A Child across the Sky

She asked me to drop her off at a flower store on Sunset. As I was pulling away from the curb, the first idea came to me. I began talking fast and urgently into a little pocket tape recorder I carry whenever I am working.

I stopped once on the way at a telephone booth and called the hospital to find out about Max. A Dr. Casey said it was one of the most unbelievable recoveries he'd seen in his entire medical career. He was about to go on when I thanked him and hung up.

3

I reached over and started to turn on the light, but Wyatt stopped me.

"No, don't do that. I want to see it again."

"What do you think?"

"I think it's brilliant and sick. It's what those films should have been. But show it to me again." He put a hand on my shoulder. "You really are a director, Weber. Your style is so distinctive. God, I wonder what Phil would have said if he'd seen that."

"Look again and tell me what else you think." Leaning forward, I pressed the play button.

For days I'd worked both at the studio and at home cutting and pasting and generally rearranging the three and three quarter Midnight films into one rough Gregston version.

Why? Because I was sure Pinsleepe was hinting at something important when she'd repeated Blow Dry's "evil is everything, turned bad." Phil may have found the magic to create the lost scene, but who was to say there wasn't another magic in what he'd already made?

In college, Strayhorn and I took a course together called Ancient Rome. One of the few things I remember about it was the haruspex, a kind of diviner who based his predictions on inspection of the entrails of sacrificial animals. Study the order of the world carefully, and you'll be able to figure out its secrets.

What if I studied the order of Phil's work? Moved it around like a designer or an architect, giving it new angles and edges. Were the answers there? Enigmas to be solved, or only the corny splatter and glop of horror movies?

There are two inherent problems with the genre. The first is the moment the monster is shown for the first time. Invariably half the tension of the film is lost right there. Until then, the audience has created their own nightmare images of a monster. So no matter how ghastly or unique you thought yours was, it couldn't possibly be as bad as their individual bogeymen. People are scared of different things – blood, rats, death, night, fire. . . . There is no way of combining them into one all-encompassing creature without being fu

Bloodstone was good because he was a kind of indistinct blur, despite the silvery face and small child's hands with no fingernails. Yes, you knew something was very wrong with him but the image was so delicately underplayed, he could just as easily have been a man going to a costume party.

The same was true with what Phil had him do. No heads were torn off or stomachs ripped open with a single long fingernail. Bloodstone was a presence from somewhere else. Like a creature from another planet a thousand times more advanced than ours, he had wondrous ways to make man suffer. That was part of the fun of the Midnight films: What's the son of a bitch going to do next?

But that was all. The films opened, Bloodstone went around hurting people in interesting, novel ways, and then the story ended. Every time it was the same, and that introduced problem two: the Endings.

Traditionally, there are two ways to end a horror film – happy or sad. The monster wins, the monster loses. That's it. And the audience knows that when they walk into the theater. They'll be scared, but they know how it will end, always.

Great films keep you guessing; you don't know who's going to get to the finish line first, if anyone.

In my version of the film (Wyatt quickly titled it "Midnight's Spills"), we rarely even saw Bloodstone and the end was inconclusive.

"Hey, that's one of the scenes we shot downtown!"

"Right. At the shoeshine place on Hollywood Boulevard."

"I didn't even realize that. Did you put many of those in?"

"A few."

"No wonder the film feels tilted, you know what I mean? It's like looking at something you've seen before, a painting or a building, but something's off about it. It's basically the same as before, but now it's better and you don't know why."

"What about the order of the scenes and the way they're moved around?"

"Don't even ask me about that, Weber. You know they're wonderful. Don't fish for compliments."

Halfway through the second run, Finky Linky turned on the lamp and looked at me while the video was still ru

"If you're going to put other scenes in here besides Midnight, add some from your own films. I'm thinking specifically of Sorrow and Son and The Night Is Blond.

"What you've done is redefine the mood of Midnight. It's your mood now, Weber, the one that's in all your work. But if you're going to do that, go all the way. I keep thinking of little sections of your movies and how well they'd fit in here and here and here and here. . . . I can't imagine what you'll end up with, but I'd love to see the result.

"I just thought of a fu

"It's damned good, Weber, but I think I'm right about what I said. Midnight's never looked better, but even with your rearranging and the other scenes added, it's still basically Midnight. Make it that, plus Sorrow and Son and The Night Is Blond, and you're going to have something wild."

Dear Weber,

I want to tell you this to your face, but I can't because it's still very embarrassing for me. I want to tell you what happened between Phil and me at the end and why we decided it was better that we not live together anymore, at least for a while.

I know I've told you some things, and you can get an idea of what it was like at the end after you've read his story "A Quarter Past You."

But this tape tells the rest. Give it back to me when you're done and please don't tell Wyatt about anything you see. I wish I could watch with you to hear what you think, but I can't. Maybe sometime. But maybe I should just let you watch and then throw it away. It's been in my drawer for weeks, and every time I think about it I get jittery. Why did I keep it? I don't know.

Sasha

I didn't watch it all. You got the idea in five minutes.

In real life, Strayhorn had not only recreated whole scenes from Midnight to scare Sasha, he filmed them too. An example? She's fast asleep when he brings a tape recorder into their bedroom and turns it on to the sound of people fucking. You can barely see the expression on her face when she comes awake and realizes what's happening, but for the viewer it's embarrassing and provocative at the same time. Her life has suddenly become a movie – how will she react?

How could he have done it? How could she have put up with it after one experience like that? How could he have shot some of those scenes without her knowing about the camera?

I put the film back on her bed with a note: "You were right to leave. Get rid of this thing."

Wouldn't it be easier if life worked that way? Recognize something as wrong or immoral, reject it on the spot, then stop thinking about it. Simple, practical, time-saving. It would be easier, but life likes color, not just black-and-white.