Linda Lee, Incorporated Part 37

Lucinda had by now become sufficiently conversant with the ways of directors to hear without much surprise--if with a little sinking of her lonely heart--the news which Summerlad had to communicate on the tenth day of his absence, when he telephoned that Jacques was threatening to find a fortnight too little for the work that had taken the company away from Los Angeles.

And the next day, when she paid the studio the perfunctory call of routine--to learn, as usual, that Barry Nolan had as yet sent no word concerning the date when he expected to begin directing for Linda Lee Inc.--Lucinda saw, as she left her car in front of the administration building, the owner of the premises lounging against one of the fluted columns of the portico and mumbling an unlighted cigar, and got from him a moody nod instead of the beaming salutation he had taught her to expect.

Himself a monstrously homely man, short, stout and swart, Zinn had an alert eye for feminine good looks, which had never before neglected to give Lucinda to understand that it was on her and humid with approbation.

By birth a Russian Jew, offspring of immigrants from Odessa, Isadore Zinn had worked his way into the producing business, as the saying ran, through its backdoor; that is to say, from the exhibitors' side.

Indefatigable industry and appet.i.te for hardship coupled with quenchless greed and a complete absence of scruples and moral sense, had promoted him from the office of usher in a "nickelodeon" of the cinema's early days successively to be the proprietor of the enterprise, organizer of a chain of motion-picture theatres, and president of a league of exhibitors, which last had eventually pooled its resources and gone into the business of producing as well as that of showing pictures. The money of this league had built what were today the Zinn Studios; just how this property had come to pa.s.s into Zinn's sole possession was a matter of secret history concerning which there were many rumours, all unsavory.

Zinn was reputed by his loving employees to set no more store by a dollar than by an eye-tooth or an only child.

On leaving, half an hour later, Lucinda found the man in the same spot and pose. Apparently he had not moved a muscle in that interval. She paused to ask why, and was frankly told.

"I'm figuring on killing a director, Miss Lee, and wondering if maybe I couldn't get away with it. I could all right, if you only could believe all you hear. You ask any of them fellers in there"--Zinn jerked his head toward the building behind him--"takes my good money and calls me Mister Zinn--and they'll tell you I get away with murder every day or worse." He sighed dismally. "If they was any truth in that, I'd be a happy kike and a lot of directors' wives wouldn't have nothing on their minds no more, only their hair. The way I am today, the first one I'd take a load off her intellect would be Mrs. Jacques."

"I didn't know Mr. Jacques was married."

"Maybe he ain't right now, it's hard to tell. You take actors and directors, they're all the same, you never know when they ain't married or how long they been that way. The way it seems to me, they get married off and on just to see what difference it will make if any. 'Most everybody you know's got a loose wife or husband kicking around somewhere this side the Cajon Pa.s.s. The only way you can keep track of them is don't try."

"It must be frightfully embarra.s.sing at times...."

"Ah, they don't mind! I had one little feller working for me, playing leads in two-reel comedies, his director was his first wife's second husband, and the little lady played opposite him was his second wife once removed. They got along fine s'long's they was on the lot, but outside the studio they wouldn't speak, only bark when they pa.s.sed."

"But you haven't told me what Mr. Jacques has been doing...."

"Oh, him--! I got a wire from him just now, says he's going to have to keep the Summerlad outfit up in that logging camp maybe another couple weeks. Joe could of shot all the scenes he had to shoot up there in a week if he'd of went at it the right way; so I give him two weeks, and now he wants four. And I don't dare give him the razz for fear he'll make it six weeks or quit."

"But if you aren't satisfied, surely you can find another director."

"Sure I can. And the first thing _he'll_ do is run all the rushes in the projection-room and tell me they're rotten and got to be retook the way he sees it. And then he'll rewrite the continuity and, just to show me what a low piker Jacques was, he'll stick in a lot of new stuff that'll cost maybe another hundred thousand dollars."

"I don't understand," Lucinda objected. "Why should Mr. Jacques deliberately waste time on a production?"

