The Mammoth Book of Dracula (25 page)

“I don’t want to be Orson Welles,” Francis shouted at the slate-grey skies, rain on his face, “I don’t want to be David Lean. I just want to make an Irwin Allen movie, with violence, action, sex, destruction in every frame. This isn’t Art, this is atrocity.”

Just before the crew left Bucharest, as the storm was beginning, Marlon Brando had consented to be Dracula. Francis personally wired him a million-dollar down-payment against two weeks’ work. Nobody dared remind Francis that if he wasn’t ready to shoot Brando’s scenes by the end of the year, he would lose the money and his star.

The six months was up, and barely a quarter of the film was in the can. The production schedule had been extended and reworked so many times that all forecasts of the end of shooting were treated like forecasts of the end of the War. Everyone said it would be over by Christmas, but knew it would stretch until the last trump.

“I could just stop, you know,” Francis said, deflated. “I could just shut it down and go back to San Francisco and a hot bath and decent pasta and forget everything. I can still get work shooting commercials, nudie movies, series TV. I could make little films, shot on video with a four-man crew, and show them to my friends. All this D. W. Griffith-David O. Selznick shit just isn’t fucking necessary.”

He stretched out his arms and water poured from his sleeves. Over a hundred people, huddled in various shelters or wrapped in orange plastic ponchos, looked at their lord and master and didn’t know what to say or do.

“What does this cost, people? Does anybody know? Does anybody care? Is it worth all this? A movie? A painted ceiling? A symphony? Is anything worth all this shit?”

The rain stopped as if a tap were turned off. Sun shone through clouds. Kate screwed her eyes tight shut and fumbled under her poncho for the heavy sunglasses-clip she always carried. She might be the kind of vampire who could go about in all but the strongest sunlight, but her eyes could still be burned out by too much light.

She fixed clip-on shades to her glasses and blinked.

People emerged from their shelters, rainwater pouring from hats and ponchos.

“We can shoot around it,” a co-associate assistant producer said.

Francis fired him on the spot.

Kate saw Ion creep out of the forests and straighten up. He had a wooden staff, newly-trimmed. He presented it to his maestro.

“To lean on,” he said, demonstrating. Then, he fetched it up and held it like a weapon, showing a whittled point. “And to fight with.”

Francis accepted the gift, made a few passes in the air, liking the feel of it in his hands. Then he leaned on the staff, easing his weight onto the strong wood.

“It’s good,” he said.

Ion grinned and saluted.

“All doubt is passing,” Francis announced. “Money doesn’t matter, time doesn’t matter, we don’t matter. This film, this
Dracula,
that is what matters. It’s taken the smallest of you,” he laid his hand on Ion’s curls, “to show me that. When we are gone,
Dracula
will remain.”

Francis kissed the top of Ion’s head.

“Now,” he shouted, inspired, “to work, to work.”

~ * ~

The coach trundles up the mountainside, winding between the tall trees. A blaze of blue light shoots up.

Westenra:
Treasure!

Harker’s Voice:
They said the blue flames marked the sites of long-lost troves of bandit silver and gold. They also said no good ever came of finding it.

Westenra: Coachman, stop! Treasure.

Swales pulls up the reins, and the team halt. The clatter of hooves and reins dies. The night is quiet.

The blue flame still burns.

Westenra jumps out and runs to the edge of the forest, trying to see between the trees, to locate the source of the light.

Harker:
I’ll
go with him.

Warily, Harker takes a rifle down from the coach, and breeches a bullet.

Westenra runs ahead into the forest, excited. Harker carefully follows up, placing each step carefully.

Westenra:
Treasure, man. Treasure.

Harker hears a noise, and signals Westenra to hold back. Both men freeze and listen.

The blue light flickers on their faces and fades out. Westenra is disgusted and disappointed.

Something moves in the undergrowth. Red eyes glow.

A dire wolf leaps up at Westenra, claws brushing his face, enormously furred body heavy as a felled tree. Harker fires. A red flash briefly spotlights the beast’s twisted snout.

The wolf’s teeth clash, just missing Westenra’s face. The huge animal, startled if not wounded, turns and disappears into the forest.

Westenra and Harker run away as fast as they can, vaulting over prominent tree-roots, bumping low branches.

Westenra:
Never get out of the coach ... never get out of the coach.

They get back to the road. Swales looks stern, not wanting to know about the trouble they’re in.

Harker’s Voice:
Words of wisdom. Never get out of the coach, never go into the woods... unless you’re prepared to become the compleat animal, to stay forever in the forests. Like him, Dracula.

~ * ~

At the party celebrating the 100th Day of Shooting, the crew brought in a coffin bearing a brass plate that read simply DRACULA. Its lid creaked open and a girl in a bikini leaped out, nestling in Francis’s lap. She had plastic fangs, which she spit out to kiss him.

The crew cheered. Even Eleanor laughed.

The fangs wound up in the punch-bowl. Kate fished them out as she got drinks for Marty Sheen and Robert Duvall.

Duvall, lean and intense, asked her about Ireland. She admitted she hadn’t been there in decades. Sheen, whom everyone thought was Irish, was Hispanic, born Ramon Estevez. He was drinking heavily and losing weight, travelling deep into his role. Having surrendered entirely to Francis’s “vision”, Sheen was talking with Harker’s accent and developing the character’s hollow-eyed look and panicky glance.

