Remake

I gave up on the scene and went back to the one before it. It was just as bad. There was too much exposition to cut it, and most of it was in Jimmy Stewart’s badly slurred voice. I rewound to the beginning of the scene and turned the sound up, getting a match so I could overdub his dialogue.

“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?” Jimmy Stewart said, leaning belligerently toward Cary Grant.

“Mute,” I said, and watched Cary Grant say something imperturbable, his face revealing nothing.

“Insufficient,” the comp said. “Additional match data needed.”

“Yeah.” I turned the sound up again.

“Liz says you are,” Jimmy Stewart said.

I rew’d to the beginning of the scene and froze it for the frame number, and then went through the scene again.

“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?” Jimmy Stewart said. “Liz says you are.”

I blanked the screen, and accessed Heada. “I need to find out where Alis is,” I said.

“Why?” she said suspiciously.

“I think I’ve found her a dancing teacher,” I said. “I need her class schedule.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know it.”

“Come on, you know everything,” I said. “What happened to ‘I think you should help her’?”

“What happened to, ‘I stick my neck out for nobody’?”

“I told you, I found her somebody to teach her to dance. An old woman out in Palo Alto. Ex-chorus girl. She was in Finian’s Rainbow and Funny Girl back in the seventies.”

She was still suspicious, but she gave it to me. Alis was taking Moviemaking 101, basic comp graphics stuff, and a film hist class, The Musical 1939-1980. It was clear out in Burbank.

I took the skids and a bottle of Public Enemy gin and went out to find her. The class was in an old studio building UCLA had bought when the skids were first built, on the second floor.

I opened the door a crack and looked in. The prof, who looked like Michael Caine in Educating Rita, a movie with way too many AS’s in it, was standing in front of a blank, old-fashioned comp monitor with a remote, holding forth to a scattering of students, mostly hackates taking it for their movie content elective, some Marilyns, Alis.

“Contrary to popular belief, the computer graphics revolution didn’t kill the musical,” the prof said. “The musical kicked off,” he paused to let the class titter, “in 1965.”

He turned to the monitor, which was no bigger than my array screens, and clicked the remote. Behind him, cowboys appeared, leaping around a train station. Oklahoma.

“The musicals, with their contrived story lines, unrealistic song-and-dance sequences, and simplistic happy endings, no longer reflected the audience’s world.”

I glanced at Alis, wondering how she was taking this. She wasn’t. She was watching the cowboys, with that intent, focused look, and her lips were moving, counting the beats, memorizing the steps.

“…which explains why the musical, unlike film noir and the horror movie, has not been revived in spite of the availability of such stars as Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. The musical is irrelevant. It has nothing to say to modern audiences. For example, Broadway Melody of 1940…”

I retreated up the uneven steps and sat there, working on the gin and waiting for him to finish. He did, finally, and the class trickled out. A trio of faces, talking about a rumor that Disney was going to use warmbodies in Grand Hotel, a couple of hackates, the prof, snorting flake on his way down the steps, another hackate.

I finished off the gin. Nobody else came out, and I wondered if I’d somehow missed Alis. I went to see. The steps had gotten steeper and more uneven while I sat there. I slipped once and grabbed onto the banister, and then stood there a minute, listening. There was a clatter and then a thunk from inside the room, and the faint sound of music.

The janitor?

I opened the door and leaned against it.

Alis, in a sky-blue dress with a bustle, and a flowered hat, was dancing in the middle of the room, a blue parasol perched on her shoulder. A song was coming from the comp monitor, and Alis was high-stepping in time with a line of bustled, parasoled girls on the monitor behind her.

I didn’t recognize the movie. Carousel, maybe? The Harvey Girls? The girls were replaced by high-stepping boys in derbies and straw hats, and Alis stopped, breathing hard, and pulled the remote out of her high-buttoned shoe. She rewound, stuck the remote back in her shoe, and propped the parasol against her shoulder. The girls appeared again, and Alis pointed her toe and did a turn.

She had piled the desks in stacks on either side of the room, but there still wasn’t enough room. When she swung into the second turn, her outstretched hand crashed into them, nearly knocking them over. She reached for the remote again, rew’d, and saw me. She clicked the screen off and took a step backward. “What do you want?”