Horst nodded, and they began to circle back toward the house: a low rambling structure of redwood and native stone, perched dramatically on the cliff to the south, a safe twenty yards back from the edge. There was a lot of work still to be done, but Horst was already beginning to think of it as home and of the Bel Air mausoleum they had so recently unloaded as a memory of another time.
“What I don’t understand is where he got those tapes, John,” Mildred said, interrupting his domestic reverie.
“That’s the most ludicrous part,” Horst said. “The hippies who delivered them were a record pirating outfit called Rubber Duck who had recorded them at the festival. When I asked Beck how he had managed to buy Rubber Duck out, he told me that
he
owned Rubber Duck in the first place.”
“He pirated tapes of his own rock festival?”
Horst shook his head. “Apparently so,” he said. “Almost as if he had a premonition of what would happen. He stands to make millions off those albums, especially since the picture now looks like it’s going to be a big success. It’s almost as if he had planned everything.”
“You don’t suppose—”
Horst laughed. “How could anyone have planned what happened?” he said. “That revolutionaries would seize the stage and burn the tapes? That Star would produce such a dramatic event? That Conrad would get it all on film? He could’ve planned some of it
—but all of it?
No, a good deal of it must’ve been just dumb luck.” They walked through the grass toward the lights of the house. Jango Beck’s not the only one with dumb luck, Horst thought. I’ve got the sort of film operation now that’s really suited to the times, a financing and distributing company without major overhead, and a film that’s going to make money virtually from the first dollar of gross to start things off right. And all because Beck got the best of me! If I’d had my way, I’d still be shortening my life with the stress of trying to run a hopeless studio operation and living in that empty castle in Bel Air.
Horst took his wife’s hand as they entered the yard proper: manicured lawn, rough-hewn rock furniture, well-tended shrubbery and flower beds. It was a little piece of their neat Bel Air past in the rustic seacoast present, but on a human scale this time, something that could be lived with.
“Is it really true that the new owners are... you know?” Mildred mumbled uneasily.
Horst nodded, tasting the only worm in his sweet new apple. “But it’s not as if we’re in some gangster movie,” he said. “As long as we’re showing a profit, they’ll leave things alone. They’re businessmen like everyone else.” Horst shivered a bit in the cool sea breeze, and he admitted to himself that he felt a certain fear, an uncertainty about what might happen if he didn’t produce. But like the formal yard, like his mild heart condition, that too was on a scale that could be lived with. After all, people didn’t get taken for rides anymore, and your job always
does
ride on the balance sheet.
Mildred looked at him uncertainly. “Are you sure of that?” she said.
Horst smiled at her. “I’m sure,” he lied. If something happens to Taub, then it’ll be time to worry. But not now.
They entered their new house on the beach through the back door as the blood-red sun seemed to touch the dark ocean, turning its mirror surface to a sheet of fire.
Paul Conrad watched Star moving across the frame in slow motion, shards of light flashing off her mirrored suit belying the slowed-down speed of the film with their sudden scintillances of real-time brilliance. Slowly, liquidly, her legs propel her forward, her breasts bob, her hand comes up to her vest—
A quick intercut flash of the contorted face of a uniformed guard firing his pistol, terrified bodies, screaming faces, swirling around him in real time—
Liquidly, Star continues her majestic trajectory across the stage in the bright sunlight, and the full shot on her fades slowly into a continuation of the same shot, but from another angle high above her, a cosmic eye watching her move into the center of this moment of destiny—
Intercut flashes of: gunmen on the stage firing their automatic rifles, close-ups of stricken faces in the crowd, a young girl screaming as blood fountains from her chest, an abstract tangle of running legs and stumbling bodies, all in jarring, jerky real time—
Slowly, slowly, divorced from time, Star takes off her vest and flings it into the air. The camera moves in for a close-up on the vest as it falls through the air in slow motion, rays of sunlight flickering intermittently from the mirrors sewn into it. Each flash of sun cues an intercut flash frame of the violence in the crowd—guards firing, bodies falling, panicked people trying to fight their way to a safety that does not exist.
