“The last movie ends about three, so the projectionist should be gone,” Otis said, as he opened the door on the side of the building. On a screen in one room an unattended projector showed a fuzzy picture with a scratchy soundtrack.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s film static. This is what you see when a station goes off the air. The projectionist puts it on when he leaves. It runs for a couple of hours until the station comes back on again. It’s weird how they make it. The picture is really a swarm of gnats trapped in a fish tank. The sound is recorded snatches of old Conelrad tests, telephone dial tones, needles sticking at the end of records, rain, and improvised breathing. Once or twice a year they film new static to replace the old. They got hundreds of feet of film just on static alone.”

“Get the fuck out a here!”

“If I’m lying, I’m flying.”

The film library was a seven-tier, walled-in jungle gym. Each tier had shelves stacked with films in large silver discs. A staircase spiraled through the middle of each tier to the bottom.

“The Westerns and war movies are on the last two levels. Don’t talk too loud and don’t walk too hard. This place is wired for sound. An alarm system goes off if the walls or floors absorb over a certain number of decibels.”

Passing from one tier to the next, I spotted the names of movies I’d seen, and for an instant, a memorable scene would frame itself in my head… Paul Muni on the lam at the end of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, retreating from his woman and into the night as she asks him, “How will you live?” And Muni answering with a desperation that has always made me believe that he is still out there somewhere hiding out, “I steal!” Martha Vickers in The Big Sleep expressing to Humphrey Bogart on the occasion of their first meeting that she thought he was taller. And Bogart saying, “I tried to be.” Gloria Swanson at the end of Sunset Boulevard confusing her arrest for murder with a press conference announcing her comeback into motion pictures, with the camera blurring her face as she says the film’s last line, “I’m ready for my close-up!” Spencer Tracy as Stanley looking for Dr. Livingstone in Stanley and Livingstone coming to an East African village where it is rumored that a white man has been seen. Unfortunately, it isn’t Dr. Livingstone but an albino. When Stanley’s sidekick asks one of the tribesmen if the albino is a black-white man, the tribesman says, “No, he’s a white-black man!”

“Here’s the John Wayne section,” Otis said when we reached the last level. “They got everything the Duke has done since 1939 when he made Stagecoach. That’s when he really started to work his show with that yippy-yi-yay shit. Look, here’s They Were Expendable, The Fighting Seabees, Back to Bataan, and Sands of Iwo Jima. That’s the one that really fucked me around.”