The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (23 page)

He wavered blearily.

“Because you wanted a friend. To keep you from making what you called the same mistakes again. To keep you from fucking up. Well, Wes, that’s what you’re doing. Fucking up.”

He finished his beer and crumpled the can. He curled his lips, angry. “Because I want a day off on my birthday?”

“No, because you’re getting your roles confused. You’re not James Deacon. But you’ve convinced yourself that you are, and Monday you’ll die in a crash.”

He blinked. Then he sneered. “So what are you, a fortune-teller now?”

“A half-baked psychiatrist. Unconsciously you want to complete the legend. The way you’ve been acting, the parallel’s too exact.”

“I told you the first time we met—I don’t like bullshit!”

“Then prove it. Monday, you don’t go near a motorcycle, a car, hell, even a go-kart. You come to the studio sober. You do your work as well as you know how. I drive you over to my place. We have a private party. You and me and Jill. She promises to make your favorite meal: T-bones, baked beans, steamed corn. Homemade birthday cake. Chocolate. Again, your favorite. The works. You stay the night. In the morning, we put James Deacon behind us and. . . .”

“Yeah? What?”

“You achieve the career Deacon never had.”

His eyes looked uncertain.

“Or you go to the race and destroy yourself and break the promise you made. You and me together. A team. Don’t back out of our bargain.”

He shuddered as if he were going to crack.

In a movie, that would have been the climax—how he didn’t race on his birthday, how we had the private party and he hardly said a word and went to sleep in our guest room.

And survived.

But this is what happened. On the Tuesday after his birthday, he couldn’t remember his lines. He couldn’t play to the camera. He couldn’t control his voice. Wednesday was worse.

But I’ll say this. On his birthday, the anniversary of Deacon’s death, when Wes showed up sober and treated our bargain with honor, he did the most brilliant acting of his career. A zenith of tradecraft. I often watch the video of those scenes with profound respect.

And the dailies were so truly brilliant that the studio VP let me finish the picture.

But the VP never knew how I faked the rest of it. Overnight, Wes had totally lost his technique. I had enough in the can to deliver a print—with a lot of fancy editing and some uncredited but very expensive help from Donald Porter. He dubbed most of Wes’s final dialogue.

“I told you. Horoscopes. Astrology,” Donald said.

I didn’t believe him until I took four scenes to an audio expert I know. He specializes in putting voices through a computer and making visual graphs of them.

He spread the charts in front of me. “Somebody played a joke on you. Or else you’re playing one on me.”

I felt so unsteady that I had to press my hands on his desk when I asked him, “How?”

“Using this first film, Deacon’s scene from
The Prodigal Son
as the standard, this second film is close. But this third one doesn’t have any resemblance.”

“So where’s the joke?”

“In the fourth. It matches perfectly. Who’s kidding who?”

Deacon had been the voice on the first. Donald Porter had been the
voice on the second. Close to Deacon’s, dubbing for Wes in
Rampage
. Wes himself had been the voice on the third—the dialogue in
Rampage
that I couldn’t use because Wes’s technique had gone to hell.

And the fourth clip? The voice that was identical to Deacon’s, authenticated, verifiable. Wes again. His screen test. The imitated scene from
The Prodigal Son
.

Wes dropped out of sight. For sure, his technique had collapsed so badly he would never again be a shining star. I kept phoning him, but I never got an answer. So, for what turned out to be the second-to-last time, I drove out to his dingy place near the desert. The Manson lookalikes were gone. Only one motorcycle stood outside. I climbed the steps to the sunporch, knocked, received no answer, and opened the door.

The blinds were closed. The place was in shadow. I went down a hall and heard strained breathing. Turned to the right. And entered a room.

The breathing was louder, more strident and forced.

“Wes?”

“Don’t turn on the lights.”

“I’ve been worried about you, friend.”

“Don’t. . . .”

But I did. And what I saw made me swallow vomit. He was slumped in a chair. Seeping into it would be more accurate. Rotting. Decomposing. His cheeks had holes that showed his teeth. A pool that stank of decaying vegetables spread on the floor around him.

“I should have gone racing on my birthday, huh?” His voice whistled through the gaping flesh in his throat.

“Oh, shit, friend.” I started to cry. “Jesus Christ, I should have let you.”

