more glint!" Big Medicine bawled, and laughed afterwards with his big
_haw-haw-haw_. "And I'll gamble there ain't enough unflinchin' demeanor
on the Coast to put that boy through the scene. Honest-to-gran'-ma, Luck,
that there Tracy Gray Joyce gits pale, and his Adam's apple pumps up and
down when I come up and smile at him! What color do yuh reckon he'll turn
to when he stands up to me right after me slaying all these innocent
boys--and me a-foamin' at the mouth and gloatin' over the foul deed I've
just did? Say? How's he going to keep that there Adam's apple from
shootin' clean up through his hair, and his knees from wobblin'? How--"
"He won't," said Luck suddenly, with a brightening of his eyes. "He
won't. I hope they do wobble. You go ahead, Bud, and foam at the mouth.
You--you _look_ at Tracy Gray Joyce. Not in the rehearsing, understand;
leave out the foam and the gloating till we turn the camera on the scene.
Sabe? On the quiet, boys."
"Sure," came the guarded chorus. It was remarkable what a complete
understanding there was between Luck and the Happy Family. It was that
complete understanding which had kept Luck's spirits up during his
unloved task of producing Bently Brown stuff in film.
"Well, say!" Big Medicine leaned close and throttled his voice down to a
hoarse whisper. "What kinda hee-ro will your Tracy Gray Joyce look like,
when I start up foamin' and gloatin' at him?"
Luck smiled. "That," he said calmly, "is for the camera to find out." He
was going to say something more on the subject, but some one called to
him anxiously from over toward the office. So he told them _adios_
hurriedly and went his busy way, and left the Happy Family discussing him
gravely among themselves.
The Happy Family were so interested in this new work that they were ready
to see the bright side even of these weird performances which purported
to be Western drama. If you did not take it seriously, all this violence
of dress and behavior was fun. The Happy Family was slipping into a
rivalry of violence; and the strange part of it was that Luck Lindsay,
stickler for realism, self-confessed enthusiast on the uplifting of
motion pictures to a fine art, permitted their violence,--which was not
as the violence of other, better trained Western actors. The Happy
Family, after their first self-conscious tendency to duck behind
something or somebody, had come to forget the merciless, recording eye of
the camera. They had come to look upon their work as a game, played for
the amusement of Luck Lindsay, who watched them always, and for the open
ridicule of Bently Brown, writer of these tales of blood and heroics.
And Luck not only permitted but encouraged them in this exaggeration,--to
the amazement of the camera man who had turned the crank on more Western
dramas than he could remember. Scenes of violence--such as the saloon row
in which Big Medicine had forgotten that Pink was to be left alive, and
so had killed him twice--made the camera man and the assistant laugh when
they should have shuddered; and to wonder why Luck Lindsay, wholly biased
though he was in favor of the Happy Family, did not seem to realize that
they were not getting the right punch into the pictures.
Luck was not behaving at all in his usual manner with his company.
Evenings, instead of holding himself aloof from his subordinates, he
would head straight for the furnished bungalow which the Flying U boys
had taken possession of, with Rosemary Green to give the home atmosphere
which saved the place from becoming a mere bunk-house de luxe. If he
could possibly manage it, Luck would reach headquarters in time for
dinner--the Happy Family blandly called it supper, of course--and would
proceed to forget the day's irritations while he ate what he ambiguously
called "real cookin'."
There was a fireplace in that bungalow, and a fairly large living-room
surrounding the fireplace. The Happy Family extravagantly indulged
themselves in wood, even at the unbelievable price they must pay for it;
and after supper they would light the fire and hunt up chairs enough, and
roll cigarettes, and talk themselves quite away from the present and into
the past of glowing memory.
The horses they rode--before that fireplace--would have made any
Frontier Day celebration famous enough to be mentioned in the next
encyclopedia published. The herds they took through hard winters and
summer droughts would have made them millionaires all, if they could
only have turned them into flesh-and-blood animals. They talked of
blizzards and of high water and of short grass and of thunderstorms.
They added little touches to the big range picture Luck had planned to
make. Starting off suddenly in this wise: "Say, Luck, why don't you
have--?" and the fires of enthusiasm would flare again in Luck's eyes,
and the talk would grow eager.
But--and here was the key to the remarkable interpretation which Luck
permitted the Happy Family to give the Bently Brown stories--some time
before the evening was too old, Luck would swing the talk around to the
work they were doing. He would pull a Bently Brown scenario from his
pocket and read, with much sarcastic comment, the scenes they were later
to enact. He would incite the Happy Family to poking fun at such lurid
performances as Bently Brown described in all seriousness and in detail.
He would encourage comment and argument and the play of their caustic
imaginations upon the action of the story. He would gradually make them
see the whole thing in the light of a huge joke; he would, without saying
much himself, bring the Happy Family into the mood of wanting to make
Bently Brown appear ridiculous to all beholders.
