Remake

And then I had Alis on the bed and was popping her and watching her face so I’d see it when I flashed, but the flash didn’t come, and the room went to soft-focus around the edges, and I pounded harder, faster, nailing her against the bed so she couldn’t get away, but she was already gone and I tried to go after her and ran into the arrays, Fred and Eleanor saying good-bye at the airport, and put my hand up and it went right through and I lost my balance. But when I fell, it wasn’t into Alis’s arms or into the arrays. It was into the negative-matter regions of the skids.

LEWIS STONE: [Sternly] I hope you’ve learned your lesson, Andrew. Drinking doesn’t solve your problems. It only makes them worse.

MICKEY ROONEY: [Hangdog] I know that now, Dad. And I’ve learned something else, too. I’ve learned I should mind my own business and not meddle in other people’s affairs.

LEWIS STONE: [Doubtfully] I hope so, Andrew. I certainly hope so.

In The Philadelphia Story, Katharine Hepburn’s getting drunk solved everything: her stuffed-shirt fiancé broke off the engagement, Jimmy Stewart quit tabloid journalism and started the serious novel his faithful girlfriend had always known he had in him, Mom and Dad reconciled, and Katharine Hepburn finally admitted she’d been in love with Cary Grant all along. Happy endings all around.

But the movies, as I had tried so soddenly to tell Alis, are not Real Life. And all I had done by getting drunk was to wake up in Heada’s dorm room with a two-day hangover and a six-week suspension from the skids.

Not that I was going anywhere. Andy Hardy learns his lesson, forgets about girls, and settles down to the serious task of Minding His Own Business, a job made easier by the fact that Heada wouldn’t tell me where Alis was because she wasn’t speaking to me.

And by Heada’s (or Alis’s) pouring all my liquor down the drain like Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen and Mayer’s putting a hold on my account till I turned in last week’s dozen. Last week’s dozen consisted of The Philadelphia Story, which I was only halfway through. So it was heigh-ho, heigh-ho, off to work we go to find twelve squeaky-cleans I could claim I’d already edited, and what better place to look than Disney?

Only Snow White had a cottage full of beer tankards and a dungeon full of wine goblets and deadly potions. Sleeping Beauty was no better — it had a splatted royal steward who’d drunk himself literally under the table — and Pinocchio not only drank beer but smoked cigars the Anti-Smoking League had somehow missed. Even Dumbo got drunk.

But animation wipes are comparatively easy, and all Alice in Wonderland had was a few smoke rings, so I was able to finish off the dozen and replenish my stock of deadly potions so at least I didn’t have to watch Fantasia cold sober. And a good thing, too. The Pastorale sequence in Fantasia was so full of wine it took me five days to clean it up, after which I went back to The Philadelphia Story and stared at Jimmy Stewart, trying to think of some way to salvage him, and then gave up and waited for my skids suspension to be over.

As soon as it was, I went out to Burbank to apologize to Alis, but more time must have gone by than I realized because there was a CG class cramming the unstacked chairs, and when I asked one of the hackates where Michael Caine and the film hist class had gone, he said, “That was last semester.”

I stocked up on chooch and went to the next party and asked Heada for Alis’s class schedule.

“I don’t do chooch anymore,” Heada said. She was wearing a tight sweater and skirt and black-framed glasses. How to Marry a Millionaire. “Why can’t you leave her alone? She’s not hurting anybody.”

“I want—” I said, but I didn’t know what I wanted. No, that wasn’t true. What I wanted was to find a movie that didn’t have a single AS in it. Only there weren’t any.

“The Ten Commandments,” I said, back in my room again.

There was drinking in the golden-calf scene and assorted references to “the wine of violence,” but it was better than The Philadelphia Story. I laid in a supply of grappa and asked for a list of biblical epics, and went to work playing Charlton Heston — deleting vineyards and calling a halt to Roman orgies. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.