Coppola's Dracula Part 1

Coppola's Dracula.

a novella by Kim Newman.

A treeline at dusk. Tall, straight, Carpathian pines. The red of sunset bleeds into the dark of night. Great flapping sounds. Huge, dark shapes flit languidly between the trees, sinister, dangerous. A vast batwing brushes the treetops.

Jim Morrison's voice wails in despair. 'People Are Strange'.

Fire blossoms. Blue flame, pure as candle light. Black trees are consumed ...

Fade to a face, hanging upside-down in the roiling fire.

Harker's Voice: Wallachia ... s.h.i.t!

Jonathan Harker, a solicitor's clerk, lies uneasy on his bed, upstairs in the inn at Bistritz, waiting. His eyes are empty.

With great effort, he gets up and goes to the full-length mirror. He avoids his own gaze and takes a swig from a squat bottle of plum brandy.

He wears only long drawers. Bite-marks, almost healed, scab his shoulders.

His arms and chest are sinewy, but his belly is white and soft. He staggers into a program of isometric exercises, vigorously Christian, ineptly executed.

Harker's Voice: I could only think of the forests, the mountains ... the inn was just a waiting room. Whenever I was in the forests, I could only think of home, of Exeter. Whenever I was home, I could only think of getting back to the mountains.

The blind crucifix above the mirror, hung with cloves of garlic, looks down on Harker. He misses his footing and falls on the bed, then gets up, reaches, and takes down the garlic.

He bites into a clove as if it were an apple, and washes the pulp down with more brandy.

Harker's Voice: All the time I stayed here in the inn, waiting for a commission, I was growing older, losing precious life. And all the time the Count sat on top of his mountain, leeching off the land, he grew younger, thirstier.

Harker scoops a locket from a bedside table and opens it to look at a portrait of his wife, Mina. Without malice or curiosity, he dangles the cameo in a candle flame. The face browns, the silver setting blackens.

Harker's Voice: I was waiting for the call from Seward. Eventually, it came.

There is a knock on the door.

'It's all right for you, Katharine Reed,' Francis whined as he picked over the unappetising craft services table. 'You're dead, you don't have to eat this s.h.i.t.'

Kate showed teeth, hissing a little. She knew that despite her c.o.ke-bottle gla.s.ses and freckles, she could look unnervingly feral when she smiled.

Francis didn't shrink: deep down, the director thought of her as a special effect, not a real vampire.

In the makeshift canteen, deep in the production bunker, the Americans wittered nostalgia about McDonald's. The Brits - the warm ones, anyway - rhapsodised about Pinewood breakfasts of kippers and fried bread. Romanian location catering was not what they were used to.

Francis finally found an apple less than half brown and took it away. His weight had dropped visibly since their first meeting, months ago in pre-production. Since he had come to Eastern Europe, the insurance doctor diagnosed him as suffering from malnutrition and put him on vitamin shots.

Dracula was running true to form, sucking him dry.

A production this size was like a swarm of vampire bats - some large, many tiny - battening tenaciously onto the host, making insistent, never-ending demands. Kate had watched Francis - bespectacled, bearded and hyperactive - lose substance under the draining siege, as he made and justified decisions, yielded the visions to be translated to celluloid, rewrote the script to suit locations or new casting. How could one man throw out so many ideas, only a fraction of which would be acted on? In his position, Kate's mind would bleed empty in a week.

A big budget film shot in a backward country was an insane proposition, like taking a touring three-ring circus into a war zone. Who will survive, she thought, and what will be left of them?

The craft table for vampires was as poorly stocked as the one for the warm. Unhealthy rats in chickenwire cages. Kate watched one of the floor effects men, a new-born with a padded waistcoat and a toolbelt, select a writhing specimen and bite off its head. He spat it on the concrete floor, face stretched into a mask of disgust.

'Ringworm,' he snarled. 'The commie gits are trying to kill us off with diseased vermin.'

'I could murder a bacon sarnie,' the effects man's mate sighed.

'I could murder a Romanian caterer,' said the new-born.

Kate decided to go thirsty. There were enough Yanks around to make coming by human blood in this traditionally superst.i.tious backwater not a problem. Ninety years after Dracula spread vampirism to the Western world, America was still spa.r.s.ely populated by the blood-drinking undead. For a lot of Americans, being bled by a genuine olde worlde creature of the night was something of a thrill.

That would wear off.

