B008J4PNHE EBOK Page 2
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In 1969 Booth Dolan had produced, directed, written, and starred in New Roman Empire, a no-budget horror movie about hippie teenagers brainwashed by a cornpone Pied Piper. It was a naked allegory wherein Booth’s character, Dr. Archibald “Horsefeathers” Law, appeared as the wicked hand of Nixonian politics, sending dazed hippies to their deaths à la Vietnam. It had been a modest success on the drive-in circuit and to this day maintained a certain cachet, primarily among B-movie superdorks. (It was telling, Sam felt, that along with their enthusiasm for Booth Dolan, this breed of cinephile could be relied upon to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the monsters that had fought Godzilla, Ed Wood, and women-in-prison films.)
Booth had parlayed the minor triumph of New Roman Empire and his performance as the charlatan Dr. Law into a career spent mugging and shouting in the lowest category of B-movies. His particular, gassy flair had spiced clunkers from virtually every genre with bathos: horror, western, blaxploitation, sexploitation, sci-fi, fantasy, animation, and any combination thereof. A daylong retrospective could begin with the Nixon-era paranoia of New Roman Empire (1971); continue on to Black Soul Riders (1972), in which Booth played a racist judge named George Washington Cream and adopted a chicken-fried Southern accent to say things like “Wuhl yer an awl-ful buh-lack wan, ain’cha?”; followed by Rat Fiend! (1975), infamous for its utilization of miniature sets in order to make normal rats look gigantic, and featuring Booth’s performance as a grizzled “sewer captain” with a “sword plunger”; going next to Hard Mommies (1976), wherein Booth’s car-wash mafia messes with the wrong group of PTA moms in belly-baring tank tops; and, as the main feature, Devil of the Acropolis (1977), arguably the crowning example of Sam’s father’s artistic offenses, for his portrayal of Plato as an expert in werewolf behavior (as well as a howling example of Hollywood’s regard for historical accuracy: Plato is killed by the werewolf in the second act); then put a bow on the day with the first episode in the Hellhole trilogy (1983), the title of which said everything a person needed to know, except maybe that Booth’s character, Professor Graham Hawking Gould, was a “satanologist.”
Even such a condensed list of Booth Dolan’s inanities threatened his son with the promise of a crushing migraine. The idea of an expanded two-day retrospective, meanwhile—including such milestones as his father’s voice-over turn as Dog, an all-knowing talking cloud, in what had to be the nadir of druggy cinema, Buffalo Roam, about a Nam vet leading a white buffalo to the Pacific Ocean; as well as Booth’s role as a lovable ass-squeezing brothel owner and leader of cowboy prostitutes in Alamo II: Return to the Alamo—Daughters of Texas—held lethal implications. Sam would rather have killed himself or someone else—Booth, hopefully—than suffer through such a sentence.
While the old man’s star, such as it ever was, had faded in the late eighties before pretty much winking out completely in the nineties (along with the majority of the B-movie production houses), the earlier films in particular continued to play on cable. To this day, on the highest movie channels, the ones that are all gore and tits and robots, a black-haired Booth can still be found battling evil with a plunger.
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The acorn of Tom Ritts’s mansion was a four-room Sears kit house that dated from the fifties. Since the contractor had purchased it in the eighties, he had expanded it, horizontally and vertically, by a room or two every year, and now it had more rooms than anyone cared to count. Tom’s ability to build, indeed, had outpaced his wherewithal to furnish. Only a potted plant or a single folding chair occupied the newest six or seven rooms. Bats and squirrels had a knack for getting trapped in the less trafficked wings of the mansion, where they expired of thirst or starvation, to be discovered as webby, desiccated corpses months later. From the exterior, the building looked like something that a very intelligent and precise twelve-year-old might have built from LEGOS. It was a grandiose hobby for such a humble-seeming man. (“None of the choices on pay-per-view sound very interesting, and the next thing I know, I’ve got my measuring tape out and some drafting paper, and I’m planning a new bathroom or something,” he once said apologetically to Sam. “It passes the time. Maybe someday I’ll have a family and we can play hide-and-seek.”)
