LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

Doon, Doane, our Kris . . . Kristina Kristoffa, our . . . lady of the . . . Oracle.

      Only now Karen is stopping because Milos Forman has spotted her and, lifting the index finger on his right hand, which I notice is short and thick, he is actually calling her over to his table.

      Colleen continues: “R.E.B.A.N.E. . Rebane, the installationist. The . . . art animator, you know?”

      “Listen,” I say, composing myself and raising my voice so that Karen can certainly hear it where she’s sitting. “I’m making a film here. Okay? I’m making a fucking film here. Do you understand that?”

      Karen turns and mouths across the cafe: “We should go.”

      I swear Forman smiles at me. He whispers in Karen’s ear and then he smiles at me. If anyone knows, he knows. Milos Forman knows.

      9

      At the university Karen will not tell me what Milos Forman said. She will not even admit it was him. All she says is:

      “Get off my case, Ciaran.”

      “Well, like, excuse me!”

      I would persist, except I figure she’s far too strung out about two things. Firstly, her meeting Professor Julian Krotow, who’s most famous works, Bodies of Sacrifice: The Anatomy of Medieval Matrydom and Entertainment in the Era of Jeanne D’Arc, were Book Club bestsellers. Secondly, my decision to go against her advice and agree to have as my film project supervisor: Dr Steven Milroy.

      Steve Milroy whose book The Film Revolution: Independent Cinema and the Hollywood Machine was featured in last month’s Clips as “a book to warm the hearts of all true cinema lovers” and, when it comes out in paperback (date so far unknown), will be on the top of my private shopping list.

      More importantly, Steve Milroy who directed last year’s Festival of the Waters Special Category winner Judgment Days, a film which struck me, actually, as not only reminiscent of John McNaughton’s early work, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, before he went on to make the truly crap Normal Life then recovered with the ink-black comedy Wild Things, but is also excellent in its own right. Captures that same terrific pace that McNaughton got in Serial Killer and, even though the cast is unknown, has never probably been in a film before, wouldn’t even know a geared head from a zoom motor, really does work.

      Interestingly, it was in one of Milroy’s early films that Helena McCabe once starred (a short, maybe fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, about a girl that gets lost in a harborside warehouse and the things that assail her in the dark, the way the imagination brings to life inanimate things, gives them the power to change lives, distress, live I guess). The lead in Judgment Days, however, was Leesa Kennedy, whose mother is the artist, Heather Rebane, dropped out of USP to helped run the Film Festival, shot in shadows mostly, kind of Gwyneth Paltrow, in cheesecloths and florals, is excellent. I’d love to cast her as Lavonia in a remake of Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens or feature in a documentary about children with famous artistic parents—Sophia Coppola would be another obvious choice, of course.

      Turns out to be entirely true that Milroy once worked as 2AD for Brian G Hutton (Ryder, Night Watch etc). Before that he did locations for Alexandre Rockwell (Four Rooms and so on). These things I checked with the press office at Universal who, though not prepared to give full details—in fact were pretty damn cagey about providing any information at all, even though I explained again and again who I was and what I wanted—confirmed that a Steve Milroy has definitely worked for Universal and, yes, he has been paid by them.

      Why Karen thinks she can comment on any of this, actually, why she thinks she can insist that “you and Steve, Ciaran, is not a good idea” when she’s chosen to abandon her undergraduate interest in film (majoring in performance, in fact) to concentrate at postgraduate level on literature is beyond me.

      She says she knows Steve Milroy pretty well—which maybe she does. Says he’s a ’70s freak, likes blaxplo films, Tobe Hooper, rubbish about . . . rock-n-roll road trips. She says he was one of first people she met at Southport. That Helena introduced him to her. She says that, if she hadn’t needed the money, she would never have met him at all, never have acted in one of his stupid films, though I’ve never seen this film, and she’s never offered to show it to me . . . Certainly, though she says she loves film no less now than she did when we met, I think this new anti-film attitude of hers is an issue building up between us.

      These things considered, I decide to wait until we’re alone in our flat. Then I’ll press her about Milos Forman.

      Instead, I stand on the balcony of the Griffith Building, with the leaded glass windows of the professors’ rooms behind me, and I phone film the whole undergraduate body swarming onto the front lawn like a sea. I film them like I’m Cecil B. DeMille. I sweep across them from what must be 100 feet in the air.

      “Like a sea,” I say to myself, and I think of that sequence in the Peter Weir drama for Silver Screen Partners IV/Touchstone, Dead Poets Society, when church bells ring, the sun shreds the sky in oranges and pinks, a flock of birds (which I notice are mostly plovers or something) rises in a parabolic arc from a lake which is back lit, and the boys come down the wooden school stairs while Mr. Pitts, first name Gerald, played by James Waterstone, comes up the stairs telling them to slow down. And the whole sequence (8 minutes 23 seconds) summarizes the film in . . . in 8 minutes and 23 seconds. Though Weir, to my mind, fails in a number of important areas. For instance: it is well known that masturbation is rife amongst boys of that age, and Weir knows of it. I would also have thought Dead Actors Society was a more appropriate title in that for the most part it’s nothing to do with poetry and everything to do with acting.

      I wait outside Dr Milroy’s office and phone shoot Karen, two doors down, sitting on a steel chair outside Krotow’s room, looking accusingly in my direction, willing me not to go into Milroy’s room, but to follow her. The shot I use is a low, shallow focus, knee shot. The corridor recedes with her on the right so that the shot favors her side and runs out of frame. She is the first to go in, so I do decide to follow behind her, holding my phone at shoulder height, hoping to God the battery will last, and keeping the angle level to give the effect of an ever filling, unbalanced three-shot.

      Krotow says: “What’s this?” as we’re entering; but Karen, who is so very nervous as to be showing an eye tooth on the left side which is clamping down firmly on her bottom lip, where it’s leaving a red mark like a cold sore, is quick to reply:

      “Professor Krotow . . .” she says.

      Julian Krotow, who is obviously not just a Joan of Arc specialist but also a Blues Brothers fan; he is obviously a Blues and ’60s freak, loves the The Doors for example according to the poster on the wall (Jim Morrison, left) and Jefferson Airplane (who knows? right), pulls his wiry terrier hair back into a knot. His face covered in what is a clipped white growth and his lips are fleshy like they belong to John Belushi. Like Belushi didn’t die via speed ball, leaving Dan Aykroyd to screw up the sequel, also starring John Goodman, with Aretha Franklin returning from the original. And Krotow—who I don’t know personally because my last university was Roeford and here in Southport I don’t know anyone except Karen who is also a Roeford graduate—I close up on.

      Though he isn’t saying it in so many words, I personally can hear him say to my phone: “Don’t take any notice of all these old books, I’d rather be listening to ‘My Baby Must be something something’ by, uh, Puff Adder.’”

      I hear him say, I’m sure: “I’d rather be smoking something stronger than Marlboro Lights, off the record, and listening to . . .” who? “. . .”Rod Stewart!”

      “Well, as long as it doesn’t turn into a circus,” he says aloud.

      “No sir,” I say, propping in the corner beside some sort of ancient lance and his red academic gown with white fur collar hung on a hat stand. “No. It’s a film. Director’s rules! Definitely.”

      He slumps down into his chair. It is strangely low backed and wooden. There is, I now notice, something said to be “A Fragment of the Thigh Bone of Jacopo di Ronc” in a silver framed glass case on

Скачать книгу