Remake (12 page)

Gene Kelly did one of his overblown ballets, Frank Sinatra and Betty Garrett danced a tango with an Empire State Building telescope, and Ann Miller, in an even more low-cut dress, showed up, and then Vera-Ellen. Wearing the green weskit and black skirt Alis had worn to the party that first night. I sat up.

Vera-Ellen took Gene Kelly’s hand and spun away from the camera. “Freeze,” I said. “Enhance,” and there was no
mistaking that backlit hair, and sure enough, when she spun back out of the turn, it was Alis, reaching her hand out, smiling delightedly at Gene.

I asked for a menu of Vera-Ellen movies.
“Belle of New York,”
I said.

Legalese. Fred Astaire. Ditto
Three Little Words
. I finally got
The Kid from Brooklyn
, and went through it number by number, but Alis wasn’t in it, and there must be some other logic at work here. What? Gene Kelly? He’d been in both
Singin’ in the Rain
and
On the Town
.

“Anchors Aweigh,”
I said.

Gene’s costars were Kathryn Grayson and Jose Iturbi, neither of whom were noted for their dancing ability, so I didn’t expect there to be any production numbers. There weren’t. Gene Kelly danced with Frank Sinatra, with a chorus line of sailors, with a cartoon mouse.

It was another of his overblown fantasy numbers, this time with an animated background and Tom and Jerry and a lot of pre-CG special effects, but he and Tom the Mouse danced a soft-shoe side by side, hand and paw nearly touching, and it almost looked like the real thing.

I accessed Vincent, decided I didn’t want this on the feed, and punched in a key override, wishing there was a way I could find out whether Heada was standing guard without opening the door.

There wasn’t, but it was okay. She wasn’t there. I locked the door in case she came back, and went down to the party. Vincent was demonstrating a new program to a trio of breathless Marilyns.

“Give it a command,” Vincent said, pointing at the screen, where Clint Eastwood, dressed in a striped poncho and a concho-banded hat, was sitting in a chair, his hands at his sides like a puppet’s. “Go ahead.”

The Marilyns giggled. “Stand,” one of them said daringly. Clint got woodenly to his feet.

“Take two steps backward,” another Marilyn said.

“Mother, may I?” I said. “Vincent, I need to talk to you.”
I got between him and the Marilyns. “I need to bluescreen some liveaction into a scene. How do I do that?”

“It’s easier to do a scratch construct,” he said, looking at the screen where Clint was standing, waiting for orders. “Or a paste-up. What kind of liveaction? Human?”

“Yeah, human,” I said, “but a paste-up won’t work. So how do I bluescreen it in?”

He shrugged. “Set up a pixar and compositor. Maybe an old Digimatte, if you can find one. The tourate traps use them sometimes. The hard part’s the patching—lights, perspective, camera angles, edges.”

I’d stopped listening. The A Star Is Born place down on Hollywood Boulevard had had a Digimatte. And Heada’d said Alis had gotten a job down there.

“It still won’t be as good as a graphic,” he was saying. “But if you’ve got an expert melder, it’s possible.”

And
a pixar,
and
the comp know-how,
and
the accesses. None of which Alis had. “What if you didn’t have accesses? Say you wanted to do it without anyone knowing about it?”

“I thought you had full studio access,” he said, suddenly interested. “Did Mayer fire you?”

“This is
for
Mayer. I’m taking the AS’s out of a hackate movie,” I said glibly.
“Rising Sun
, There are too many visual references to do a wipe. I’ve got to do a whole new scene, and I want it to be authentic.”

I was counting on his not having seen the movie, or knowing it was made before accesses, a good bet with somebody who’d turn Clint Eastwood into a marionette. “The hero superimposes a fake image over a real one. To catch a criminal.”

He was frowning vaguely. “Somebody breaks into the fibe-op feed in this movie?”

“Yeah,” I said. “So how do I make it look like the real thing?”

“Source piracy? You don’t,” he said. “You have to have studio access.”

Nowhere fast. “I don’t have to show anything illegal,” I said, “just talk about how he finds a bypass around the
encryptions or breaks into the authorization guards,” but he was already shaking his head.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “The studios have paid too much for their properties and actors to let source piracy happen, and encryptions, authorization guards, navajos, all those can be gotten around. That’s why they went to the fibe-op loop. What goes out comes back in.”

