Authors: Clive Barker
Just before the thaw, in the middle of the following April, the weight of snow and ice finally brought the vaults down, in one calamitous descent.
There was nobody there to witness it, nor anyone within earshot to hear it. The room which had contained the Hunt was buried in the debris of all the vaults, plaster and wood and stone filling the chamber to the middle of the walls. Nobody who visited the Fortress in subsequent years—and there were a few explorers who came there every summer, usually imagining they’d stumbled on something darkly marvelous—a Fortress, per-
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haps belonging to Vlad the Impaler, whose legendary territories lay only a few hundred miles off to the west, in Transylvania—none of these visitors dug through the overgrown ruins with any great enthusiasm; certainly none ever asked themselves what function the half-buried room might once have served. Nor, should it be said, would they have been able to guess, even the cleverest of them. The mystery of the ruined chamber had been removed to another continent, where it was presently unfolding its dubious raptures for the delectation of a new and vulnerable audience.
Men and women who—like the tiles—had in many cases lately left their homelands; and in their haste to be famous left behind them such talis-mans as hearth and altar might have offered by way of protection against the guileful Hunt.
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The Heart-throb
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O N E
There’s a premiere in Los Angeles tonight, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The Chinese has been housing such events since 1927, but of course the crowds were much larger back then, tens of thousands of people, sometimes even hundreds of thousands, would block Hollywood Boulevard in their hunger to see the star of the moment. Tonight’s event is nowhere near that scale. Though the studio publicists will massage the numbers for tomorrow’s
Variety
and
Hollywood Reporter
, claiming that a crowd of four thousand people waited in the chilly evening air for the appearance of the star of tonight’s movie, Todd Pickett, the true numbers are in fact less than half that.
Still, a third of the Boulevard is barricaded off, and there are a few cop cars in evidence, just to give the whole event more drama.
As the limos approach the red carpet, and the ushers, who are dressed in the black leather costumes of the villains in the movie, step forward to open the doors, a few “screamers,” paid and planted in the crowd by the studio publicity people to get a little excitement going, start to do their job, yelling even before the face of the limo’s passenger has been seen.
There’s a large contingent of A-list names on tonight’s guest-list, and plenty of faces that elicit screams as they appear. Cruise isn’t here, but Nicole Kidman is; so is Schwarzenegger, who has a small role in the picture as the retiring Gallows, a vengeful, mythological character whom our hero, played by Todd Pickett, must either choose to embody when his time comes round, or—should he refuse—be pursued by the ghosts of several generations of former incarnations of the character, to persuade CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 54
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him otherwise. Sigourney Weaver plays the woman who has broken the curse of Gallows once before, to whom Pickett’s character must go when the phantom pursuers are almost upon him. Her arrival at Grauman’s is greeted by a genuine roar of approval from the fans, who are devoted to her. She waves, smiles, allows a barrage of photographs to be taken, but she doesn’t go near the crowd. She’s had experiences with overly-possessive fans before: she walks straight down the middle of the red carpet, where she’s out of reach of their fingers. Still they shout, “
We love you Ripley!,
”
which is the character she plays in the
Alien
movies, and with which she will be identified until the day she dies. She waves, even when they call the name Ripley, but her eyes never focus on anybody in the crowd for more than a moment.
The next limo in the line contains the bright new star of
Gallows
, Suzie Henstell, named by this month’s
Vanity Fair
one of the Ten Hottest Names in Hollywood. She is petite (though you’d never know it on the screen), blonde and giggly; she’s shared a little marijuana with her boyfriend in the limo, and it was a bad move. She stumbles a little as she steps onto the red carpet, but the crowd has been prepped, thanks to several months of puff pieces and photo-spreads and in-depth interviews, to think of this woman as a full-blown star, even though they have yet to see more than a few frames of her acting ability from the trailer for
Gallows
.
So what do they care if she looks a little out of it? Unlike Ms. Weaver, who wisely chooses to be elusive, allowing the photographers just a minute or two to catch her, the new girl is still hungry for adulation. She goes straight to the barricades, where a number of young women with sou-venir programs for
Gallows
are waving them around. She signs a few, giving her boyfriend, who is a six-foot Calvin Klein model hunk, a goofy
“gee-I-must-be-famous!” look. The model looks back vacantly, which is the only look in his repertoire. He can give it to you vacantly with a semi-hard-on in his jeans, or vacantly with his ass hanging out of his Y-fronts.
Either way, it is heart-achingly beautiful; almost troublingly so.
The wind comes in gusts along Hollywood Boulevard, and the security men start to look a little worried. It was some bright publicist’s idea to CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 55
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build two gallows, as a kind of gateway through which the audience for the premiere will need to come. Not, it now seems, a clever notion. The gallows are made to be trashed tomorrow morning, so they’re made of light timber and foam-core. The wind is threatening to topple them; or worse, pick then up entirely and deposit them on top of the crowd. Light though they are, they could do some serious damage if they fell.
Four of the ushers from inside the theater are summoned from their duties and told to go and stand beside the gallows, two on either side, holding on to them as casually as possible. Security is told that the publicity people only need five more minutes. As soon as Suzie Henslett can be persuaded to move on up the carpet and into the building (which at present she is showing no desire to do), the director’s, Rob Neiderman’s, limo can be brought to the carpet, followed by the last and most important of the bunch, Todd Pickett.