The close-up on the slowly falling mirror vest flicker-fades into a close-up on just Star, from a low angle, the sun centered in the frame behind her head, outlining it in brilliance, flashing red highlights off her black hair as if tosses and tumbles in slow motion, where every motion registers on the eye as a choreographed moment of ballet.
Slowly, regally, she raises the microphone to her lips, and as her mouth begins to move, the camera eye moves around her in a series of shots that quick-fade into each other trailing piled-up afterimages—close up from below, medium shot from above, medium shot from below from another angle—all the shots centered on her face as the opening line of the song seems to move her tender lips with its passage.
In his mind, Paul supplied the sound to go along with the untracked film, the rhythm of what the final sequence would be. “Take this body....”
Cut to a shot from the depths of the crowd centered on the stage, on Star, seen in the top center of the frame, a tiny figure above a meadow of faces turning en masse to face her like animate flowers turning to the sun.
“I am yours....”
Cut to a medium close-up on Star in slow motion, shot from below, her bare torso looming in the frame like a towering statue of pink vulnerable flesh, her face haloed by hair and sun. Bright red roses of blood bloom on her left shoulder and right hand, abstract and beautiful flowers against the paleness of her skin.
“I will warm you....”
Flicker-fade to a longer shot from the same angle, including the leader of the gunmen and emphasizing him by the framing as he turns, rising to face her, and the camera zooms back into the previous shot of Star, haloed by the sun, anointed with her own blood.
“I will love you....”
Cut to another shot from within the crowd, centered on the tiny stage in the far distance. The motion of the people, of three guards with pistols visible in the extreme right of the frame, slows down from real time to slow motion to dead stop, a freeze frame.
“I will flash you through the fire of my flame.”
The blue of the sky begins to slowly, very slowly, acquire a rosy tint as the still frame fades into another freeze frame, this one a tableau of Star singing, Horvath reaching her side, and the revolutionary commander in the act of tossing away his weapon and rising to shield her body with his own. All against a blue sky deepening to sunset-red.
The camera zooms in on the automatic rifle sailing off the gunman’s fingertips as the frame unfreezes. The rifle sails off into space in slow motion, the camera following its upward trajectory into the glare of the sun, into a flash of brilliance that washes out the frame.
The camera comes out of this burst of light to a medium shot on Star and Bill Horvath, shielded by the disarmed gunman, all three of them seen from a low angle, outlined like a heroic tableau against the rays of the sun, against the red-filtered sky.
The shot slowly fades into a helicopter shot on the three figures from above as Horvath takes his guitar in hand and starts to play. Slowly, steadily, the camera spirals up and back with the shot centered on the bull’s-eye of the stage, until the frame is filled by a vast sea of people, until the stage itself is only a tiny detail, a pinpoint of metal on a field of flesh.
This shot fades into a series of shots fading continuously into each other: faces in the crowd; singly, in small groups, in vast numbers, showing the change in mood moving through flesh, the quieting of the beast. Slowly, the rosy tint deepens toward red, gradually washing out all detail until the frame is a field of red-orange fire.
The fire begins to pale, and detail emerges. A helicopter shot above the campgrounds, refugees trudging south lit by the somber light of sunset. The camera moves north and crests a ridgeline. Far below, the great saucer of the natural amphitheater, empty now, abandoned, is bisected into hemispheres of gold and near-black shadow. The light and dark begin to rotate, fill the frame with a strobing swirl of reddish orange that settles into a steady orange glow.
The camera pulls back and the field of orange becomes the glowing ball of the setting sun truncated by the line of the horizon. Or is it sunrise? For the camera zooms in on the sun in three discontinuous jumps, and the sun seems to leap in perspective, upward and outward. On the second jump, a close-up of Velva Leecock, wide-eyed and smiling, is superimposed on the solar sphere, and on the third, the face of Star, frozen in a moment of song.
Her face solarized into a stylized poster mask of hard-edged reds and oranges, and then the film flickered into white and the screening-room lights came on.
Paul blinked in the sudden light, wrenching his mind away from the reality of his own creation, back into the world of flesh and blood. It’s going to be good, he thought. It’s going to be so damned good I don’t even have a right to think about it.