Is it any wonder, then, if the camera man and the assistants should
exchange puzzled glances when Luck put the Happy Family through their
scenes? Exits and entrances, the essential details of the action, Luck
directed painstakingly, as always he had done. Why, then, said camera man
to assistants, should he let those fellows go in and ball up the dramatic
business and turn whole scenes into farce with their foolery? And why had
he chosen Tracy Gray Joyce as leading man? And that eye-rolling, limp
sentimentalist, Lenore Honiwell, as his leading woman? Luck was known to
despise these two, personally and professionally. They could not, to save
their lives, get through a dramatic scene together without giving the
observers a sickish feeling. To see Tracy Gray Joyce lay his hand upon
the left side of his cravat and cast his eyes upward always made Luck
shiver; yet Tracy Gray Joyce would he have for leading man, and none
other. To see Lenore Honiwell throw back her head, close her eyes, and
heave one of those terrific motion-picture sighs always made the camera
man snort; yet Luck, who before had considered her scarcely worth a civil
bow when he met her, had actually coaxed her away from a director who
really admired her style of acting.
And when Luck, who had always gone about his work impervious to curious
onlookers, suddenly changed his method and ordered all interior sets
screened in, and all bystanders away from the immediate vicinity of his
exterior scenes, the Acme people began to call him "swell-headed"--when
they did not call him worse. Even his excuse that he was working with
boys new to the business and did not want them rattled failed to satisfy
most of them.
The Happy Family, in the tiny, bare dressing rooms which they called
box-stalls in merciless candor, were smearing their faces liberally with
cold cream and still arguing among themselves over the doubtful blessing
of owning as many lives as a cat, and bewailing the bruises they had
received while sacrificing a few of their lives to the blood-lust of Big
Medicine and Pink, the two official, Bently-Brown bad men. Outside their
two connecting "stalls" a fine drizzle was making the studio yard an
empty place of churchyard gloom and incidentally justifying Luck in
quitting so early. Big Medicine was swabbing paint from his eyebrows and
bellowing his opinion of a man that will keep a-comin', by cripes, after
he's shot the third time at close range, and then kick because he takes
so much killing off. This was aimed at the Native Son, who had evidently
died hard, and who meant to retaliate as soon as he got that dab of paint
out of his eye. But the door opened violently against his person and
startled him into forgetting his next observation.
This was Luck, and he had the look of a man who owns a guilty secret, and
is ready to be rather proud of his guilt,--providing society consents to
wink at it with him. He was not smiling, exactly; he had a wicked kind of
twinkle in his eyes.
"Hurry up, boys! My Lord, how you fellows do primp and jangle in here!
They're going to run our first picture, _The Soul of Littlefoot Law_.
Don't you fel--"
"The which?" Big Medicine whirled upon him, rubbing his left eye into a
terrifying, bloodshot condition while he glared with the other.
"_The Soul of Littlefoot Law_," Luck repeated distinctly with a perfect
neutrality of manner.
"'S that what you call all that ridin' and shootin' we done, that you
said was by moonlight?" Pink inquired pugnaciously--for a young man who
had died the death four different times that day.
"That's what it's called," Luck averred with firmness.
"Aw--where does Soul of Littlefoot Law come in at?" Happy Jack scoffed.
"It doesn't, so far as I know."
"Aw, there ain't no sense in such a name as that. Is that where I got
shot off'n my horse, and Bud, here, done his best to run over me?"
"That's the one. My Lord, boys, how long does it take you fellows to get
your make-up off? They'll have the film run and passed and released and
out on the five-cent circuit on its fifteenth round before you--" Luck,
director though he was, found it wise to pass out quickly and hold the
door shut behind him for a minute. "Honest, boys, you want to hurry," he
called through the closed door. He waited until the sounds within
indicated that they were hurrying quite violently, and then he went his
way; and he still had the look in his eyes of one who bears in his soul a
secret guilt of which he is inclined to be proud.
When the Acme people gathered resignedly in the private projection room,
however, Luck's wicked little twinkle had turned a shade anxious. He
excused himself from the chair between Martinson and Mollie Ryan, the
stenographer, and went over to confer with the Happy Family and the dried
little man who kept clannishly together as usual, and he forgot to return
to his place.
The Acme people, personally and individually, were sick and tired of all
motion pictures that did not portray with vividness the beauty or the
talents of themselves, or the faults of their acquaintances. No Acme
people, save Lenore Honiwell and Tracy Gray Joyce and a phlegmatic
character woman, were in this picture at all. The camera man who took it
did not think highly of it and considered the wonderful photography as
good as wasted, and he had said as much--and more--to his intimates.
Beckitt, Luck's assistant, had privately announced it as the rottenest
piece of cheese he had ever seen under a Wild-West label, and disclaimed
all responsibility. They of the cutting and trimming clan had not said
anything at all. Martinson, having heard the rumors, felt that they
confirmed his own suspicion that Luck had made a big blunder in bringing
those cowboys into the company. They were not actors. They did not
pretend to be actors.
