“I know a lieutenant who’s the same way. He should have been chief of detectives years ago, but he always figures out a way to cheese off the brass around promotion time. It’s going to be a lot more quiet downtown when he retires.”
“It’d take a charge of dynamite to retire Ruth. She laid the rails that brought the first carload of movie people to this town.”
Yesterday’s smog was yesterday’s smog. Once outside, she fished a trim pair of sunglasses out of a woven-leather purse and put them on. He said, “You’ll have to fight off the paparazzi if you wear those off campus. You look like Meg Ryan’s daughter.”
“Kid sister. But thank you.” She slid them down Lolita-style, watching him. “You don’t look that much like him.”
“Like who?”
“You know who. I was engaged to a negative cutter at Sony. We went to Toronto once, to take in the film festival. They were screening some early Rudolph Valentino shorts they found in Canada, from before
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
I thought he looked like a cross-dressing woman. Was he gay?”
“There’s been debate. After he put on that beauty mark in
Monsieur Beaucaire,
he spent the rest of his life trying to prove he wasn’t a pink powder puff.” He hesitated; should he brag? “I had a small hand in bringing those early two-reelers to the surface. An anonymous bidder bought them in a lot at Pola Negri’s estate auction. I finally tracked him down in Ontario.”
“Why didn’t you bring them back to UCLA?”
“The Canadian government filed an injunction against the U.S. State Department, declaring them national treasures that couldn’t be removed from the country. They’d still be in storage while the bureaucrats battled it out, but I had a friend in Montreal who offered to donate some rare Alaskan gold rush documentary footage to the Smithsonian. The State Department backed off. It was a sweetheart deal: The documentary stuff had greater historical value, and now anyone who wants to make the trip can enjoy both.”
“Your friend just decided to donate?”
“Well, we discussed it.”
“Doesn’t sound like such a small hand to me.”
“It was, though. Preserving and restoring film is as much a team effort as making one. What you’re about to see is only part of the process.” He glanced at her. “You’re the first person who’s heard of Rudolph Valentino who didn’t think I look like him.”
“You’re the first person who thought I looked like Meg Ryan’s daughter.”
They entered the preservation building, where a red bulb in a steel cage was flashing above the door to the laboratory.
“We can’t go in now,” he said. “It’s crunch time on a major project, and a stray hair or a speck of dust could ruin a morning’s work. But we can watch the show.”
He led the way to the thick window that looked into the room. The technicians were in full battle dress, masks and safety glasses and shiny black gloves, smocks to their knees, paper slippers covering their shoes. They were washing forceps and scissors in the stainless steel developing sinks, adjusting the thermostat on the storage cabinet, turning the crank on the mammoth copy camera. Light flooded the room evenly and everything looked as clean as in an incubator.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I was still downtown,” Harriet Johansen said. “What’s everyone doing?”
“They spend most of their time cleaning their instruments. A piece of grit you can barely see can make a scratch twenty feet long onscreen. That fellow there has the crucial responsibility of making sure the temperature in that storage cabinet never exceeds seventy degrees and that the relative humidity stays below fifty percent. To heat and moisture, celluloid is like sugar to an ant. The cabinet’s built to hold a hundred and fifty thousand feet of film. It’s strictly short term, for work in progress. After that it goes into the vault downstairs for extended storage. You can guess what the camera’s for. Transferring silver nitrate to safety stock is a frame-by-frame process. A lot of people think it’s just a matter of pushing a button, like copying videotape.”
“Why isn’t it?”
“For the same reason you don’t unwrap a three thousand-year-old mummy by yanking on the bandage. This is brittle stuff in the first stage of decomposition.”
“No wonder they have to wear so much gear.”
“That’s for their protection, not the film’s. In the second and third stage, it releases nitric and nitrogen dioxide, among other nasty gases. Extremely toxic. When it reaches stage three, it goes in there.” He pointed at a schoolbus-yellow cylinder standing three feet tall in the center of the room, with a lock-lid on top and a scarlet skull-and-crossbones on the side. Stenciled warnings in three languages appeared below.
“I guessed it was fragile. I never knew it was dangerous.”
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg. After stage three, it goes into a steel drum and the drum goes to the bottom of the Pacific, next to all the nuclear waste. That’s if it doesn’t burn or blow up en route.”
She smiled. “Now you’re exaggerating.”
“Only a little, because every precaution is taken to prevent combustion. The material’s laced with silver. Silver oxidizes, oxidation produces heat, and celluloid is extremely inflammable even in its pristine state. If it were introduced today, the Federal Trade Commission would never allow it to go on the market.”
“How many stages of decomposition
are
there?”
“Five.”
“Five?
Three sounded scary enough. What happens in stage four?”
“It degenerates into a glutinous mass, fused into an orange lump that smells like vinegar. In the final stage it crumbles into a fine powder that’s about as volatile as magnesium. You know, photographer’s flash powder. Poof!” He sprang open his hands.
She tilted her head toward the technicians. “Are they in danger?”
“Minimally. They’re trained to handle hazardous materials. We installed ventilation fans and an automatic sprinkler system in compliance with OSHA and the National Fire Protection Association and made some improvements of our own. People who specialize in removing asbestos are at greater risk.” He had a sudden premonition of personal crisis.
She saw it on his face. “You’re thinking about the Oracle, aren’t you? Old theaters and asbestos go together like fried potatoes and grease.”
“There’s a lot of insulation hanging out of the ceiling,” he said. “But Max Fink was cutting corners, trying to save money. Maybe he used rock wool.”
“We’ll keep a good thought.” She touched his arm. Then she turned back toward the window. “What is safety stock?”
