse made his way up past the second floor landing, he stole a glance at the attached bedroom and bathroom, and realized this was not just Scoble's shop, but his home.

  "It's the next floor," the man said.

  Jesse kept walking. At the top of the staircase, he saw what the showman had brought him up to see. Scoble had built a personal screening room. Here, he could entertain guests while screening the latest minute-long amusements that he and his competitors were cranking out for the roadshow market.

  "Take as long as you'd like, I've got everything you can imagine," Scoble said. "I'll fetch us a couple of drinks. Pick your poison."

  "You got any tea?"

  Scoble gave a half-cocked nod, and went downstairs. Jesse spent the afternoon, curtains drawn, viewing strips of celluloid projected onto the wall. He was studying just as he had at UCLA. Getting a feel for the cinematic lexicon that an audience of the day would possess. What inspired their passions? What made them laugh? Cry? Grow angry?

  In one short, a man was watering his garden when a boy, hidden behind bushes, stepped on the hose, stopping the flow of water. The man looked down the business end of the hose for a clog, and when the boy lifted his foot, the backed-up surge of water blasted the gardener' face. The man then chased the rascal off-screen.

  The entire thing was filmed as one continuous take from a single, locked-off camera angle. It was incredibly simple. Despite its banal lack of sophistication, this was the most successful motion picture ever that had ever been brought to market, according to Scoble. It was so popular, in fact, they had to re-shoot it for a second round of prints because the original was so badly worn.

  Jesse knew that if this simple novelty was the apex of the cinema of the screen, he could do better.

  "What if I told you I wanted to make a longer story?" Jesse posited. "One with more than one recording, and sort of string them all together? A bigger kind of film, where we can move through time and location in a way that the live theatre could never do?"

  He noticed he was mimicking Scoble's own grandiose flair back at the showman. "We can have drama, and passion, and revenge. And action, I mean real danger and spectacle! And, and, and we'll get the biggest stars of the stage to be in it. Tight shots, you know, real close up on their faces where we can see them really emoting, and we can feel right alongside them."

  "I don't know," Scoble said, running a hand through his uncompromising mane. "If we do that, the actor's faces will be the size of a doorway. Won't people find that rather...odd?"

  "Even better. They'll tell their friends they'll never get a better look at their favorite performers, warts and all."

  Scoble's eyes drifted out beyond the pedestrian confines of those four walls, out towards spectacle and profits yet unimagined. "An interesting proposition."

  Jesse leaned in closer now. He just had to reel Scoble in, and he knew what language men like him spoke. "I've already got a silent partner," Jesse said, which was true enough. "He's backing me, five hundred dollars. Let's go in on this together—you give me another five hundred, we distribute this thing nationally. I only ask for the right to first exhibition, next month."

  The profiteer absentmindedly snapped on his suspenders, a faraway twinkle continuing to hold his eyes captive. "A most interesting proposition," he murmured once more, under his breath.

  At some point in the middle of that night, Jesse's pen slipped from his hand as he fell to sleep on the floor. Pages of handwritten script surrounded him, like the unfinished thoughts of a madman gripped in the thrall of some conspiracy.

  After waking to the early morning light, Jesse hopped on a streetcar and headed to the telegram office. He sent a message to the Bridgetown saloon, addressed to "Ol' Eagle Eyes." This was a secret handshake between Clayburn (the barkeep), Mr. Black, and whoever was trying to reach the exile. A secret to which Jesse was now party to.

  "Progress in Windy City goes well," the message read. "Will return in one week with footage."

  Scoble had a small, hand-operated printing press, which he used to advertise his traveling exhibitions in whatever town happened to be in his crosshairs that day. Jesse used it to run off a hundred copies of a cattle call for extras. He posted these flyers all along the power lines and public spaces of downtown Chicago.

  While Jesse corralled the human scenery, Scoble visited a local Chicago playhouse and wrangled up the troupe's supporting players to star in the film for a flat fee. Scoble, like most men of his age and profession, knew more than one person who owned him a favor. Making the most of this, he hustled Chicago's playhouses for a recognizable name willing to star in his project. But the "flickers" were a vulgar medium, and Scoble was on the long-tail of his career. Who he ended up with was Floyda Marsh, a soprano diva who was also past her sell-by date. Her career had peaked on Broadway in the Reconstruction era, before her gradual tectonic shift westward brought her to an extended engagement in Chicago.

  Jesse didn't have a part for her, but Scoble's enthusiasm—real or feigned—compelled him to write her in. Marsh would play Madame Ferris, a Bridgetown socialite who could no longer bear to stand by idly while the commoners had their land taken from under their feet. She would lead a charge of ill-equipped but spirited rebels, and meet a dramatic, sacrificial end. Jesse assured the opera singer that it would be a suitably tragic and memorable fate.