Up on the screen Clint had started moving. I glanced up. He was walking in a figure-eight pattern, hands down, head down. Looping.

“The fibe-op feed sends the signal out and back again in a continuous loop. It’s got an ID-lock built in. The lock matches the signal coming in against the one that went out, and if they don’t match, it rejects the incoming and substitutes the old one.”

“Every frame?” I said, thinking maybe the lock only checked every five minutes, enough time to squeeze in a dance routine.

“Every frame.”

“Doesn’t that take a ton of memory? A pixel-by-pixel match?”

“Brownian check,” he said, but that wasn’t much better. The lock would check random pixels and see if they matched, and there’d be no way to know in advance which ones. The only thing you’d be able to change the image to was another one exactly like it.

“What about when you have accesses?” I said, watching Clint make the circuit, around and around. Boris Karloff in
Frankenstein
.

“In that case, the lock checks the altered image for authorization and then allows it past.”

“And there’s no way to get a fake access?” I said.

He was looking at the screen irritatedly, as if I was the one who’d set Frankenstein in motion. “Sit,” he said. Clint sat.

“Stay,” I said.

Vincent glared at me. “What movie did you say this was for?”

“A remake,” I said, looking over at the door. Heada was coming in. “Maybe I’ll just stay with the wipe,” I said, and ducked off toward the stairs.

“I still don’t see why you insist on doing it by hand,” he called after me. “There’s no point. I’ve got a search-and-destroy program—”

I skidded upstairs and punched in the override, cursing myself for locking the door in the first place, opened it, got in bed, remembered the door was supposed to be locked, locked it, and flung myself back on the bed.

Hurrying had not been a good idea. My head had started to pound like the drums in the Latin number in
Tea for Two
.

I closed my eyes and waited for Heada, but it must not have been her in the doorway, or else she had gotten waylaid by Vincent and his dancing dolls. I called up
Three Sailors and a Girl
, but all the “next, please” ’s made me faintly seasick. I closed my eyes, waiting for the queasiness to pass, and then opened them again and tried to come up with a theory that didn’t belong in a movie.

Alis couldn’t have bluescreened herself in like Gene Kelly’s mouse. She didn’t know anything about comps—she’d been taking Basic CG 101 last fall when I got her class schedule out of Heada. And even if she had somehow mastered melds and shading and rotoscoping, she still didn’t have the accesses.

Maybe she’d gotten somebody to help her. But who? The undergrad hackates didn’t have accesses either, and Vincent wouldn’t have understood why she insisted on doing it by hand.

So it had to be a paste-up. And why not? Maybe Alis had finally realized dancing in the movies was impossible, or maybe Mayer’d promised to find her a dancing teacher if she’d pop his boss. She wouldn’t be the first face to come to Hollywood and end up on a casting couch.

But if that were the case, she wouldn’t have looked like she did. I called up
On the Town
again and peered at it through my headache. Alis leaped lightly around the Empire
State Building, animated and happy. I turned it off and tried to sleep.

If it was a paste-up, she wouldn’t have had that focused, intent look. Vincent, programs or no programs, could never have captured that smile.

Slow pan from comp screen to clock, showing 11:05, and back to screen. Shot of sailors dancing. Slow pan to clock, showing 3:45
.

Somewhere in the middle of the night it occurred to me that there was another reason Mayer couldn’t have done a paste-up of Alis. The best reason of all: Heada didn’t know about it.

She knew everything, every bit and piece of popsy, every studio move, every takeover rumor. There wasn’t anything that got by her. If Alis had given in to Mayer, Heada would have known about it before it happened. And reported it to me, as if it was what I wanted to hear.

And wasn’t it? I had told Alis she couldn’t have what she wanted, that dancing in the movies was impossible, and it was a paste-up or nothing, and everybody likes to be proven right, don’t they?

Especially if they are right. You can’t just walk through a movie screen like Mia Farrow in
The Purple Rose of Cairo
and take Virginia Gibson’s place. You can’t just walk through a looking glass like Charlotte Henry and find yourself dancing with Fred Astaire.

