The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (12 page)

“Then for God’s sake, man, loosen the wires!”

“No!” Franklin’s eye snapped open. The madness was still there. “I entrusted my work to you. That’s a sacred trust. You were responsible for
The Hut
’s integrity when you took on the job of adapting it to the screen.”

“But I’m an artist, too!” Why was he arguing with this nut? He slipped the pistol into his front pocket and reached around back for the wire cutters.

“All the more reason to respect another man’s work! You didn’t own it—it was only on loan to you!”

“The contract—”

“
Means nothing!
You had a moral obligation to protect my work, one artist to another.” 

“You’re overreacting!”
 

“Am I? Imagine yourself a parent who has sent his only child to a reputable nursery school only to learn that the child has been raped by the faculty—then you will understand
some
of what I feel! I’ve come to see it as my sacred duty to see to it that you don’t molest anyone else’s work!”

Enough of this bullshit! If Franklin wouldn’t loosen the wires, Milo would cut them off! He pulled the wire cutters from his rear pocket and began to shuffle toward Franklin, sweeping the marbles and daggers of glass ahead of him.

“Stay back!” Franklin cried. He grabbed the pliers and pushed them down toward his lap, grinning maliciously. “Didn’t know I was left-handed, did you?” He twisted something.

Searing pain knifed into Milo’s groin. He doubled over but kept moving toward Franklin. Less than a dozen feet to go. If he could just—

He saw Franklin drop the pliers and pick up the screwdriver, saw him raise it toward his right eye, the good eye. Milo screamed:

“NOOOOO!”

And then agony exploded in his eye, in his head, robbing him of the light, sending him reeling back in sudden impenetrable blackness. As he felt his feet roll across the marbles, he reached out wildly. His legs slid from under him, and despite the most desperate flailings and contortions, he found nothing to grasp on the way down but empty air.

EVERYONE KNOWS THE OPENING sequence of
Kaleidoscope
. Even if they’ve never seen any other part of the movie (and they have, even if they won’t admit it), they know the opening scene. No matter what anyone tells you, it is the most famous two-and-a-half minutes ever put on film.

The camera is focused on a man’s hand. He’s holding a small shard of green glass, no bigger than his fingernail. He tilts it, catching the light, which darts like a crazed firefly. Then, so very carefully and with loving slowness, he presses the glass into something soft and white.

The camera is so tight the viewer can’t see what he’s pushing the glass into (but they suspect). Can you imagine that moment of realization for someone who
doesn’t
know? Watch the opening sequence with a
Kaleidoscope
virgin sometime, you’ll understand. The man pushes the glass into the soft white, and moves his hand away. A bead of bright red blood appears.

As the blood threads away from the glass, the sound kicks in. Only then do most people notice its absence before and discover how unsettling silence can be. The first sound is a breath. Or is it? Kaleidophiles (yes, they really call themselves that) have worn out old copies of the film playing that split-second transition from silence to sound over and over again. They’ve stripped their throats raw arguing.
Does
someone catch their breath, and if so,
who
?

There are varying theories, the two most popular being the man with the glass and the director. The third, of course, is that the man with the glass and the director are the same person.

Breath or no breath, the viewer slowly becomes aware they are listening to the sound of muffled sobs. At that moment of realization, as if prompted by it, thus making the viewer complicit right from the start, the camera swings up wildly. We see a woman’s wide, rolling eyes, circled with too much makeup. The camera jerk-pans down to her mouth; it’s stuffed with a dirty rag.

The soundtrack comes up full force—blaring terrible horns and dissonant chords. The notes jangle one against the next. It isn’t music, it’s instruments screaming. It’s sound felt in your back teeth and at the base of your spine.

The camera zooms out, showing the woman spread-eagle and naked, tied to a massive wheel. Her skin is filled with hundreds of pieces of colored glass—red, blue, yellow, green. Her tormentor steps back; the viewer never sees his face. He rips the gag out, and spins the wheel. Thousands of firefly glints dazzle the camera.

The woman screams. The screen dissolves in a mass of spinning color, and the opening credits roll.

You know what the worst part is? The opening sequence has nothing to do with the rest of the film. It is what it is; it exists purely for its own sake.