The house had gone as far backward as it could. Perched above a steep embankment and upheld by cement pillars, a redwood deck extended to the edge of the property, where the forest cropped up and the land became the town of Hasbrouck’s. On a clear morning like this one, the view was glorious; the rustling canopy of orange, red, and yellow swept away for miles, to the umber-colored shapes of the mountains.
Sam leaned against the balustrade and inhaled the crisp air and, as he released the breath, attempted to exhale his irritation along with it. A grand, towering sugar maple stood before the deck. On a branch just a few feet from the deck’s railing, a bluebird perched in a resplendent tuffet of leaves and twittered. Sam had a dismal recollection of the anthology horror film A Thousand Deaths: Booth had played a barbarian chieftain and bitten the head off an obviously rubber pigeon, which had produced a geyser of fake blood from its neck and drenched his face in syrup.
“But I am being honest! You must admit that the whole story is heavy. There is, throughout, a sort of funereal drumbeat.” Booth refused to give up. Showered and dressed, he had tracked his son to the deck and sidled right up beside him, almost shoulder to shoulder at the balustrade. On his way through the house, Sam had laid what had seemed a sure trap to divert his father’s attention, setting the television in Tom’s study to the Turner Classic Movies Channel, but Booth must have walked by during a commercial break.
“Okay, okay. What if, like, a gigantic hole opens up in the middle of the campus and it swallows all the characters?” Sam asked. “Could there be some fun in that? And suppose if there were mimes, too, a visiting mime troupe, and we put them in the gigantic hole and let them mime for their lives. How about that?”
“This poor young man who becomes a drug addict, for instance, and a little later, abracadabra, he turns into a little puddle of clothes. It is so harsh. And I do understand that college isn’t all fucking and giggles, but it’s certainly more fucking and giggles than you make it seem. I also think that young people are more self-aware than you give them credit for being. In fact, most young people I know, especially the young females, are—”
“Do you listen to anything I say, Booth? Because I have this impression that, to you, my voice is on the same frequency as a dog whistle.”
“No, no. Samuel, I listen to everything you say.”
“Because I was just being sarcastic. About the clowns. Did you catch that?”
Booth raised an eyebrow at him. Errant gray hairs stuck out from the eyebrow like frayed wires. Several of the wires had dandruff. “I thought they were mimes.”
“Yeah.” Sam dumped the last of his coffee over the side of the deck. The bluebird alighted.
Sam was aware that he was not an especially relaxed person. He was reactive. Optimism was not among his favored emotions. But Booth brought out the worst in him. Sam just wanted him to butt out. It was 2002, and Sam was twenty-two. He thought he had earned the right to finally have a bit of his own space. “Can you move away an inch or two, Booth? There’s a whole deck over that way. We don’t have to share this one spot.”
His father’s shrug seemed to imply that the request was over the top, but he was willing to cooperate for civility’s sake. He shifted down the railing a few feet.
“Okay, then,” said Sam. “I’ll grant you that it’s heavy. The story is heavy. So what?”
“So nothing!” Booth’s chuckle boomed across the open air. On film, he had utilized this same sonorous chuckle on many occasions, often when playing the role of an insane person. “It is a very grave work of art. There is nothing wrong with that.”
“Terrific. We agree. Thanks.” It was easier to submit. The sun was warm on Sam’s face. He breathed the good scents of dirt and leaves and thought about the d
rive to come, the privacy of his car, his future, not seeing having to see this man.
“You are perfectly welcome. But you see, this is a story about college students, and you have endowed it with the gravity of the Manhattan Project. And that is what I mean when I say that it could be construed as a bit portentous.” Booth gave the railing of the deck a sharp knock for emphasis and beamed out at the treetops as if he had conquered them. “Think about letting some light into the thing. You can do that, can’t you, think about it?”
Sam nodded. He wasn’t changing a fucking thing.
“Good! That is all I wished to say. However it turns out, I am terribly proud of you.” Booth spread his arms wide. “You are, and always have been, and always will be, an incomparable delight to me, and—I am sure I don’t need to add—to your mother. She could not have loved you more. I could not love you more.”
