red in The Lady Eve, for example, sends a signal to the audience that she’s duplicitous. Let them figure it out for themselves.”
It was an argument I would remember when Julius and I would discuss how far to go in conserving a particular film.
“Even the word restoration represents a threat. To restore often means to impose someone’s idea of what a picture should look like, means a heavy dose of tampering, means this: going too far. Colorization, like putting arms back on Venus, is out of the question.” He turned around and asked the waitress for more coffee, then just as abruptly changed the subject.
“I grew up in Los Angeles. My mother worked in the costume department of Universal Studios,” Julius said, and I imagined the man I barely knew sitting across from me as a child careening around this or that set. “I stole a costume once from a stuntman who was doubling for Clint Eastwood in Hang ’Em High. It was a great cowboy suit with these Technicolor yellow suede chaps with green fringe. I wore the suit to school thinking other kids would pay attention to me. They did, but not in the way I imagined.”
He didn’t reveal what kind of attention he received, but because of this story I felt some affection for him, and this was a mistake. Julius knew how to elicit sympathy and attention, and my response, my laughter, made him comfortable, so he plunged on. Actually, I’d worked on Hang ’Em High, admittedly restoring only one section of the film, but couldn’t remember Clint Eastwood in yellow chaps. Perhaps the scene with that particular stunt had been cut when the film was edited. In any case I said nothing about it.
“She used to get calls from gossip columnists because actors, even extras, often made startling confessions during fittings, revealing liaisons and uncomfortable memories as if she knew magic words of absolution, as if she had the answers which, believe me, she did not. She was as good as they were at theatrical expressions of shock and sympathy that she recycled from the movies, and sometimes when I’m working on a film I see her raised eyebrows or hand over her mouth. The talent also spoke to one another as if she was invisible, and in this way more gossip was overheard. An uncle got me into the preservation business because they thought I was brainy and useless, but I learned from my mother. My telephone number is unlisted.”
Julius, a displaced Californian who took his profession east, was never entirely at home in New York where hundreds of miles of trains rumbled underground, where the odds of an actual earthquake were small, and business was conducted in dark rooms high above street level. He was constantly a bit bewildered, as if looking for a switch in order to turn on the light. Yet Julius could read damaged and deteriorating film history as if it were a large-print book. The old films became a pedestal he lectured from. Without me, you’re nothing, he’d say, and this always got a laugh from whoever was in the room.
Julius was meticulous, this I knew from his reputation, but ill at ease with responsibility, the kind of man who belonged nowhere and who had landed in a profession that only once in a while demanded he communicate with a live human being. He didn’t like the idea of exercise, was gym phobic, but every once in a while would take the stairs. Julius lit another cigarette but held it so his hand dangled over the edge of the booth.
“I don’t want to blow smoke in your eyes. Eye,” he corrected himself and turned red. I wasn’t annoyed, in an odd way his embarrassment and the dangling hand were persuasive.
Over the cash register a television was suspended. The Garwood case was being discussed briefly on the news. Garwood, a Vietnam POW — some believe he was falsely accused of treason. We stood up to leave, and I had my eye on that particular story when suddenly Julius kissed me good-bye awkwardly but deliberately. As he bent over I noticed he colored his hair orangey brown (against colorization but dyed his hair) and his eyes were shut. Somehow he made me feel I’d asked for that kiss since I’d laughed at his self-deprecating jokes. His implication was that there was more where it came from; still, I accepted the job. I guess at the time I didn’t mind all that much.
When I left the Library of Congress to work for a private company in New York I cut my hair so that no strand would accidentally fall across the frame, and I tried unsuccessfully to quit drinking coffee, which was making my hands shake a bit if I was tired. I made more money but still affected an appearance that combined seriousness with attention to certain kinds of ironic details, like narrow-waisted jackets that looked as if they’d been pinched from old movies and frayed trousers because I wore clothing until it fell apart. This created an image of studied slovenliness, as if my mind were completely on my work and not on the body I actually inhabited. A ten-dollar good-luck ring set with a square, magenta piece of glass was my prize possession until I lost it in a public swimming pool my first week in the city. No longer working with a large number of people as I had in Washington, and knowing no one in New York, I could go for days barely speaking to anyone. I felt like a prisoner in my own skin and began to wonder what the relationship might be between my sense of physicality, my vanity, all unacted upon, and my vocation that was so concerned with preserving the display of others.
The editing rooms of Alphabet Film Conservation are in the Mayflower Building downtown. You walk in through the main entrance, a double door centered like a mouth, windows for eyes. A sculpture, a large statue of Hermes built into its own recessed aedicule above the door; that’s the nose. Hermes is sinewy, his arms and legs an abstract collection of metal rods, yet in his winged cap he is identifiable as the god of rogues, gymnasts, and travelers. Other mouths: curving balconies, Gaudí-like but functionless flourishes since no one uses them. More windows resemble other pairs of eyes. How is an office building like a human body? Banks of elevators function like arteries, the furnace is a giant sweat gland, air-conditioning ducts are drawn-out branches of lung. The building directory located in the lobby might be the brain, flat and simple, tin and industrial felt, a banal yet practical mind.
Alphabet is on the fifth floor. The labs where the films are treated branch out from the reception area and offices of the director, Julius Shute, his assistant, and the accountant. The walls are covered with framed posters from a few of the films we have preserved: Go West, The Cameraman, Wages of Fear, Out of the Past, The Runaway Bride, and photographs of Julius as a boy shaking hands with Charlie Chaplin in one picture and Montgomery Clift in another. Julius believes that in the eyes of our clients these photographs are the equivalent of medical school diplomas.
Chaplin bent over to meet Julius’s gaze and smiled broadly, cane stuck out behind, yet this was an older Chaplin, perhaps tired of little boys, although perhaps not. Montgomery Clift playing Freud didn’t look happy. He may have been pressed for time, the shutter snapped, and Julius, a confused but polite boy, thanked him and disappeared back into the ranks of the crew. Peanut lights, 200-watt midget solarspot, stingers (a 25-foot extension cord), horsecock (feeder cable), Mighty-Moles, Mickey-Moles, inkies, tweenies, leekos, optima 32s, brutes, and HMI 6Ks. He could hear gaffers’ and electricians’ banter, and he ducked behind a trailer grabbing a doughnut as he ran. Behind the camera, behind it, not in front, stay out of harm’s way, kid. Do us a favor. Get that boy out of here. Keep him out of the light. And so they did. The photographs of Julius represent his history, and at the same time the images have the aura of standard publicity shots.
The waiting room also contains a Mr. Coffee, newspapers, magazines, and a few plants, but only a few, since the work done in Alphabet is performed in the dark. On a table near the receptionist are stacks of letters addressed to members of Congress and institutions representing the motion-picture industry, letters of protest against the colorization of old black-and-white films.
When she isn’t reading or answering the telephone, Antonya, the accountant and occasional receptionist, suggests that anyone visiting Alphabet should sign one or more of the letters and mail them to Washington and Hollywood. Washington and Hollywood, Washington and Hollywood, she repeats every