Outside the bunker, in a shrinking patch of natural sunlight between a stand of real pines and the skeletons of fake trees, Francis shouted at Harvey Keitel. The actor, cast as Jonathan Harker, was stoic, inexpressive, grumpy. He refused to be drawn into argument, invariably driving Francis to shrieking hysteria.

'I'm not Martin f.u.c.king Scorsese, man,' he screamed. 'I'm not going to slather on some lousy voice-over to compensate for what you're not giving me. Without Harker, I don't have a picture.'

Keitel made fists but his body language was casual. Francis had been riding his star hard all week. Scuttleb.u.t.t was that he had wanted Pacino or McQueen but neither wanted to spend three months behind the Iron Curtain.

Kate could understand that. This featureless WWII bunker, turned over to the production as a command centre, stood in ancient mountains, dwarfed by the tall trees. As an outpost of civilisation in a savage land, it was ugly and ineffective.

When approached to act as a technical advisor to Coppola's Dracula, she had thought it might be interesting to see where it all started: the Changes, the Terror, the Transformation. No one seriously believed vampirism began here, but it was where Dracula came from. This land had nurtured him through centuries before he decided to spread his wings and extend his bloodline around the world.

Three months had already been revised as six months. This production didn't have a schedule, it had a sentence. A few were already demanding parole.

Some vampires felt Transylvania should be the undead Israel, a new state carved out of the much-redrawn map of Central Europe, a geographical and political homeland. As soon as it grew from an inkling to a notion, Nicolae Ceausescu vigorously vetoed the proposition. Holding up in one hand a silver-edged sickle, an iron-headed hammer and a sharpened oak spar, the Premier reminded the world that 'in Romania, we know how to treat leeches - a stake through the heart and off with their filthy heads.' But the Transylvania Movement - back to the forests, back to the mountains - gathered momentum: some elders, after ninety years of the chaos of the larger world, wished to withdraw to their former legendary status. Many of Kate's generation, turned in the 1880s, Victorians stranded in this mechanistic century, were sympathetic.

'You're the Irish vampire lady,' Harrison Ford, flown in for two days to play Dr Seward as a favour, had said. 'Where's your castle?'

'I have a flat in Clerkenwell,' she admitted. 'Over an off-licence.'

In the promised Transylvania, all elders would have castles, fiefdoms, slaves, human cattle. Everyone would wear evening dress. All vampires would have treasures of ancient gold, like leprechauns. There would be a silk-lined coffin in every crypt, and every night would be a full moon.

Unlife eternal and luxury without end, bottomless wells of blood and Paris label shrouds.

Kate thought the Movement lunatic. Never mind cooked breakfasts and (the other crew complaint) proper toilet paper, this was an intellectual desert, a country without conversation, without (and she recognised the irony) life.

She understood Dracula had left Transylvania in the first place not merely because he - the great dark sponge - had sucked it dry, but because even he was bored with ruling over gypsies, wolves and mountain streams. That did not prevent the elders of the Transylvania Movement from claiming the Count as their inspiration and using his seal as their symbol. An Arthurian whisper had it that once vampires returned to Transylvania, Dracula would rise again to a.s.sume his rightful throne as their ruler.

Dracula meant so much to so many. She wondered if there was anything left inside so many meanings, anything concrete and inarguable and true. Or was he now just a phantom, a slave to anyone who cared to invoke his name? So many causes and crusades and rebellions and atrocities. One man, one monster, could never have kept track of them all, could never have encompa.s.sed so much mutually exclusive argument.

There was the Dracula of the histories, the Dracula of Stoker's book, the Dracula of this film, the Dracula of the Transylvania Movement. Dracula, the vampire and the idea, was vast. But not so vast that he could cast his cloak of protection around all who claimed to be his followers. Out here in the mountains where the Count had pa.s.sed centuries in petty predation, Kate understood that he must in himself have felt tiny, a lizard crawling down a rock.

Nature was overwhelming. At night, the stars were laser-points in the deep velvet black of the sky. She could hear, taste and smell a thousand flora and fauna. If ever there was a call of the wild, this forest exerted it.

But there was nothing she considered intelligent life.

She tied tight under her chin the yellow scarf, shot through with golden traceries, she had bought at Biba in 1969. It was a flimsy, delicate thing, but to her it meant civilisation, a coloured moment of frivolity in a life too often preoccupied with monochrome momentousness.

Francis jumped up and down and threw script pages to the winds. His arms flapped like wings. Clouds of profanity enveloped the uncaring Keitel.