The wind is getting worse; the gallows sway giddily. An executive decision is made to bring Neiderman’s limo in, and if Suzie’s screaming fans are visible waving like lunatics behind Neiderman in his press pictures, so be it. This isn’t a perfect world. It’s already 8:13 p.m. At this rate the picture won’t be able to begin until half past the hour, which wouldn’t be a problem if the damn thing weren’t so long, but Neiderman’s cut came in at two hours and forty-three minutes, and though the studio appealed to Pickett to get him to shave the thing down to a tight two hours, Todd came back saying he liked the picture pretty much as it was, so only four minutes were going out of it. That means it’ll be past eleven before the picture’s finished, and almost midnight by the time everybody’s assembled at the party venue. It’s going to be a long night.
Neiderman has persuaded the easily-distracted Miss Henslett away from her fans and down the carpet to the door. The big moment is at hand. The ushers cling to the gallows, their jobs depending on the per-pendicularity of their charges. The largest of the limos comes up to the curb. Even before the door has opened, the fans—especially the women—are in a state of ecstasy, shrieking at the top of their voices.
“
Todd! Todd! Oh God! Todd!
”
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The cameras start to flash, as though the incomprehensible semaphore of their flashes is going to summon the man in the limo.
And out comes Todd Pickett, the star of
Gallows
, the reason why ninety-five percent of its audience will be there when it opens next Friday (it is now Monday); Todd Pickett, one of the three biggest male action-movie-stars in the history of cinema. Todd Pickett, the boy from Cincinnati who failed in all his grades but ended up the King of Hollywood.
He raises his hands like a presidential candidate, to acknowledge the shouts of the crowd. Then he reaches back into the limo to catch hold of the hand of his date for the night, Wilhemina Bosch, a waitress-turned-model-turned-actress-turned-model-again, with whom he has been seen at parties and premieres for the past four months, though neither will say anything about the relationship other than that they’re good friends.
He gathers Wilhemina to him, so that the photographers can get pictures of them together. Then, arm in arm, through the blizzard of lights and the barrage of
We love you, Todd!
coming at them from every side, the pair make their way to the cinema doors, which, having gathered their most important guests into the fold, then close rather defiantly, as if to divide the important from the unimportant, the stable and the solid from those who are simply objects of the night’s wind.
Gallows
is an irredeemable piece of shit, of course, and everyone involved with it, from the executives who green-lit it (at a cost of some ninety million dollars, before prints and advertising costs add another thirty-seven to the bill) to the humblest publicist, knows.
It is, in the words of Corliss’s review in
Time
, “
an old fashioned action-horror picture which lacks the full-bone theatrics of grand guignol, and the savvy,
John-Woo-style action piece audiences have come to expect. One minute Schwarzenegger is camping it up, the next Todd Pickett, as his unwilling successor, is playing his scenes as though he’s Hamlet on a particularly dreary night in Denmark.
From beginning to end,
Gallows
is bad noose
.”
Everybody going up the red carpet that Monday night already knows what
Time
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very plain in a piece about the state of action movies he wrote two weeks before. Nor does it take an oracle to predict that there will be others who will not like the picture. But the extent of vitriol will prove astonishing, even to those who expected the worst. In the next forty-eight hours,
Gallows
will garner some of the most negative reviews of the last twelve months, the vehemence of the early news reviewers empowering minor names to pull out the stops. Besides the incomprehensible script, everyone agrees, there is a lackluster quality to the picture that betrays the cast’s indifference to the entire project. Performances aren’t simply uneven, they seem designed for entirely different movies: a hopeless mismatch of styles. The worst culprit in this regard? There is no question about that. All the reviewers will agree that the most inadequate performance comes from its star, Todd Pickett.
People
writes that: “
Mister Pickett is plenty old enough to know better.
Thirty-something-year-olds don’t act the way Mister Pickett acts here: his trademark ‘young man with a chip on his shoulder and a thousand-watt smile,’ which
was looking stale the second (all right, the third) time he did it, seems particularly
out-of-place here. Though it seems incredible that time has passed so fast since
America first swooned to the charms of Mister Pickett—he’s now simply too old
to play the twenty-something Vincent. Only Wilhemina Bosch, as Vincent’s
Prozac-chewing sister, comes out of this mess with any credibility. She has an elegant, beautifully-proportioned face, and she can turn a line with the snappy, East-coast smarts of a young Katharine Hepburn. She’s wasted here. Or, more correctly, our time would be wasted here were she not in the movie
.”
The premiere audience didn’t seem to mind it. On occasion there were audible gasps and loud laughter (perhaps in truth a little
over
-loud, a little fake) for the jokes, but there were several long stretches in the Second Act when the movie seemed to lose their interest. Even in the Third Act, when the action relocates to the orbiting space station, and the special effects budget soared, there was very little real enthusiasm. A few scattered whoops of nihilistic delight when the villain’s planet-destroying weapon actually went off, against expectation, and Washington, D.C., is CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 58
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fried to a crisp. But then, as the smoke cleared and Todd, as the new Gallows, proceeded to finish off the bad guys, the audience became restless again.
About fifteen minutes before the end credits rolled, a member of the audience got up from his seat on the aisle and went to the bathroom. A few people caught a look at the man’s face as he looked back at the screen.
It was Todd Pickett, lit by the light of his own face. Nobody got up to ask for his autograph.
Pickett stared at the screen for a moment only, then he turned his back on it and trudged up and out of the cinema. He didn’t go to the restroom.
Instead he asked one of the ushers if he could be allowed out through the back of the building. The usher explained that the area around the back had no security.
“I just want a quiet smoke with nobody watching me,” Todd explained.
The usher said, sure, why not, and led Todd down a passageway that ran behind the screen. Todd looked up at his reversed image. All he could remember about the scene that was playing was how damn uncomfortable his costume had been.
“Here you go,” the usher said, unlocking the doors at the end of the corridor, and letting Todd out into an area lit only by the ambient light from the Boulevard.