My hands had the sweet raisiny smell of old film. I’d been working a long time at the Steenbeck. I stood up to stretch, closed my eye and walked into the hall that lead to the waiting area and Antonya’s desk. I knew where I was going, or thought I did. I looked like a sleepwalker. My hands hit a fur wall. I opened my eye.
“Who the hell are you?”
It was Judy Holliday back from the dead. I mean, it was the former Mrs. Julius Shute in a short fur coat. Mrs. Julius had had some work done, but when looking around the office she wore a my-husband-is-a-bum expression. Her face was tight, eyes sunken, mouth like a stretched-out red rubber band. Yet Mrs. J. was no dummy. She spoke five languages and read several newspapers every morning. On her right hand, which flailed in my direction, a topaz the size of a cough drop glittered.
“This is Frances Baum. She works for me,” Julius said while showing her to the door.
“Does she always play hide-and-seek in the office?”
Before Julius could answer she went on. “Look at this place. I don’t know why I ever bought into your half-baked ideas.”
“There’s nothing half-baked about Alphabet. It’s an industry, an art.” Julius grabbed her by the elbow and steered her toward the elevator.
“Fine, now I want my money back . . .” Her voice trailed off as the door shut.
“Frances, a word.” He tipped his head toward my room as if to say, the jig is up. Inside the editing room he looked at what I was working on. I threaded up Divers at Work on the Wreck of the “Maine,” one of Méliès’s actualités. This one had been tricky because Méliès had shot through layers of gauze to give the effect of swimming under Havana Harbor.
Julius squinted, then frowned.
“These prints should reflect the original with all its granularity and visual static,” I defended the careful hand I’d taken in the restoration.
“Then the image on the screen will be nothing but grain. There won’t be any clear picture, only fountains spilling piles of black and white M&M’s. No clear picture. Maybe a hand or a face will appear once in while if you’re lucky.”
“The Wet Gate look has become less desirable, Julius. You know that. These films aren’t supposed to look as if they were made yesterday.”
I loved the archaeology of these crappy prints, and when making a copy of a film I photographed the whole surface, preserving whatever was there, including the dust and fingerprints. This was information Jack Kews would want, but that Julius, for reason of profit, wanted to get rid of. I wanted to race to the end of the film, but because it was so terribly fragile I had to proceed one frame at a time.
“Relying on what the film looks like to the naked eye is important because the emotional punch may matter more than the quality of the image. Don’t paint the dress red.” He stood very close. I inched away but kept talking.
“Noir films, for example, should retain scratches and grayness. Sometimes you want a rich gray scale; it depends on the subject. Comedies, we’ve agreed, should have sharp black and white contrast.”
“Apart from Dreyfus, most of these are comedies,” Julius argued. “Frances, you don’t understand. These films have to look clear and crisp, yes, as if they were made yesterday. Otherwise, the client will be unhappy with our work, and according to our contract we won’t receive the last half of the payment due us. This isn’t the subsidized Library of Congress. I told you, I’m sacrificing Dreyfus in order to keep Alphabet afloat. I don’t care if you have to use so much Wet Gate that Dreyfus has a halo at the end and flies up to fluffy clouds above his prison on Devil’s Island. Frances, my life depends on this.”
The heathered gray soundproofing that covered the studio walls loomed as if the walls were slightly tilted and pushing in on me from all sides.
“What are you saying?”
“I want The Dreyfus Affair to have a happy ending. The guilty verdict is impossible to believe because he was so clearly innocent. Over time, for those who care to dig and sift through forged documents and trial records, it will look only more absurd. Eventually if the trial is remembered at all, many readers will stop at the evidence which points to innocence and close the book.”
Julius wouldn’t tell me who bought the Looney Tunes archive, but he did tell me that what we had in the office was the last known copy of the Dreyfus film. Few living people had ever seen it, he believed. Certainly all the original rioters were long dead.
Of course, I doubted his claim. He couldn’t be certain this was the only copy of a rarely seen and, as far as he was concerned, barely documented film. Besides, written descriptions of the film must have existed in a book or two. If the film were to convey the astounding assumption that Dreyfus went free without the trials he did have, ammunition was taken from those who would charge the prosecution with fabricating evidence, of in fact protecting the real spy. Julius didn’t see it that way.
The innocent verdict, Julius explained, is a victory; history as it was meant to be, not a whitewash of the guilty, not in the least. He wanted to pull one bit of victory/success out of the morass of prison cells, firing squads, nooses, gas chambers, even if it was a fantasy. Delirious, sleep deprived, “Why not?” he said. “Who can it hurt?” Fluorescent lights flickered overhead.
“It doesn’t just make me look better,” he whispered. “It doesn’t just save the business from bankruptcy. I have a bigger picture in mind. There are, as you know, revisionists who say now we know, now we can say it: Alfred Dreyfus really was guilty all along.”
I’d been up so long assessing the damage done to Méliès’s rockets landing in the moon’s left eye that I’d almost agree with Julius if he told me my parents had finally seen the light, joined the creationists, and were now burning classroom charts connecting amoebas, eventually, to man.
“You can’t reshoot a scene from over one hundred years ago. You can’t rewrite history.”
“Cut the end. Cut the guilty verdict. Dreyfus’s case was so convincing the audience will assume he was found innocent without seeing the verdict read. Cut the degradation scene where his sword is broken, cut the scene where Dreyfus is returned to prison after the trial. Just cut all that footage. We’re on a deadline. Say it was too screwed up to save. No one will ever know. What does it matter if a few French generals and their henchmen are given a whitewash? Dreyfus was innocent. Everyone knows it. Let it go at that. We’re just taking a shortcut to get to the same end result.”
“What if someone asks what happened to the end of the film?”
“There wasn’t any viable film stock left to unspool. I’ve been offered a lot of money to change the ending, and that’s what’s happening.”
I had visions of Julius deliberately damaging the film in the middle of the night, squeezing chemicals from an eyedropper onto the film so as to look like natural erosion, mimicking the corrosive nature of the passage of time and humidity, blaming an archive that used improper storage.
Julius was sweating slightly, like he’d had way too much coffee and just wanted to get on to the next task at hand, regardless of how outrageous the suggestion he had just made was. I asked him if he was trying to lose his business or change history or both. He just kept talking.