  Happily, the weather that week was amenable to their ambitions. Clear skies kept the cards from seeming hopelessly stacked against them. Scoble's Kinetoscope was incredibly light-hungry, like all motion picture cameras of the day, and shooting at night was out of the question. Even an overcast sky could render a take muddy and unusable. On top of that, Jesse had to gauge whether he was cranking the camera's manual frame advance evenly, something he never had to worry about in film school.

  Jesse and Scoble reserved their first day of shooting for camera testing, to ensure any fickleness had been teased out of the machinery. Removing their first day's prints from the camera was to be a touch-and-go affair. Jesse insisted he do it himself, so he went to Scoble's windowless water closet on the second floor, camera in hand, and closed t
he door behind him. In the dark, he felt for the latch on the camera's side and unlocked it, praying that he wouldn't feel a chewed-up angel-hair mess of celluloid inside. To his relief, the film was still properly spooled, and he was able to remove it and place it inside a canister.

  He developed the filmstock in this improvised dark room, running the negatives through developing fluid and tacking the filmstrips to dry. Then he ran the footage through the impresario's projector, and witnessed cinema breathe life and motion into the motionless. Wind rustled trees, a train crossed a bridge, mother and child walked the streets of downtown Chicago. All of it rendered and exposed perfectly. But these were, after all, just tests, and the next day, Jesse embarked on a filmmaking pursuit the likes of which the world had never seen.

  Their first day of production was spent in an empty lot on the outskirts of the city, overrun with weeds and Chicago snakeroot. In Jesse's script, this was where the rebels met to plot their sabotage of the gleaming new factory built by "Mr. King," the film's evident stand-in for Wayne.

  If Jesse's experiences at film school had taught him one thing, it was to factor into the schedule twice as much time as he thought he'd need. This proved just as excellent advice in 1897 as it did in 1970. The shoot was slow going, but cast and crew developed a sense of flow, bit by bit.

  As the shadows grew long and the midwest air picked up a chill, Jesse felt good about calling it a day. They'd managed to get most of what he'd planned, and he didn't want to risk shooting anything they wouldn't be able to use. He thanked the cast, and sent them off to rendezvous at sunup the next morning.

  Scoble held out a hand to shake. "Congratulations, sonny," the old man said.

  Jesse couldn't help himself. Giddy, he and Scoble broke out into laughter and hollering, and he put his arms around the showman in a celebratory bear hug.

  The next day, they returned to that forgotten field of overgrowth, feeling good about their prospects. The cast were having a good time, and all were anxious to be able to see some part of what they were laboring on. Jesse insisted it would be worth the wait, and they obliged him, though he knew they couldn't grasp the significance of what they were doing. Not even Scoble could, for he still saw The Robbery of Bridgetown as little more than an elaborate carnival distraction.

  Something changed that over the course of the night, however, while Jesse slept a well-earned rest and the following morning's papers rolled off the presses. Local beat reporters had begun to pick up whispers about something percolating on the fringes of Chicago. Word had gotten out that Floyda Marsh had canceled her opera shows for the week, and that half the city's repertory players had likewise disappeared. It didn't take long for the press to pin this to the strange attraction being assembled by an unknown playwright and a carnival king.

  Scoble was ever the showman. He capitalized on this interest by rapid-firing an array of bombastic, superlative-laced proclamations at a dizzying clip.

  "A spectacular tale of drama and intrigue!"

  "A monumental achievement in the manipulation of light and energy."

  "A New Renaissance, an enlightened era of art Emerges with this work!"

  Jesse had to admit, the man knew how to work a crowd.

  Production moved to an old warehouse that was to be a stand-in for the nefarious factory. Jesse decided he had to pay some men from the docks to act as security, just to keep out the curious fence-jumpers who tried to make their way onto the set. Scoble made sure the press knew about this development, too.

  On the sixth day of production, Jesse checked off the last item on his shot list.

  "That's a wrap!" he announced. This was met with only blank stares. "We're done," he clarified. "We finished."

  Everyone in the cast and crew cheered. Jesse was sure they had drank together, fought together, and slept together. He'd always been in the thick of those tangled, knotted webs of interdependence that emerged backstage. But not this time. He was apart from these people, these aliens from another world. Besides, he had a job to do.

  Principal photography was complete, and it would soon be time for Jesse to return to Bridgetown. His stay in Chicago had been a whirlwind. Ms. Marsh and the other actors were thanked, congratulated, and dismissed. He promised the school-dodgers and dock workers who'd been wrangled up that their movie would soon come to the city, and they would be able to watch themselves projected on a great big silver screen. Jesse and Scoble went back to Scoble's place to watch dailies, so he could make sure he really had everything he needed.

  The last of the reel had run through the projector upstairs before Jesse noticed Scoble was no longer beside him.

  "Mr. Scoble?"