"He's getting his two thousand a week, ain't he? And if he makes this picture cost less than the last one Summerlad done, how's he going to keep his tail up with the other dogs, next time the hooch hounds meets down to Santa Monica? Not only that, if he should ever get a rep for making pictures quick and cheap, the only jobs he'll be offered will mean honest-to-G.o.d work."

"But, Mr. Zinn: if that's the usual director's att.i.tude toward his job, I should think you would do as we're doing with Mr. Nolan, pay each a fixed sum for every production he makes."

Zinn drew down the corners of his mouth in sour pity for Lucinda's innocence. "Twenty-five thousand a picture's what Nolan's going to drag down, ain't it? When a director gets that cla.s.s, he's doing you a favour to make pictures for you, to start off with; and then he spreads himself to spend more coin more ways than any other director ever thought of, just to show you he's the big-money boy. A director don't think big means anything without a dollar-mark parked in front of it; and the producer's the poor sap that puts up the dollar-mark every time. They's only one way a producer can beat a director, the way it is today, and that's quit the fillum business cold."

"I presume that's what you'll do, if the directors persist in making it impossible for you to make any money."

A twinkle kindled in the beady eyes, a rougishly confidential grin formed on the fleshy features. "Now, listen, Miss Lee: I never told you I wasn't making money, did I? It's the jack directors waste on me I'm kicking about. Any time things get so bad you can't give one of them megaphone nurses his head and still get your production cost back and something over, I got it all framed so I can ease out and never be missed."

And when Lucinda had obliged by voicing a polite doubt that such a thing as this could ever come to pa.s.s, Zinn concluded with grim humour: "I got everything all set to sell the studio to the county for an insane asylum; then n.o.body in Hollywood won't never know the difference."

Running true to the form thus forecast, Jacques kept the Summerlad company away so long that its return found the first Linda Lee production in full swing, with Barry Nolan in command, Lucinda playing the supple puppet of his whim from sun to sun, f.a.n.n.y demurely walking through the feminine part of second importance, and Lontaine functioning at the peak of his capacity as executive genius of the organization and showing the strain of it all in his prominent blue eyes.

Why it should be so hard on him n.o.body seemed to know and Lontaine was too busy to explain; while Lucinda, in the prepossession of her anxiety to give a good account of herself before the camera, carelessly accepted that prodigious display of activity, that mien of unremitting abstraction, as phenomena doubtless common to men of affairs, and never paused to wonder why Lontaine need be so fretted and fretful when everything was now in the hands of Nolan and his a.s.sistants, who did pretty much as they pleased anyway, as a rule consulting Lontaine if at all only after acting on their own initiative and leaving to his office merely the routine of financial matters.

Nevertheless Lontaine was ever the first of the Linda Lee forces to show up at the studio in the morning, the last to leave it at night, and between whiles kept incessantly on the go: trotting from his desk to the stage to give Nolan the benefit of advice which was invariably attended to with much patience and disregarded with more prompt.i.tude as soon as its source turned his back; to the laboratory to run a wise eye over negative newly developed as it came dripping from the vats to be stretched to dry upon huge revolving drums; to the studio of the technical director, to badger that competent and long-suffering gentleman about sets and their dressing; to Zinn's sanctum overlooking the "lot," where that old-timer sat spying out on the comings and goings of his employees and spinning his endless schemes of avarice, but ever ready to lend an ear and give cunning counsel to a tenant who paid his rent on the nail; to the projection-rooms to view the rushes; back to the stage to flatter Lucinda, felicitate Nolan, and b.u.t.tonhole subordinate players for earnest conferences apart concerning their performances--this last a habit which, since it afforded the actors a chance to talk about themselves, earned Lontaine the loving grat.i.tude of all hands, barring the directorial staff whose job it was to undo all that he did, were it well done or ill, for the sake of morale and to preserve unimpaired the precious prestige of Barry Nolan.

