For Leon, watching movies was work. Every night after dinner he went to the screening room at Summit Drive. Julia also sat through all those daily sessions, but pictures were never simply her profession; they were her passion. She shared that passion with me. A darkened theater was our favorite place on earth. She used to take me to matinees when I didn’t weigh enough to hold down the seat. Sometimes we’d go to the glamorous palaces like Grauman’s Chinese, but often we’d take in a double feature at a little music box of a theater in Westwood. We believed that theaters were a place of worship where magic washed over us, a world heightened, made brilliant with music, with action and romance, where all the sounds are crisp, and all the words are meaningful, and all the endings are happy or poignant, and you walk out bathed in emotions you didn’t have to suffer for, or struggle for, or take any risks to feel so wonderfully enhanced. A gift. The false opulence, plush carpets, stale air, and palliative darkness combine to create a sacred space. A place of solace, hushed and holy. I recognized this same consecrated ambience the first time I walked into Notre-Dame in Paris, except that Notre-Dame did not have stale air, and the stories glowing in the stained glass windows were not nearly as exciting as the coming attractions in a darkened theater.

PART II

The Challenger

1955

Chapter Eight

I’m sitting on an orange couch in Larry Sanford’s office on Poverty Row, those little low-rent studios hunkered near Gower that make B Westerns, gangster flicks, monster movies, and Saturday-morning serials. Larry’s office, like all the rest of them, is smelly, smoke-filled, with filthy windows; the Venetian blinds are missing slats, and lurid posters dot the walls (men looking resolute, women wailing in terror, slimy creatures). Larry and I are chatting away about Charlie Frye’s Return of the Cat People and a couple of second-rate Westerns that Jimmy Ashford wrote. Larry isn’t exactly committing to them, but he’s enthusiastic about both my clients, and last year he bought one of Jimmy’s Westerns, and a gangster script by Art Luke. The pay was mere merde, but he actually produced them. Now he’s talking about Charlie’s Return of the Cat People like it is Citizen Kane.

Larry stands up from behind his desk and moves to the couch where I’m sitting. The arms on this orange couch and the cheap coffee table in front of it have scorch marks where people have left their cigarettes to burn. Larry takes the cigar from his mouth and smiles, sits down and flings his arm across the back of the couch and toys with my hair. He puts his cigar in a nearby ashtray, and his hairy hand on my knee.