“Do me a favor, huh? Turn off the light now. Let me finish this in peace.”

I had so much to say to him. But I couldn’t. My heart broke.

“And buddy,” he said, “I think we’d better forget about our bargain. We won’t be working together anymore.”

“What can I do to help? There must be something I can—”

“Yeah, let me end this the way I need to.”

“Listen, I—”

“Leave,” Wes said. “It hurts me too much to have you here, to listen to the pity in your voice.”

“But I care about you. I’m your friend. I—”

“That’s why I know you’ll do what I ask”—the hole in his throat made another whistling sound—“and leave.”

I stood in the darkness, listening to other sounds he made: liquid rotting sounds. “A doctor. There must be something a doctor can—”

“Been there. Done that. What’s wrong with me no doctor’s going to cure. Now if you don’t mind. . . .”

“What?”

“You weren’t invited. Get out.”

I waited another long moment. “. . . Sure.”

“Love you, man,” he said.

“. . . Love you.”

Dazed, I stumbled outside. Down the steps. Across the sand. Blinded by the sun, unable to clear my nostrils of the stench in that room, I threw up beside the car.

The next day, I drove out again. The last time. Jill went with me. He’d moved. I never learned where.

And this is how it ended, the final dregs of his career. His talent was gone, but how his determination lingered.

Movies. Immortality. See, special effects are expensive. Studios will grasp at any means to cut the cost.

He’d told me, “Forget about our bargain.” I later discovered what he meant—he worked without me in one final feature. He wasn’t listed in the credits, though.
Zombies from Hell
. Remember how awful Bela Lugosi looked in his last exploitation movie before they buried him in his Dracula cape?

Bela looked great compared to Wes. I saw the zombie movie in an eight-plex out in the Valley. It did great business. Jill and I almost didn’t get a seat.

Jill wept as I did.

This fucking town. Nobody cares how it’s done, as long as it packs them in.

The audience cheered when Wes stalked toward the leading lady. And his jaw fell off.

I

We can speculate, and we can speculate, but the probability is that few of the silent movies made during the siege of Constantinople in 1453 were very good. And there are clear reasons for this, both political and cultural.

On the one hand, we have to bear in mind the extremely trying circumstances under which the movies were being filmed. In attacking Constantinople, the Ottoman Turks were also attacking the last bastion of the Roman Empire (if only in symbolic form), a direct line of power that stretched back some two thousand years. It was also the seat of the Orthodox Christian Church, a force equal and opposite to the Catholic Church in Rome. Expansionist wars were two a penny in the fifteenth century, but this was no run-of-the-mill example, it was already rife with meaning, and no doubt the Byzantines under threat would have been only too aware of that. Besides which, on a purely practical level, the constant cannoning of the city walls must surely have been a distraction. Even making silent movies, surely, some peace and quiet is required for concentration’s sake.

On the other hand, and perhaps more pertinently, Byzantine art had always defined itself by a certain flat austerity. Their mosaics and paintings that we can study today are colourful, but there’s a grim functionality to all that colour; the lines are severely drawn and make the characters depicted seem two-dimensional and undramatic. It would be foolish to expect that in the creation of an entire new art form that several centuries of engrained Byzantine culture would be abandoned overnight. It is unfair to imagine that the clowns who pratfalled and danced and poked each other in the eyes in Constantinople cinema were other Chaplins, or Keatons, even other Fatty Arbuckles. The conditions were wrong. Their genius could not have flowered.

And yet, of course, we remain fascinated by those movies from the Byzantine age. And again, partly this will be because they were the pioneers, the history of cinema begins here with these shadowy figures by the Bosporus doomed to be killed or enslaved by the Muslim potentate. But I hope our fascination is not purely academic. That we honour not merely the historical significance of what was invented, but that, with care and study, and an open mind, we try to appreciate the art on its own terms.

II

No entire print of a Byzantine movie survives, and that is to be expected. When the sultan Mahomet II appealed to the Byzantines to surrender, with the promise that their lives would be spared, his terms were rejected. The Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, said that the city could not be yielded, for it was no single man’s possession to yield. And with these brave words he sealed the fate of the fifty thousand inhabitants of Constantinople, and, more importantly, the fate of those few precious cans of film kept within. The Turks had besieged Constantinople for fifty-five days. They were tired and angry. When they broke the defences, as was the custom, the soldiers had permission to ransack and pillage the city for three whole days, taking plunder, razing buildings to the ground, and raping and slaughtering the populace. These were not conditions in which a fledgling film industry was ever likely to prosper.