At other times members of the cast loafing about the lot while they waited to be called to work on the stage, would observe the president of Linda Lee Inc., at the window of his tiny office in the administration building, brooding portentously over doc.u.ments of legal aspect, or with fine flourishes of the fountain-pen affixing his hand to those cheques which, issuing forth in a steady stream, kept the treasury always at low ebb no matter how often or how generously Lucinda might replenish it.

Neither did the silver-and-blue car know overmuch rest. In view of the man's ubiquity in the studio, it was surprising how often Lontaine was to be seen speeding down Sunset Boulevard, bound for the business centre of Los Angeles, to other studios for mysterious conferences with local somebodies who had no known interest in the destinies of Linda Lee Inc., or to objectives whose nature remained a close secret between Lontaine, his chauffeur, and his G.o.d.

To all these picturesque symptoms of hustle and bounce, so little in character with the Briton of tradition, his wife played silent but attentive audience; though oftentimes her pretty eyes would light up with an unspoken comment too pungent to be wasted and, discreetly questing a sympathetic confidant would find it without fail in Barry Nolan, who learned to watch for that look whenever one of Lontaine's antics made a more than everyday appeal to his sense of humour.

Irish both by descent and profession, Nolan had at least that sense conspicuously developed. What others he possessed of which as much might be a.s.serted, was a question which came to occupy many of Lucinda's spare moments. She was not at all disposed to be hypercritical, in the beginning, she had yet to cultivate conceit in her abilities as an actress, she knew that she knew little more than nothing about the manufacture of motion-pictures; and Summerlad had so highly recommended Nolan she inclined to suspect there must be something radically wrong with her judgment. With all this, she couldn't pretend to account for Nolan's high place in the hierarchy of the cinema, unless a sprightly and affectionate disposition, a fetching grin, infectious verve, impudence without end, and a distinctly indicated vein of genius at c.r.a.p-shooting, summed up the essential qualifications of a director who pretended to earn a wage of twenty-five thousand dollars per production.

Certainly nothing that Nolan was contributing to this present picture, in the way of action, business, sense of dramatic proportion and feeling for pictorial values, appealed as in any way inspired--except occasionally by a retentive memory.

True that common usage in methods of production, working together with such special circ.u.mstances as Lucinda's inexperience and the absence of any fixed plan of plot development other than in the omniscience of Barry Nolan, made it anything but easy to judge the man fairly by the record of his work from day to day.

In the continuity which Nolan concocted to supplant that prepared by Zinn's staff writer--as in every proper continuity--each scene had been placed in its right sequence, where anybody uninstructed in the way of a director with a picture might reasonably look to see it appear in the completed photoplay. But as soon as the typist had transcribed Nolan's dictation, the new continuity was turned over to his a.s.sistants to be dismembered and rebuilt with its scenes arranged as they were to be photographed, by groups, without respect to chronological sequence.

Obviously it would be stupid (as Lucinda was quick to appreciate) to take the scenes as laid out in the continuity; for example, to photograph Scene 1 in a studio set, transport the company ten miles to photograph Scene 2 on, say, an ocean beach, and jump back to the studio to take Scene 3 on the same set as used for Scene 1. Consequently all scenes indicated for each particular set were shot seriatim; after which the set would be promptly demolished, to clear the stage for the erection of another.

It resulted from this that only an intelligence comprehending the whole plan and scope of both story and continuity could have kept track of the scenes as photographed and rated each rightly at its proportional value.

Even in the ranks of studio veterans, minds of such force and grasp are few and far to seek. The Linda Lee company hadn't been at work two days before Lucinda began to feel in relation to the story like one lost in a fog, helplessly dependent upon the guiding hand of Barry Nolan, and none too well satisfied that he knew his way about as well as he pretended to in that beclouded labyrinth.

Neither was confidence in his infallibility encouraged by a habit to which he, like most directors, proved lamentably p.r.o.ne, of improvising improvements on the story as he went along. All of a sudden, while directing a scene, Nolan was wont to break out in a profuse inspiration, and incontinently some well-remembered bit of business or episode from an old stage success would be interjected into or subst.i.tuted for incidents really germane to the original plot. That this practice as often as not produced results in conflict with the fundamental mechanics of the story, if it missed throwing them out of kilter entirely, seemed to be a consideration of minor consequence.