  He got up, and wandered the length of the screening room. The extravagance of its plush sofas and polished gold railing was just creepy without anyone else around to see it. Only now did Jesse notice the intricate inlay of the ceiling, done up in a Spanish motif. There was an opulence to this room that had been hidden by the dark, It was the one place spared the clutter that had overtaken the rest of the house. Jesse hadn't thought of Scoble as a particularly rich man before, but a place like this didn't come cheap. His three-story was a busy mess, the playground of an obsessive old man stuffed full with his old toys of the trade. Scoble seemed to use his house as a storage shed. Scoble called it a "shop," but in the week since Jesse had arrived, he hadn't seen any customers. Nor had he spotted price tags on anything, for that matter.

  To hear Scoble tell it, it sounded like this screening room was regularly populated by a whos-who of Chicago's elite, drinking and dancing while moving images flickered on the wall. But now, Jesse began to doubt any of that. He wondered if Scoble had had any other guests the whole year.

  Jesse felt like he was in a lounge for ghosts.

  He flicked off the projector and made his way down the staircase. At the landing, he spotted the old showman downstairs, going through a worn brown trunk full of odds and ends. Scoble picked out a ventriloquist dummy and held him up, a thin grin coming over his face, as if seeing an old friend for the first time in years. He set the dummy aside, gently, and pulled out a length of faded, tied-together flags and a ragged stovetop hat. Jesse began to feel uncomfortable, like he was spying on him.

  "There you are," he said, if only to alleviate his own unease.

  Scoble responded with a bit of a jolt. "Oh," he said. "I was just getting this trunk ready for you. To carry the film back west. Had to clear out a few things."

  "I see." Jesse walked down the flight and joined Scoble on the first floor. He picked up the dummy. Its face was frozen in a rictus exclamation that seemed pure agony, eyes slightly crossed. Its hair was matted and had fallen out in clumps, and the paint on its apple cheeks had long ago worn thin. Perhaps the most unsettling thing about it was how its flesh had turned a mottled, jaundiced yellow with smoke exposure and natural decay. It seemed to Jesse the color a body might turn, after a few weeks facedown in a bog.

  "Good ol' Johnny-boy," Scoble said. He lifted the doll from Jesse's hands, and placed him at his own side. He cleared his throat.

  "Johnny-boy," Scoble began, addressing the dummy in a projected, overly-enunciated stage voice. "Why don't you tell our friend here about your carnival days?"

  "I don't wanna tell him nothin'!" the puppet protested.

  "Now, Johnny-boy, if you can't play nice with our friend here, I'm gonna have to put you back in the box."

  "No, sir! Anything but the box! I been in that box for months! I got to see my girl first! Maybe get me a whisky and play a hand of—"

  "Tell Jesse about the old days!" Scoble interrupted.

  Jesse wasn't sure what to make of this strange interlude, but the doll seemed to oblige at last with a cartoonish sigh.

  "Back then," the puppet began, "I seen it all. Bearded ladies, honest-to-goodness elephants, you name it. I even remember a little boy, back when, who—"

  But the puppet didn't get to finish his story. His jaw fell off, and Scoble kept up the act, emitting a
muffled shriek and making Johnny-boy mime a hyperventilating panic as the doll peered down, looking for his missing piece. At last, the showman allowed Johnny-boy to simply pass out from fright, collapsing into a bundle of cloth and wood, lifeless once more.

  "And that," Scoble professed to Jesse, "is why Johnny-boy doesn't get to be in the show any longer." He laughed.

  "I actually felt sorry for the puppet," Jesse admitted.

  "Funny how that works, isn't it?" Scoble said, as he gathered the bits of Johnny-boy up and put him aside. "I long ago realized, when I was just a boy, that people buy into illusion. We make the unreal more real than reality. More meaningful, at least, that the mundane that is all around us. We need fantasy, to make sense of the frailty of the universe."

  He turned to Jesse, and took a breath, before going on. "When I was just a boy in Montana, before the carnivals started traveling all around, there was a show some of the locals would put on every summer solstice. The shadows were growing longer, the woods becoming just a bit more ominous in their darkness. You could just feel the order of this world turning upside-down, the spirits coming out to dance. It was as if the changing of the seasons commanded the carnival to happen whether we wanted it to or not.

  "As a lad, this fascinated me, even if I couldn't yet put it into words. But I understood, even then, that illusion was to be my calling. That unreality was my playhouse. So when I first saw the Kinetoscope, I knew I was witnessing the greatest magic trick I'd ever seen. Life breathed into lifelessness. Time captured in a silvery gelatin, preserved to be put on show wherever and whenever one pleases. Yet, like the best magic tricks, it was so elegant in its simplicity."

  "Where I come from," Jesse said, "People have forgotten that movies are really magic tricks. They think of them like theater, or books. Stories, but not magic."

  "They're all illusions of one sort or another," Scoble countered. Then his countenance changed in the dim light, that gleam once again in his eye.