And yet, we are lucky. In spite of all, some sequences of film are extant. They are fragments only, most no more than a few seconds long, but they still afford us a tantalising impression of early cinematography, and what those Byzantine audiences must have enjoyed. One man tries to sit down upon a stool, and a second pulls it away, so he falls to the ground with his legs splayed in the air. A farmer waters his crops with a bucket of water, but a prankster holds it upright; when the farmer pours the bucket over his head to see what’s wrong, he gets soaked. It is not sophisticated comedy, granted, but there is a spirit of mocking fun to it; yes, it plays upon the weak and the vulnerable, but no one gets hurt, no one gets savaged, and certainly no one experiences the sort of carnage that is awaiting them at the end of the siege. Some historians have tried to read a political subtext into the extracts, but I think that can be exaggerated. One of the more (justly) admired sequences is of a beggar, or tramp, who at dinner sticks a knife into two vegetables and proceeds to do a puppet dance with them. In siege times food was scarce, and this flagrant disregard for its value can be seen as something deliberately provocative, a renunciation of the very crisis that would have caused the food shortage in the first place, and thus a renunciation of war. But what attracts us to the film is not its message, but its simple beauty; there is such elegance to the dance, and to the comic conceit of it, and for the duration the tramp smiles out at the viewer in childlike innocence.

One might have expected that there would have been a pronounced propagandist element to the films. But the Ottoman Turks are never referenced, and instead what is offered to us is cheap comedy and heightened melodrama. The longest extant extract—and, sadly, one of the most tedious—is a case in point. A moustachioed villain, sniggering silently to camera, ties a damsel in distress to a set of railway tracks. The damsel is left there for no fewer than six minutes of static inaction, as we wait in vain for a train to come and flatten her; however, since we are many centuries shy of the invention of a locomotive engine, it is unclear how much jeopardy the girl can really be in. The tracks are not the important part; it is the villain. Wearing a gabardine common in fashion at the time, he looks like an everyday Byzantine. He’s not given a turban, or a Muslim beard, or shifty Oriental eyes. It’s the ideal opportunity for the filmmaker to identify and feed off a common threat to the audience, but it refuses to do so; even in its monsters, Byzantine cinema remains stubbornly domestic.

Many eyewitnesses recorded the siege of Constantinople for posterity, and the most celebrated is George Sphrantzes. Sphrantzes recounts the conflict from a mostly militaristic perspective and pays depressingly little heed to the day-to-day to and fro of the thriving visual arts scene. Nevertheless, he does record in his diary how, one evening, shortly after the siege had been raised, he was ushered into a big hall, alongside some other hundreds of citizens. There he took a seat, and the windows were covered with sacks, and the room was cast into darkness. He describes an expectation in the audience, something apprehensive, like fear, but more pleasurable than fear. And then, at the end of the room, facing them all, a large piece of white cloth was illuminated. He writes: “At first I thought there was a stain upon it, and then the stain enlarged, as if by magick.” It was no stain; it was the image of a horse and cart, and its approach towards the camera. George Sphrantzes describes the awe and wonder as the “moving painting” flickered upon the makeshift screen—and then the rising panic as it became clear that the horse and cart were coming directly at them. People rose from their seats; they stumbled towards the exit; they fell over in the darkness—if they didn’t escape, within
minutes
the cart would reach them and there might be an irritating bump. Sphrantzes records how the authorities arrested the man in charge of the exhibition for disturbing the peace.

No name of any actor has survived the fall of Constantinople. But the name of that man
has
survived, and he must be regarded as the first maverick genius of cinema. His name was Matthew Tozer.

III

It is all too easy to be seduced by images of the Byzantine Empire as a thing of great glory. That was true at its zenith, but its zenith was centuries past. By the time the Ottoman Turks lay siege to Constantinople, the empire had shrunk to little more than a city-state, and the population within were a random ragtag of different nationalities from different backgrounds. Matthew Tozer (or Toza, or Tusa) was probably a Greek Cypriot, but his name is peculiar, and no one can say for sure. There is no physical description of the man. There is no record of his beliefs, or anything he stood for—save his obvious love for the cinematic medium.