Jango Beck, his feet propped up on the back of the seat in front of him, puffed on a joint, shook his heavy head of dark hair, laughed. “Well, how does it feel to be the next Stanley Kubrick?” he said slyly.
“Do you really think it’s going to be that good, or are you just putting me on?”
“What I really think is that it’s going to be a cinematic legend, instant myth,” Beck said. “In fact, I don’t
think
it, I
know’ll.
I’m going to guarantee it by the way I sell the film, the albums, the posters, the T-shirts, the roach clips, the rolling papers, and whatever other tie-ins I can dream up. The legend of Star, the debut of Velva Leecock, the magic of Paul Conrad, the Boy Genius who captured it all! You’ll be the hottest thing in town for six months, and I’m sure you’ll make the most of it.”
Beck regarded Paul with those unreadable bottomless eyes. The film looks good to me, and I know it’s going to be a success, he thought perversely, but
is
it really good? Would the me who drove up to Jango’s house with Velva in that other geological age have been proud of the me sitting here in this screening room today? Is it a good film or just commercially successful, flashy schlock? Am I really that good or just one lucky son of a bitch? Is my judgment even sound anymore?
“But do you
really
like it, Jango?” he said. “Do you really think it’s good?”
“It’s going to make me four or five million dollars,” Beck said. “How can that be bad?” His eyes were laughing.
“Goddamn it, Jango, you know what I’m asking.
Intrinsically
, do you like it?”
Beck sucked on his joint. “I don’t believe in intrinsic qualities,” he said. “A series of events take place; you stage another series of events and record both the controlled events and the spontaneous events on film. You edit the film into a sequence of sounds and images. A high-powered PR campaign sucks people into the theaters to see it by creating expectations of greatness in their minds. They react—to the film, to their expectations, to the intersection of the film with their personal karma. Likewise for the critics. Where’s the absolutes?
You
tell
me
where the intrinsic qualities are.”
Beck untangled himself from the seats, began walking toward the screening-room door. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “we’ve got to change the title. I think
Sunset City
doesn’t make it.”
“It was
your title in the first place,” Paul said. “I was never in love
with it.”
“We’re
going to retitle it
Passing Through the Flame
,” Beck said.
“I like it,” Paul answered spontaneously. Then he thought about the events on the celluloid, the things he had gone through to get them there, the ending of the film with its sun and fire imagery, the transformations that had been wrought in his life, in Velva’s life, in the lives of Doug Winter and Peggy Greene, and he began to see why he liked the title.
He laughed. “I like it because it’s
intrinsically
the right title,” he said.
“Is it?” said Jango Beck. “Well, it also happens to be the title song of the last Velvet Cloud album, which is what I want to give the heaviest push. A commercial decision on my part, Paul.”
“A happy miscegenation of art and commerce?”
“Like the man says,” Beck said, moving on toward the door, “one thing is certain and the rest is lies.”
“And what’s that one certain thing?”
Beck stopped in his tracks, turned to face Paul. There was suddenly no humor in his expression, no humor at all. “I pity any man who can answer that,” he said. “If you ever find out, be sure not to tell me. My advice to you is to believe in whatever lies make you brave and strong and free. It’s all illusion anyway. As Markowitz says, only chaos is real. I’ve always found that thought comforting.” He turned again and walked out the door.
“See you tonight, Paul?” Sandra Bayne said as they stepped out of the commissary building and into the hazy afternoon sunlight.
“I’m going to be tied up tonight,” he said, looking down nervously at his feet. “How about tomorrow night?”
You’re so transparent, love, Sandra thought. And yet... and yet in some weird way I like this little deception in you. Maybe because it makes you seem a little more like me.
“I’m going to be tied up tomorrow night,” she lied. “How about the day after?”
Paul looked up at her with too big a smile of relief on his face. “Sure,” he said. “With bells on.”
Why don’t we just get this out in the open? Sandy thought. You’re involved with Velva Leecock. I know it. You know I know it. Why can’t we just come up-front with it?