Sam touched his father on the shoulder and slipped inside the house and upstairs to the attic.
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Other people found Booth charming. Women generally agreed that he was witty and adorable. Men instinctively took him as an authority. Tom Ritts, as forthright and sterling a character as Sam knew, let Booth sponge off him incessantly. Allie, Sam’s mother, had continued to coddle him after their divorce. It could make Sam feel wild if he thought too much about it, as if the whole world were an airtight tank filling with water, but no one else would admit that they were getting wet, let alone help him find some way to escape.
His mother had given up everything for Booth: college, music, her business. Tough, resourceful, a withering teaser, Allie had never been one to suffer nonsense—except when it came to Booth, from whom she had been capable of suffering nearly any amount. Tom at least had the excuse of having grown up with Booth. Allie had essentially raised the man’s child on her own and absorbed his absences and adultery for nearly twenty years before divorcing him. Then, after everything, she continued to invite Booth to holiday dinners, where he was allowed to sit in his old chair, and talk his bullshit, and eat way more than his share, and act altogether as though he had never been cast from their home.
Sam could recall a particular Christmas Eve in the early nineties. Booth’s arrival had been imminent. His mother had been in the kitchen, cooking for her ex-husband.
“I’m disappointed in you, Mom,” Sam blurted. He had been thirteen, a craterous zit aching and glistening in the center of his chin.
Allie looked up from the trellis of piecrust that she was attempting to puzzle out. She frowned, blew her bangs out of her eyes. His mother had been one of those middle-aged women whose faces remained smooth while her brown hair spilled white. “Not too disappointed to help set the table, I hope.”
“Why?” Sam asked. “Why does he have to come?”
“Because I love him, kiddo,” said Allie. “Because he’s your father.” She smiled and shrugged, her expression full of sympathy and love for Sam, before adding, “And because it’s my damn house.”
His ears had grown hot. “Mom.” What was he supposed to say to that?
His mother had tipped her head from side to side, the same way she did when she was contemplating a restaurant menu. “Just set the table.” Without waiting for a response, she returned her attention to the crust. “Oh,” she added, “you know, I was flipping through TV Guide. Hard Mommies is on sixty-four tonight. Have you seen that one? That’s the one where Booth plays the mumbly mobster.”
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After Allie’s death, Tom offered his attic to absorb the few possessions that weren’t liquidated with the house. This was why Sam had come south from Quentinville—the location of Russell College and of his apartment—to Hasbrouck the previous night, to rummage the contents of the attic. He was looking for things to sell.
The attic was a long pine-smelling hallway with canted ceilings and triangular windows on either end. Sam kept to the center of the room so he wouldn’t bang his head on the ceiling and sat on the floor, dragging the boxes over to sift one at a time.
There were Sam’s baseball cards, his comic books, and a footlocker of red plastic figurines called Nukies that he had collected feverishly for a couple of years in his early adolescence. These one-inch statues were intended—with their humps and bulging eyeballs and claws and dripping flesh—to portray the mutant peoples of the post-apocalyptic world. Sam spared a moment’s tender thought to the child who had amassed the little horrors and spent so many solemn, satisfying hours arranging them on surfaces. Then the cards, the comics, and the figurines went into a forty-gallon garbage bag, the Sell Bag.
When their tops were popped, a clutch of cardboard tubes divulged well-preserved posters of New Roman Empire, Devil of the Acropolis, Buffalo Roam, and a few other Booth Dolan classics. The posters went into the Sell Bag, although if he didn’t get a fair price, Sam planned to create a Burn Bag.
Last was a shoe box containing pieces of costume jewelry that he could not recall ever seeing his mother wear. He ran a few of the necklaces through his fingers and felt bewildered and unhappy. As often as she had frustrated him, Sam missed his mother to such a painful degree, and on such a basic level—wishing for her at that moment the way he remembered wishing for home one summer when he went away to camp, ecclesiastically—that it made him ashamed and scared. The feeling was so powerful that some interior sluice usually prevented him from thinking about her at all. But the unfamiliar jewelry had him blinking at tears. The beads of one necklace felt hollow between his fingertips, but as hard as he squeezed them, they didn’t pop. Sam let out a breath, put the jewelry into the Sell Bag, and wiped at his face with the neck of his shirt.