Even if that’s what it looks like you’re doing. It’s a trick of lighting, that’s all, and makeup, and too much
liquor, too much klieg; and the only cure for that was to follow Heada’s orders, piss, drink lots of water, try to sleep.

“Three Sailors and a Girl/9
I said, and waited for the trick to be revealed.

Slow pan from comp screen to clock, showing 4:58, and back to screen. Shot of sailors dancing. Slow pan to clock, showing 7:22
.

Feeling better?” Heada said. She was sitting on the bed, holding a glass of water. “I told you ridigaine was rough.”

“Yeah,” I said, closing my eyes against the glare from the glass.

“Drink this,” she said, and stuck a straw in my mouth. “How’s the craving? Bad?”

I didn’t want to drink anything, including water. “No.”

“You sure?” she said suspiciously.

“I’m sure,” I said. I opened my eyes again, and when that went okay, I tried to sit up. “What took you so long?”

“After I found
Funny Face
, I went and talked to one of the ILMGM execs. You were right about it’s not being Mayer. He’s sworn off popsy. He’s trying to convince Arthurton he’s straight and narrow.”

She stuck the straw under my nose again. “I talked to one of the hackates, too. He says there’s no way to get live-action stuff onto the fibe-op source without studio access. He says there are all kinds of securities and privacies and encryptions. He says there are so many, nobody, not even the best hackates, can get past them.”

“I know,” I said, leaning my head back against the wall. “It’s impossible.”

“Do you feel good enough to look at the disk?”

I didn’t, and there was no point, but Heada put it in and we watched Fred dance circles around Audrey Hepburn and Paris.

The ridigaine was good for something, anyway. Fred was doing a series of swing turns, his feet tapping easily, carelessly, his arms extended, but there wasn’t a quiver of a flash or even a soft-focus. My head still ached, but the drumming was gone, replaced by a bleak silence that felt like the aftermath of a flash and had its sharp clarity, its certainty.

I was certain Alis wouldn’t have danced in this movie, with its modern dance and its duets, carefully choreographed by Fred to make Audrey Hepburn look like a better dancer than she was. Certain that when Virginia Gibson appeared, she’d be Virginia Gibson, who looked a lot like Ms.

And certain that when I called up
On the Town
and
Tea for Two
and
Singin’ in the Rain
, it would still be Alis, no matter how secure the fibe-op loops, no matter how impossible.

Virginia Gibson came on in a gaggle of Hollywood’s idea of fashion designers. “You don’t see her, do you?” Heada said anxiously.

“No,” I said, watching Fred.

“This Virginia Gibson person really does look a lot like Alis,” Heada said. “Do you want to try
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
again, just to make sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said.

“Good,” she said, standing up briskly. “Now, the main thing now that you’re clean is to keep busy so you won’t think about the craving, and anyway, you need to catch up on Mayer’s list before he gets back, and I was thinking maybe I could help you. I’ve been watching a lot of movies, and I could tell you which ones have AS’s in them and where they are.
The Color Purple
has a roadhouse scene where—”

“Heada,” I said.

“And
after
you finish the list, maybe you and I could get Mayer to assign us a real remake. I mean, now that we’re
both clean. You said one time I’d make a great location assistant, and I’ve been watching a lot of movies. We’d make a great team. You could do the CG’s—”

“I need you to do something for me,” I said. “There was an ILMGM exec who used to come to the parties who was always using time travel as a line. I need you to find out his name.”

“Time travel?” Heada said blankly.

“He said they were
this
close to discovering time travel,” I said. “He kept talking about parallel timefeeds.”

“You said it wasn’t her in
Funny Face”
she said slowly.

“He kept talking about doing a remake of
Time After Time.”

She said, still blankly, “You think Alis went back in time?”

“I don’t
know,”
I said, and the last word was a shout. “Maybe she found a pair of ruby slippers, maybe she walked up onto the screen like Buster Keaton in
Sherlock Holmes, Jr
. I don’t
know!”

Heada was looking at me, her eyes full of tears. “But you’re going to keep looking for her, aren’t you? Even though it’s impossible,” she said bitterly. “Just like John Wayne in
The Searchers.”

“And he found Natalie Wood, didn’t he?” I said. “Didn’t he?” but she was already gone.