But let’s go back to the scream. It’s important. It starts out high-pitched, classic scream queen, and devolves into something ragged, wet, and bubbling. If there was any nagging doubt left about what kind of movie
Kaleidoscope
really is, it’s gone. But it’s too late. Remember, the viewer is complicit; they agreed to everything that follows in that split second between silence and sound, between sob and catch of breath. They can’t turn back—not that anyone really tries.

Here’s another thing about
Kaleidoscope
—no one ever watches it just once; don’t let them tell you otherwise.

The opening is followed by eighty-five minutes of color-soaked, blood-drenched action. (Except—if you’re paying attention—you know that’s a lie.)

The movie is a cult classic. It’s shown on football fields, on giant, impromptu screens made of sheets strung between goalposts. It flickers in midnight double-feature theaters, lurid colors washing over men and women hunched and sweating in the dark, feet stuck to crackling floors, breathing air reeking of stale popcorn. It plays in the background, miniaturized on ghostly television screens, while burnouts fuck at 3 a.m., lit by candles meant to disguise the scent of beer and pot.

Here’s the real secret:
Kaleidoscope
isn’t a movie, it’s an infection, whispered from mouth to mouth in the dark.

Hardcore fans have every line memorized (not that there are many). They know the plot back and forth (though there isn’t one of those, either). You see, that’s the beauty of
Kaleidoscope
, its terrible genius. It is the most famous eighty-seven-and-a-half minutes ever committed to film (don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise), but it doesn’t exist. If you were to creep through the film, frame by frame (and people have), you would know this is true.

Kaleidoscope
exists in people’s minds. It exists in the brief, flickering space between frames. The
real
movie screen is the inside of their eyelids, the back of their skulls when they close their eyes and try to sleep. When the film rolls, there is action and blood, sex and drugs, and not a little touch of madness, but there are shadows, too. There are things seen from the corner of the eye, and that’s where the true movie lies. There, and in the rumors.

Jackson Mortar has heard them all. Crew members died or went missing during the shoot (or there was no crew); a movie house burned to the ground during the first screening (the doors were locked from the inside); fans have been arrested trying to recreate the movie’s most famous scenes (the very best never get caught); and, of course, the most persistent rumor of all: everything in the movie—the sex, the drugs, the violence, and yes, even the flickering shadows—is one hundred percent real.

“You know that scene in the graveyard, with Carrie, when Lance is leading the voodoo ceremony to bring Lucy back from the dead?” Kevin leans across the table, half-eaten burger forgotten in his hand.

Jackson nods. He traces the maze on the kiddie menu, and refuses to look up. Kevin is a fresh convert. Like moths to flame, somehow they always know—when it comes to
Kaleidoscope
, Jackson Mortar is the man. Jackson supposes that makes him part of the mythology, in a way, and he should be proud. But his stomach flips, growling around a knot of cold fries. He pushes the remains of his meal away, rescuing his soda from Kevin’s enthusiastic hand-talking.

“And you know how Carrie is writhing on the tomb, and the big snake is crawling all over her body, between her tits and between her legs, like it’s
doing
her, and she’s moaning and Lance is pouring blood all over her?” Kevin grins, painful-wide; Jackson can hear it, even without looking up.

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Do you think it’s real?”

Jackson finally raises his head. Sweat beads Kevin’s upper lip; his burger is disintegrating in his hand. A trace of fear ghosts behind the bravado in his eyes.

“Maybe.” Jackson keeps his tone as neutral.

The glimpse of fear gives him hope for Kevin, but Kevin’s smile does him in. Maybe the kid sees more than the sex and drugs and blood, but that’s all he
wants
to see. Kevin has seen
Kaleidoscope
, and wishes the movie was otherwise. That, Jackson cannot abide.

“Listen, I gotta get going.” Jackson stands. “I got work to do.”

“Oh, okay. Sure.” Kevin’s expression falls. Another flicker of unease skitters across his face.

Guilt needles Jackson—he can’t leave the kid alone like this—but Kevin pastes it over with another goofy, sloppy grin. “Maybe we can catch a midnight screening together sometime?”

Jackson’s pity dissolves; he shrugs into his worn, black trench coat, “Yeah, sure. Sometime.”