The real Jonathan, Kate remembered, was a decent but dull sort, perpetually ‘umble around brighter people, deeply suburban. Mina, his fiancée and her friend, kept saying that at least he was real, a worker ant not a butterfly like Art or Lucy. A hundred years later, Kate could hardly remember Jonathan’s face. From now on, she would always think of Sheen when anyone mentioned Jonathan Harker. The original was eclipsed.

Or erased. Bram Stoker had intended to write about Kate in his book, but left her out. Her few poor braveries during the Terror tended to be ascribed to Mina in most histories. That was probably a blessing.

“What it must have been like for Jonathan,” Sheen said. “Not even knowing there were such things as vampires. Imagine, confronted with Dracula himself. His whole world was shredded, torn away. All he had was himself, and it wasn’t enough.”

“He had family, friends,” Kate said.

Sheen’s eyes glowed. “Not in Transylvania.
Nobody
has family and friends in Transylvania.”

Kate shivered and looked around. Francis was showing off martial arts moves with Ion’s staff. Fred Forrest was rolling a cigar-sized joint. Vittorio Storaro, the cinematographer, doled out his special spaghetti, smuggled into the country inside film cans, to appreciative patrons. A Romanian official in an ill-fitting shiny suit, liaison with the state studios, staunchly resisted offers of drinks he either assumed were laced with LSD or didn’t want other Romanians to see him sampling. She wondered which of the native hangers-on was the
Securitate
spy, and giggled at the thought that they all might be spies and still not know the others were watching them.

Punch, which she was sipping for politeness’s sake, squirted out of her nose as she laughed. Duvall patted her back and she recovered. She was not used to social drinking.

Ion, in a baseball cap given to him by one of Francis’s kids, was joking with the girl in the bikini, a dancer who played one of the gypsies, his eyes reddening with thirst. Kate decided to leave them be. Ion would control himself with the crew. Besides, the girl might like a nip from the handsome lad.

With a handkerchief, she wiped her face. Her specs had gone crooked with her spluttering and she rearranged them.

“You’re not what I expected of a vampire lady,” Duvall said.

Kate slipped the plastic fangs into her mouth and snarled like a kitten.

Duvall and Sheen laughed.

~ * ~

For two weeks, Francis had been shooting the “Brides of Dracula” sequence. The mountainside was as crowded as Oxford Street, extras borrowed from the Romanian army salted with English faces recruited from youth hostels and student exchanges. Storaro was up on a dinosaur-necked camera crane, swooping through the sides, getting shots of rapt faces.

The three girls, two warm and one real vampire, had only showed up tonight, guaranteeing genuine crowd excitement in long-shot or blurry background rather than the flatly faked enthusiasm radiated for their own close-ups.

Kate was supposed to be available for the Brides, but they didn’t need advice. It struck her as absurd that she should be asked to tell the actresses how to be alluring. The vampire Marlene, cast as the blonde bride, had been an actress since the silent days and wandered about nearly naked, exposing herself to the winds. Her warm sisters needed to be swathed in furs between shots.

In a shack-like temporary dressing room, the Brides were transformed. Bunty, a sensible Englishwoman, was in charge of their make-up. The living girls, twins from Malta who had appeared in a
Playboy
layout, submitted to all-over pancake that gave their flesh an unhealthy shimmer and opened their mouths like dental patients as fangs—a hundred times more expensive if hardly more convincing than the joke shop set Kate had kept after the party—were fitted.

Francis, with Ion in his wake carrying a script, dropped by to cast an eye over the Brides. He asked Marlene to open her mouth and examined her dainty pointy teeth.

“We thought we’d leave them as they were,” said Bunty.

Francis shook his head.

“They need to be bigger, more obvious.”

Bunty took a set of dagger-like eye-teeth from her kit and approached Marlene, who waved them away.

“I’m sorry, dear,” the make-up woman apologized.

Marlene laughed musically and hissed, making Francis jump. Her mouth opened wide like a cobra’s, and her fangs extended a full two inches.

Francis grinned.

“Perfect.”

The vampire lady took a little curtsey.

~ * ~

Kate mingled with the crew, keeping out of camera-shot. She was used to the tedious pace of film-making now. Everything took forever and there was rarely anything to see. Only Francis, almost thin now, was constantly on the move, popping up everywhere—with Ion, nicknamed “Son of Dracula” by the crew, at his heels—to solve or be frustrated by any one of a thousand problems.

The stands erected for the extras, made by local labour in the months before shooting, kept collapsing. It seemed the construction people, whom she assumed also had the door contract at the Bucharest hotel, had substituted inferior wood, presumably pocketing the difference in leis, and the whole set was close to useless. Francis had taken to having his people work at night, after the Romanians contractually obliged to do the job had gone home, to shore up the shoddy work. It was, of course, ruinously expensive and amazingly inefficient.

The permits to film at Borgo Pass had still not come through. An associate producer was spending all her time at the Bucharest equivalent of the Circumlocution Office, trying to get the trilingual documentation out of the Ministry of Film. Francis would have to hire an entire local film crew and pay them to stand idle while his Hollywood people did the work. That was the expected harassment.

The official in the shiny suit, who had come to represent for everyone the forces hindering the production, stood on one side, eagerly watching the actresses. He didn’t permit himself a smile.

Kate assumed the man dutifully hated the whole idea of
Dracula.
He certainly did all he could to get in the way. He could only speak English when the time came to announce a fresh snag, conveniently forgetting the language if he was standing on the spot where Francis wanted camera track laid and he was being told politely to get out of the way.

“Give me more teeth,” Francis shouted through a bull-horn. The actresses responded.

“All of you,” the director addressed the extras, “look horny as hell.”