“Cellulose triacetate. Kodak brought it out in nineteen forty-eight, and within three years it replaced silver nitrate at all the studios. It met all the performance requirements and was fire retardant besides. The jury’s still out on whether triacetate adds much to the actual life of the film. The hues of Technicolor seem to resist fading in the old stuff better than the new. We’ll know more when it’s been around as long as what came before. Bored yet?” He smiled. He could still feel the touch of her hand on his arm.
“Not at all. So the one with the copy camera is striking off a new print on triacetate from silver nitrate. What’s the film? You said it’s a major project.”
“A wonderful old silent that’s been missing for eighty years.”
“What’s it called? Maybe I’ve heard of it.”
He knew the subject would come up, but he decided it was too early to hit her up for a word on behalf of his mission.
“Greed,
directed by Erich von Stroheim.”
She popped her head in that little shrugging movement he liked. “I score okay on some of the highlights:
Citizen Kane
and William Randolph Hearst, the Gish sisters, John Ford’s westerns. I know Marcello Mastroianni isn’t a kind of pasta. Douglas was the buff.”
“Douglas was your fiancé?”
“Yes. The first time I called him Doug, he corrected me. I should have known where it was going then.” She looked troubled. “I’m picturing Erich von Stroheim, why is that? Directors are kind of invisible.”
“You probably saw him in
Sunset Boulevard,
his swan song. He couldn’t stay away from the other side of the camera. He played Gloria Swanson’s butler.”
“Yep. Saw it. Can you
show
silver nitrate?”
“Only as late as the first stage, and then it requires a special projector with an air-cooling system. It’s an experience no one should miss. The silver provides an illumination all its own; a glossy glow that’s lost in transference to triacetate. When they called it the silver screen, they weren’t just being poetic.”
“If you’re asking me to the movies, I accept.”
She kept her profile turned toward him, watching the technicians at work. He said, “I’ll set it up.”
“‘Flammable Solid,’” she read from the English legend on the side of the drum; back to business. “What’s the difference between ‘flammable’ and ‘inflammable?’”
“There isn’t any. Too many people were smoking around oil tankers, thinking ‘inflammable’ meant ‘uninflammable.’ It was cheaper to change all the signs than educate them.”
“Like ‘irregardless.’”
“Exactly. Only in this case people were blowing themselves up.”
He spoke of molecular sieves and ester-base film, formaldehyde and sulfur dioxide, pointed out the air-quality monitors, and was about to suggest a visit to the storage facility in the basement when the technicians started climbing out of their protective gear. The red bulb above the door had stopped flashing. He looked at his watch.
“That’s lunch. My God, I’ve been jabbering for two hours.” Way to make an impression on a first date.
“Are you serious? It seemed like five minutes.”
They entered the lab, where he introduced her to the crew, one of whom was a woman a little older than Ms. Johansen. “Marge is our safety inspector,” Valentino said. “If we get any more shorthanded, we’re going to have to get the head of the department down here to help empty the waste-baskets.”
Marge, a short redhead with freckles the size of dimes, gripped the visitor’s hand tightly, one woman in a male-dominated trade to another. “We should get together sometime and swap war stories,” she said. “How’d they break you in?
“My section chief made a sandwich out of a human liver and slipped it into my sack lunch. What about you?”
“Someone poured vinegar in my locker; I never found out who. I was on my way to the dump barrel with my favorite cashmere sweater when the laughing started. So did you take a bite?”
“Just a nibble.”
One of the others showed her a section of negative on safety stock. Valentino couldn’t resist looking over her shoulder when the man held it up to the light. It was the seduction scene in the dentist’s office. Harriet Johansen asked if it was a stag film.
“It was a little less scandalous in nineteen twenty-five,” Valentino said. “They told rape jokes back then. We’re going to take some heat from several special-interest groups when this is released. One of the secondary characters is bound to attract the attention of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. Luckily for us, von Stroheim was a Jew.”
“And Stepin Fetchit was black. That didn’t stop the NAACP from hounding him to his grave.” Marge laughed. “If you hang around with these characters long enough, you’ll qualify for a film-school diploma.”
Harriet said, “I’ve learned plenty just this morning. I’m looking forward to walking Val through the county morgue.”
“Val, is it?” The technician, a rawboned post-graduate named Artie, grinned. He’d joined the preservation program on the advice of Kyle Broadhead, who’d smashed his hopes for a directing career with a failing grade. “We were told to expect an official visit.”
Valentino decided to stop that conversation in its tracks. “It is official. California’s a first-name-only state. I guess they didn’t teach you that in North Dakota.”
“South Dakota,” Artie corrected.
“What part?” Harriet asked.
“Rapid City.”
She uncased that brilliant smile. “I’m from Pierre.”
“We beat the pants off you on the varsity court.”
“We got them back on the football field.”
Valentino and Harriet left. In the hallway, he asked if she was free for lunch.
“My father used to say, ‘Free, white, and twenty-one’; but I don’t want to offend any special-interest groups. I’ve been starving for an hour, ever since I mentioned fried potatoes. Is there a good place close by? I should get back, but no one downtown knows how long it takes to tour a film preservation laboratory.”
They took his car to the Sunset-Vine Tower and got a table in Room at the Top, just ahead of the rush. Their window spot looked out on a hundred years of Hollywood history. The waitress, an obvious would-be starlet in makeup too heavy for her tender years, brought them a salad and a breast of chicken. Harriet stuck a fork into her romaine. “How’d you get interested in movies?”
“I’ve taken up enough of your time on that subject,” he said. “What drew you into criminology?”
“My father was chief of police in Pierre. I guess it’s in my blood. I enrolled in the program at USC on the theory that the practical experience in Los Angeles has it all over the smash-and-grab specialists in South Dakota. I guess that doesn’t make me any less of a starry-eyed kid than our waitress.”