'Don't you realise I've put up my own f.u.c.king money for this f.u.c.king picture,' he shouted, not just at Keitel but at the whole company. 'I could lose my house, my vineyard, everything. I can't afford a f.u.c.king honourable failure. This has abso-G.o.dd.a.m.n-lutely got to outgross Jaws or I'm personally impaled up the a.s.s with a sharpened telegraph pole.'

Effects men sat slumped against the exterior wall of the bunker - there were few chairs on location - and watched their director rail at the heavens, demanding of G.o.d answers that were not forthcoming. Script pages swirled upwards in a spiral, spreading out in a cloud, whipping against the upper trunks of the trees, soaring out over the valley.

'He was worse on G.o.dfather,' one said.

Servants usher Harker into a well-appointed drawing room. A table is set with an informal feast of bread, cheese and meat. Dr Jack Seward, in a white coat with a stethoscope hung around his neck, warmly shakes Harker's hand and leads him to the table. Quincey P. Morris sits to one side, tossing and catching a spade-sized bowie knife.

Lord G.o.dalming, well-dressed, napkin tucked into his starched collar, sits at the table, forking down a double helping of paprika chicken. Harker's eyes meet G.o.dalming's, the n.o.bleman looks away.

Seward: Harker, help yourself to the fare, Jon. It's uncommonly decent for foreign muck.

Harker: Thank you, no. I took repast at the inn.

Seward: How is the inn? Natives bothering you? Superst.i.tious babushkas, what?

Harker: I am well in myself.

Seward: Splendid ... the vampire, Countess Marya Dolingen of Graz. In 1883, you cut off her head and drove a hawthorn stake through her heart, destroying her utterly.

Harker: I'm not disposed just now to discuss such affairs.

Morris: Come on, Jonny-Boy. You have a commendation from the church, a papal decoration. The frothing she-b.i.t.c.h is dead at last. Take the credit.

Harker: I have no direct knowledge of the individual you mention. And if I did, I reiterate that I would not be disposed to discuss such affairs.

Seward and Morris exchange a look as Harker stands impa.s.sive. They know they have the right man. G.o.dalming, obviously in command, nods.

Seward clears plates of cold meat from a strong-box that stands on the table. G.o.dalming hands the doctor a key, with which he opens the box. He takes out a woodcut and hands it over to Harker.

The picture is of a knife-nosed mediaeval warrior prince.

Seward: That's Vlad Tepes, called 'the Impaler'. A good Christian, defender of the faith. Killed a million Turks. Son of the Dragon, they called him. Dracula.

Harker is impressed.

Morris: Prince Vlad had Orthodox Church decorations out the a.s.s. Coulda made Metropolitan. But he converted, went over to Rome, turned Candle.

Harker: Candle?

Seward: Roman Catholic.

Harker looks again at the woodcut. In a certain light, it resembles the young Marlon Brando.

Seward walks to a side-table, where an antique dictaphone is set up. He fits a wax cylinder and adjusts the needle-horn.

Seward: This is Dracula's voice. It's been authenticated.

Seward cranks the dictaphone.

Dracula's Voice: Cheeldren of the naight, leesten to them. What museek they maike!

There is a strange distortion in the recording.

Harker: What's that noise in the background?

Seward: Wolves, my boy. Dire wolves, to be precise.

Dracula's Voice: To die, to be reallllly dead, that must be ...

gloriousssss!

Morris: Vlad's well beyond Rome now. He's up there, in his impenetrable castle, continuing the crusade on his own. He's got this army of Szekeley Gypsies, fanatically loyal f.u.c.ks. They follow his orders, no matter how atrocious, no matter how appalling. You know the score, Jon. Dead babies, drained cattle, defenestrated peasants, impaled grandmothers. He's G.o.d-d.a.m.ned Un-Dead. A f.u.c.kin' monster, boy.

Harker is shocked. He looks again at the woodcut.

Seward: The firm would like you to proceed up into the mountains, beyond the Borgo Pa.s.s ...

Harker: But that's Transylvania. We're not supposed to be in Transylvania.

G.o.dalming looks to the heavens, but continues eating.

Seward: ... beyond the Borgo Pa.s.s, to Castle Dracula. There, you are to ingratiate yourself by whatever means come to hand into Dracula's coterie.

Then you are to disperse the Count's household.

Harker: Disperse?

G.o.dalming puts down his knife and fork.

G.o.dalming: Disperse with ultimate devotion.