Aside from Hal Roach, and Len Powers, and Beanie Walker, and Charley Chase, and Leo McCarey, and him, the theater is loaded with family members and crew. Charley Chase holds a hand counter. So does Beanie Walker.
The picture starts. Charley Chase is a husband who decides to alter his appearance with plastic surgery. Vivien Oakland is his wife, who does the same. They meet, not recognizing each other. They flirt. They go to a party. The party is raided. Charley realizes that his amorous companion is, in fact, his wife, and stages a fight between the two versions of himself to teach her a lesson, but she spots the ruse. Charley gets it in spades. The End.
Mighty Like A Moose is twenty-four minutes long. Charley Chase wants sixty laughs in those twenty-four minutes, but will settle for fifty. Using his hand counter, Charley Chase estimates that the picture already contains more than fifty laughs. So does Beanie Walker, which causes everyone to wonder if there might not be sixty laughs in the picture after all. They work this out over dinner – Leo McCarey, Hal Roach, Charley Chase, Beanie Walker, Len Powers, the ghost of Max Linder, and he. Remove a minute from the picture, they decide, and the laughs will go up. They will reshoot. Not much, but enough.
He takes in everything: the care, the attention to detail, the ambition. He had tried to institute these processes with Joe Rock, but Joe Rock had neither the money nor the vision to indulge him.
Here it is not an indulgence. Here it is a necessity.
How many pictures will be released by Hollywood this year? He estimates four hundred, give or take. Last year, Hal Roach alone produced over seventy pictures. Mighty Like A Moose will be twenty-three minutes long when the Audience finally sees it. The Audience will watch Mighty Like A Moose, laugh, forget it, and want more.
Just twenty-three minutes.
But each minute must be perfect.
He returns to the apartment. Lois is reading.
He takes Lois to bed, to the dark.
To lose himself in the flawlessness of her.
57
At the Oceana Apartments, a young man comes to visit: a writer for television, a fan of his work. The young man is polite, overwhelmed. He tries to put the young man at his ease.
They talk about his pictures. He hates to see them broken up by the advertisements on television. He can understand why it is done, but there is no logic to the interruptions beyond the requirements of time slots. The advertisements interrupt scenes and gags. They destroy the rhythm of what he has created with Babe. The distributors have even butchered the longer features to create shorter shows so that all sense is lost. He has written to them, offering to edit the pictures again for television just so the gags will work better. He will do this for free, he tells them. He has time, and it will not take long. He has watched these pictures often enough. He has already reedited them in his mind. He does not want money. What would he do with it?
The distributors do not reply. He is not surprised. He had only hoped that they might respond.
He is not bitter. Never that. Babe would have said it was not worth becoming bitter, and Babe would have been right. But he is sad, sad that they do not care as much as he does.
And then the young man asks if he has read Chaplin’s autobiography.
58
Joe Rock continues to hold out.
This is frustrating, but William Doane believes that progress is slowly being made. William Doane would like to meet with Joe Rock’s lawyers in order to shake their hands and congratulate them on their acumen, but William Doane is afraid of losing fingers in the exchange. William Doane prefers to keep Joe Rock’s lawyers at one remove, to save having special gloves made. For now, William Doane informs him, he must continue writing and directing, and keep the camera pointed away from himself.
But Babe’s wife Myrtle falls in Laurel Canyon while fleeing from a rattlesnake, and will be laid up for weeks. Babe decides to cook for her, but burns his hand with hot grease, then slips and injures himself while leaving the kitchen to seek help. He thinks that this might make for a memorable gag, but he is not certain that Babe would see the humor in it. With no one else available, he must take Babe’s roles in Get ’Em Young and Raggedy Rose, while also co-directing.
I was you, he will later remind Babe. I was a better you than you.
I gave you your big break, Babe will reply. I burned myself because I felt sorry for you.
Back before the cameras, he realizes how much he has missed this. He is tired of writs, tired of Joe Rock. He wants to marry Lois, but cannot do so with lawyers arguing in his ears, and his future uncertain.
Bring it to an end, he tells William Doane. Make a deal.
Joe Rock is working out of Poverty Row.
Joe Rock is drowning.
Joe Rock takes the deal.
59
He has been liberated from music halls, liberated from vaudeville, liberated from Mae. He has been liberated from fifteen-minute skits, liberated from spoofs of dramas, liberated from Joe Rock.
And he has been liberated from repetition only to find himself bound to a new wheel, because Hal Roach operates a manufactory and its machines must be fed. They are voracious consumers of ideas. They seek novelty, but only to replicate it. They demand variety, but only if it can conform to a set rule.
He watches the vaudeville players come and go. They sense the imminence of the circuit’s passing. When vaudeville sinks, it will sink quickly, like a ship that has stayed afloat only long enough to permit those with an instinct for self-preservation to make for the lifeboats or brave the water, but will now take the rest, the ones who feared to jump, down to the bottom.
But this is not fair. They cannot all leave, these performers. Some the circuit has made lazy, content to recycle endlessly the gags they have created, inherited, or stolen from others. And some have just one gag, one skit, one bit of business, and it will not be enough to save them. They are pigs cavorting in the knife’s gleam.
The acts that survive, and make the transition to pictures, understand certain matters without being told. They must innovate while appearing to remain the same. They must diversify without alienating the Audience. They must mold characters from clay before commencing the process of firing them in the furnace of the Audience’s regard. Most of all, they must be aware not only of the camera, but also of the screen. They will be projected upon it, and the Audience will project itself upon them in turn.