It is not even clear what Tozer’s part in the craze was, merely that he was at the very centre of it. Had he invented the principle of moving photography himself? Was he instead the director of the films, exploiting someone else’s discoveries? It is possible that he merely ran the cinema in which the movies were shown. Scientist, artist, entrepreneur—scholars argue which of them he may have been. Maybe there is no single Matthew Tozer. This essay does not purport to take any great interest in specious biography. For simplicity’s sake we shall assume Tozer is all three rolled into one; not so much a man, but a personification of a new art form; we can never know Tozer the individual, let us instead study Tozer the wave of revolution.

The earliest account we have of Tozer is what we now refer to as the Horse and Cart Debacle. Punishment in the Middle Ages was typically severe, especially in times of military crisis. But within days Tozer has been freed and, moreover, is showing new films, we can only suppose with the blessing of the authorities. Sphrantzes writes again, after a turgid account of a day setting up the city’s defences and his concerns of a maritime engagement with the Turkish fleet: “And, in the evening, to the picture house, there to see a comedic play about three men and a mule. Silly stuff. Amiable.”

Sphrantzes might dismiss it as silly stuff, but it is clear that Tozer was doing something right. He set up a cinema just a stone’s throw from the Hagia Sophia, and there he’d show the latest movie releases—and the people of Constantinople began to flock to them in droves. It is important to remember what siege conditions were like in the fifteenth century. They were frightening, yes, and they were desperate, and they were hungry; but mostly they were very
boring
. With the Ottoman Turks on one side, and a naval blockade upon the other, there was really very little for the Byzantine folk to go and do in the evenings. However silly the movies on offer may have been, the distractions they provided were hugely popular, and tickets became highly prized; one anonymous commentator writes that to get in to see one particular blockbuster, a family bartered a week’s supply of precious bread. Tozer was forced to put on more and more screenings, sometimes letting his cinema run all night until dawn. He employed janissary bands to accompany the films with the music of harp, lyre, and zither; he employed young girls to serve sweet snacks in the intervals.

And what Tozer was accomplishing was not merely artistic, but also sociological. Because if these citizens of a dying empire were merely desperate stragglers with no real identity, here, at least, they could find something that unified them. They could sit in the dark together and laugh and cry as one collective. Is it too much to hope that at last they discovered that they had more in common with their fellow man than they had realised—that the same stunts thrilled them, the same custard-pie fights kept them amused? Is this the irony of the end of the Byzantines, that only in their final days they became a proper people?

As for Tozer, he appears to have worked tirelessly. With almost superhuman energy he released several new movies a week, filming them during the day and presenting the results on screen once the sun went down. To satisfy the appetite of a citizenry starved of entertainment, he produced an oeuvre that makes Steven Spielberg look like some dilettante hobbyist. And with the introduction of a new art form, inevitably the people are inspired; they are no longer content to be mere spectators, they want to take part in the art form too. Sphrantzes complains, but when does Sphrantzes not complain? He writes that the most pressing concern the Byzantine population faced was the Muslim hordes outside the gates, and that work should be done repairing those gates, building new walls, training all able-bodied men to fight. Instead everybody wanted to be an actor, to star in the movies, to see themselves flicker on the white cloth screens, to be famous, to be adored.

The greatest tragedy of the fall of Constantinople is that not one frame of Matthew Tozer’s masterpiece,
The Ten Commandments
, survives. A true epic, it ran for nearly six hours and used over a thousand extras. It was a gamble on Tozer’s part; to find time to make it he had to close the cinema for three full days, and there was civil unrest and small-scale rioting whilst the people were left starved of their fix. But the gamble paid off. It is a testament not only to Tozer’s vaulting ambition but to his commercial canniness—even if you weren’t in the movie yourself you knew someone who was, and if you saw only one movie that season it had to be
The Ten Commandments
! The sets, by all reports, were sumptuous. The cast were on peak form. And the special effects were remarkable: to achieve the parting of the Red Sea, Tozer had used up a half of the besieged city’s water supply.

It was Tozer’s greatest achievement. Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos took time off being the champion of the Orthodox Church to attend the premiere, and had even taken a cameo role as a burning bush. Could Tozer have suspected that it was all downhill from here? And that all that ambition would prove his undoing?