Jackson squeezes out of the booth. Kevin turns back to his cold hamburger. Jackson wonders how the kid stays so skinny. As he pushes through the restaurant door, out into the near-blinding sun, Jackson tries to remember to hate Kevin for the right reasons, not just because he’s young and thin.

Jackson steps off the curb, and freezes. Across the street, on the other side of the world and close enough to touch, Carrie Linden walks through a slant of sunlight. She glances behind her, peering over the top of bug-large sunglasses, which almost swallow her face. She hunches into her collar, pulls open the pharmacy door, and darts inside.

A car horn blares. Jackson leaps back, the spell broken. His heart pounds. No one has seen any of the actors from
Kaleidoscope
since the movie was filmed. There are no interviews, no ‘Where Are They Now?’ specials on late-night TV. It plays into the mystique, as though
Kaleidoscope
might truly be a mass hallucination thrown up on the silver screen. No one real has ever been associated with the film. The credits list the director as B. Z. Bubb and the writer as Lou Cypher.

It’s been nearly forty years since
Kaleidoscope
was filmed, five years before Jackson was born (but long before he was
really
born). But Jackson knows it’s her; he would know Carrie Linden anywhere.

Jackson has been in love with Carrie Linden his whole life. (Yes, he considers the first time he saw
Kaleidoscope
as the moment he was born.)

When Carrie Linden first appeared on the screen, Jackson forgot how to breathe. The scene is burned into his retinas; it, more than anything else, is his private, skull-thrown midnight show. He sees it on thin, blood-lined lids every time he closes his eyes.

Jackson refrains from telling anyone this unless he knows they’ll really understand (and fellow Kaleidophiles always do). The problem—the reason he can’t say anything to converts and virgins—is that the first part of Carrie Linden to appear on screen is her ass.

It’s during the party scene. She walks across the camera from left to right. Long hair hangs down her back, dirty blonde, wavy, split ends brushing the curve of her buttocks. She wears ropes of glittering beads, but the viewer doesn’t know that yet. They are the same beads used to whip Elizabeth in the very next scene, horribly disfiguring her face, but the viewer doesn’t know that yet, either.

What the viewer knows is this: Carrie Linden walks across the screen from left to right. She climbs onto the lap of a man at least twice her age. She fucks him as he lifts tiny scoops of cocaine up to her nose, balancing them delicately on the end of an overlong fingernail.

The first time the viewer sees Carrie’s face, she is sprawled naked on the couch. The camera pans up from her toes, pausing at her chest. Her breathing is erratic, shallow, then deep, then panicked-fast—a jackrabbit lives under her skin. Her head lolls to one side, her eyes are blissfully (or nightmare-chokedly) closed. A trickle of blood runs from her nose.

While Carrie sleeps, but hopefully doesn’t dream, Elizabeth is whipped with Carrie’s beads. Elizabeth screams. She’s on her knees, and sometimes it looks as though she’s stretching her hands out toward Carrie. Some viewers (Kaleidophiles, all) have made the comparison to various religious paintings. Elizabeth’s face is a sheet of blood. When she collapses, her torturer steps over her, and drops the bloody beads around Carrie’s neck. Almost as an afterthought he sticks his hand between Carrie’s legs before wandering away. She doesn’t react at all.

Jackson stares at the pharmacy door for so long that the woman he
knows
is Carrie Linden has time to conclude her business and slip out again, still darting glances over her shoulder as she hurries away. Once she’s disappeared around the corner, Jackson dashes across the street, ignoring traffic. He yanks open the pharmacy door, and runs panting to the back counter. Luckily, Justin is working. Justin is a
Kaleidoscope
fan, too. (Aren’t we all?)

“Hey, buddy. Here to get your prescription filled?” Justin winks.

Jackson ignores him, trying to catch his breath. “The woman who just left, did you see her?”

“Yeah. Dark hair and glasses? Not bad for an older broad.” Justin’s grin reminds Jackson of Kevin. He wants to reach across the counter and throttle Justin, who is skinny too, but old enough to know better. He’s older than Jackson (not counting
Kaleidoscope
years, of course).

“Percocet,” Justin says as an afterthought. He has no compunctions about confidentiality. If he didn’t know the owner too well, he’d have been fired a long time ago.

“Can you get me her address?” Jackson asks. His mind whirls (like colors dissolving behind a credit roll while a woman screams).