Wadded in the corner of the shoe box was a faded black cloth. Sam pulled it out. The cloth was lacy, scalloped at the edges; it was a pair of panties, twelve years old, he knew.
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Booth had offered to help load the car, but when Sam came downstairs, he discovered his father on the couch in Tom’s living room. The television must have snared him on the second pass. On the screen, an alien and some children were flying through the sky on their bicycles against the backdrop of the moon.
Sam watched from the doorway. E.T. was among his least favorite movies. He thought it was sentimental and disingenuous. In E.T. the kids saved the day. His own childhood of divorce had unquestionably had its moments, but what he remembered most was feeling bewildered and ineffectual. Also, E.T. was magic, and magic annoyed Sam. Magic was puppets, lighting, computer animation, and latex.
“You still want to help me carry my stuff out?” he asked, not knowing why he bothered.
“I’ll be right there,” said Booth, leaning against the arm of the couch, head propped on fist, making no move. He was sitting in exactly the same position when his son stopped by on his way out the door.
“I’m leaving,” said Sam.
The older man clicked off the television and, with a grunt of effort, shifted around to look at his son over the arm of the couch. “Already?”
“Yeah.” It was about a two-hour drive north to Quentinville.
“Very well, then. Two last pieces of advice. One: have fun! It’s supposed to be fun! That is why they call it entertainment!”
“Ah,” said Sam, “I’d always wondered.” The man’s philistinism was ceaseless. Like Tom’s mansion, it spread ever outward.
Booth flourished the television controller. “And two: get your coverage!”
“Coverage” was the most basic principle of filmmaking, whereby you made sure to “cover,” say, the angles of a two-person conversation at a restaurant table. There was a master shot that showed both people, a medium shot of the one on the left, a medium shot of the one on the right, a close-up of the left, and a close-up of the right. Perhaps you also snapped a cutaway or two, the bell ringing above the door as someone enters, maybe, or a geezer on a nearby stool sipping coffee. That was it: you were covered.
Coverage was the director’s first responsibility. Coverage was the essence of responsibi
lity. To be reminded of such a thing by Booth Dolan—well, now there was a faultless irony.
Who did the man think he was?
Sam strode into the room, tore the pair of panties from his pocket, and threw it at Booth’s face.
The article of clothing missed Booth’s face and landed on his shoulder, like a very small net. His father recoiled, snatched the panties off, and studied them with a perplexed grimace. It was bullshit, though. He knew. They both knew exactly to whom the panties belonged, and the singular, unpardonable place that they held in their shared history. Sam waited for the lie, waited for it like waves in the dark, the interval between crashes.
“Jesus Christ, Samuel.” Booth blinked at him. “Why did you just throw a pair of underpants at me? What is wrong? I’m sorry I got caught up in the film and didn’t help load the car.”
“Never mind,” said Sam, thinking, miserably, He’s actually not such a bad actor when he wants to be. “I need to go.”
Booth held the panties, crumpled in his hand. “What do you mean, ‘never mind’? You don’t throw underwear at people without cause. Look, don’t hurry off. Relax. Why don’t you stay and watch a movie with me?” His grimace opened into an anxious yellow smile. “There’s always something good on cable.”
“I can’t,” said Sam. “Goodbye, Booth.”
He left his father’s hand hanging in the air, left the room, left the house, climbed in his car, put it in reverse, backed out into the street, and got going.
2.
When it came to making the film, Sam began with two key advantages.
The first of these was that Who We Are could be made relatively cheaply. The script included no special effects, no costly Hollywood-style spectacles, no stunts, no explosions. Many other elements of a typical production were irrelevant: set design was unnecessary—the college was exactly what they needed it to be; the actors could provide their own wardrobes; and the conceit of the film was such that lighting continuity was not particularly important—all that mattered was that the “day” of the movie gradually fade into “night.”