Thus Nolan laboured long and pa.s.sionately to persuade Lucinda it would benefit the story to engraft on it a scene wherein she would figure as a lonely prisoner in a garret, menaced by hordes of hungry rats. This regardless of the fact that there was no garret in the original story, nor any room for one, and no reason why the young person portrayed by Lucinda should be imprisoned in one, but solely because Nolan happened to fancy a resemblance between her and an actress whom he had several years before directed with great success in a garret scene with rats ad lib.

That the rats didn't work their way into the picture eventually, whether Lucinda wanted them or not, was mainly due to Nolan's misfortune in failing to think of them before his star began to show symptoms of what he called the swelled-head; that is to say before, having worked several weeks under his direction, Lucinda began to suspect that Nolan wasn't really sole custodian of the sacred mystery of motion-picture making, and to a.s.sert herself modestly as one whose views ought to have some weight with a director whose pay came out of her own pocket.

Nor is she to this day ready to believe that Nolan, left to himself, would not ultimately have overborne all opposition and had his willful way with the rat episode.

But it was neither because of this instance, nor because of other arbitrary changes that Nolan made in the story, that Lucinda first learned to mistrust his ability, but because of the appalling ignorance which he betrayed concerning what she believed should be matters of general knowledge, such as rudimentary principles of social usage.

Since the story they were concerned with had to do with people of fashionable New York transacting the business of life in their homes and public rendezvous, Lucinda thought it important that their manners should conform to approved convention; but Nolan was so little learned in such matters, and his impatience with them was so wholehearted, that she presently abandoned all effort to correct him, and in a fatalistic spirit endeavoured to comfort her misgivings with his customary rejoinder to advice in any form: "Ah, what's it matter? Ninety per cent.

of your audiences are solid bone from the neck up, and the rest wouldn't think they'd got their money's worth unless they found something to beef about in a picture. Why worry about little things like that? Life's too short, and we're wasting time!"

So Lucinda schooled herself to suffer in silence when she saw men of alleged gentle breeding offer women their left arms to escort them from the drawing to the dining rooms of Fifth avenue or when two bickered in public as to which should escort to her home a woman married to a third, and when Nolan posed a pair of lawless lovers in the foyer of a restaurant and instructed them to register unutterable emotion by holding hands, in the view of hundreds, and swelling their tormented bosoms until (as f.a.n.n.y described it) they resembled more than anything else a brace of pouter pigeons shaking the shimmy.

She held her peace even when Nolan directed a father and his son, both presumptive adepts in the social life of New York, to pause on meeting, when each was decently turned out in morning-coat and top hat, strike att.i.tudes of awed admiration, solemnly wheel each other round by the shoulders and, wagging dumbfoundered heads over the sight of so much sartorial splendour, exclaim--in subt.i.tles to be inserted in the film--"Some boy!" "Some Dad!"

And when a woman in a scene with Lucinda parted from her, uttering an injunction put in her mouth by Nolan, "Don't forget, dearie--tea at the Ritz at one o'clock," Lucinda, conceiving this to be a slip of the tongue, said nothing. But when later she viewed in the projection-room that sequence of scenes roughly a.s.sembled, with what are termed "scratch t.i.tles," in place, and read the words as quoted, and on making enquiry learned that they had been copied verbatim from Mr. Nolan's continuity, she ventured to remonstrate.

"But, Mr. Nolan, tea is a function for four o'clock or later all the world over."

"That's so, Miss Lee? Well, what d'you know about that? Guess I must've been thinking about luncheon."

"But your subt.i.tle introducing the restaurant sequence later on says 'Tea at the Ritz.'"

"That's right. I remember now, I meant tea, not luncheon. It's that way in the book."

"But in the restaurant scenes the tables are covered with cloths and the waiters are serving all sorts of dishes, course meals."

"What's the matter with that?"