You will see that it was a critical audience indeed that gathered there
in the projection room that rainy afternoon to see the trial run of _The
Soul of the Littlefoot Law_. It would take a good deal to win any
approbation from that bunch.
And then they were looking at the first scene, which Was a night in
Whoopalong, the fake town over there beyond the big stage. The Happy
Family, all disguised as cowboys, came surging out of the darkness.
H-m-m. That was the bunch that Luck Lindsay had done so much bragging
about, and called "real boys," was it? silently commented the audience.
No different from any other cowboys, as far as any one could see.
True, they used about half the usual amount of film footage in getting to
foreground; probably underspeeded the camera,--an old, old trick which
has helped to put the dash and ginger into many a poor horseman's act.
But the "XY cowboys" certainly surged up to foreground, and it was seen
that they rode with reins in their teeth, and that each and every man
fired two huge six-shooters straight up at the moon every time their
horses hit the ground with forefeet. The Happy Family leaned forward and
craned around the heads of those in front that they might see all of it.
Luck had told them before making this scene to "eat 'em alive," and the
Happy Family had very nearly done so. Andy Green nudged his wife,
Rosemary, and whispered hurriedly that this was where the camera man had
pulled up his tripod by the roots and beat it, thinking he was going to
be run over; and that was why the scene was cut unexpectedly just where
Andy set his horse on its haunches and posed, a heroic figure of a cowboy
rampant, immediately before the lens.
Luck, glancing hurriedly to right and left, slid down and rested the nape
of his neck on the back of his chair, slipped a fresh stick of gum
between his teeth, hung his hat on his knee, and prepared to view his
work with critical mind and impartial, and with his conscience like his
body at ease. The thing had certainly started off with zip enough, since
zip was what Mart claimed the Public demanded.
The next scene was a continuation of the one before,--the camera man
having evidently recovered himself and gotten to work again. The Happy
Family, still surging and still shooting two guns apiece at the pale
moon, were shown entering the saloon door four abreast and with the rest
crowding for place. Still there was zip; all kinds of zip. The Happy
Family nudged and grinned in the dusk and were very much pleased with
themselves as XY cowboys seeking mild entertainment in town.
Some one behind remarked upon the surging and the shooting, and Big
Medicine turned his head quickly and sent a hoarse stage whisper in the
general direction of the mumble.
"Ah-h, that there ain't anything! Luck never let us turn ourselves loose
there a-tall. You wait, by cripes, till yuh see us where we git warmed up
and strung out proper! You wait! Honest to gran'--" It was Luck's elbow
that stopped him by the simple expedient of cutting off his wind. Big
Medicine gave a grunt and said no more.
Thereafter, the Happy Family discovered that there was a certain
continuity in the barbaric performances in which Luck had grinningly
encouraged them to indulge themselves. They beheld themselves engaged in
various questionable enterprises, and they laughed in naïve enjoyment as
certain bloodcurdling traits in their characters were depicted with
startling vividness. Accented by make-up and magnified on the screen, the
goggling, frog-like ugliness of Big Medicine became like unto ogres of
childish memory; his smile was a thing to make one's back hair stand up
with a cold, prickling sensation. Happy Jack stared at himself and his
exaggerated awkwardness incredulously, with a sheepish grin of
appreciation. The rest of them watched and missed no slightest gesture.
So they saw the plot of Bently Brown unfold, scene by scene; unfold in
violence and malevolent intrigue and zip and much fighting. Also unfolded
something of which Bently Brown had never dreamed; something which the
audience, though greeting it with laughter, failed at first to recognize
for what it was worth, because every one knew all about the Bently-Brown
Western dramas, and every one believed that they were to be made after
the usual recipe more elaborately stirred. So every one had been
chortling through several scenes before the significance of their
laughter occurred to them.
Comedy--that was it. Comedy, that had slipped in with cap and bells
just when the door was flung open for black-robed Tragedy. But it was
too late to stop laughing when they discovered the trick. They saw it
now, in the very sub-titles which Luck had twisted impishly into sly
humor that pointed to the laugh, in the deeds of blood that followed.
They saw it in the goggling ferocity of Big Medicine; in the
innocent-eyed, dimpled fiendishness of Pink; in the lank awkwardness of
Happy Jack. They saw it in the sentimental mannerisms of Lenore
Honiwell, whose sickish emotionalism slipped pat into the burlesque.
They rocked in their seats at the heroics of Tracy Gray Joyce, who
could never again be taken seriously, since Luck had tagged him
mercilessly as an unconscious comedian.
Oh, yes, there was zip to the picture! But there was no explanation of
the title. _The Soul of Littlefoot Law_ remained as great a mystery when
the picture was finished as it had been at the start. Littlefoot Law, by
the way, was Pink. That much the audience discovered, and no more; for as
to his soul, he did not seem to own one.
Luck, still hunched down so that his back hair rubbed against his chair
back, was laughing with his jaws wide apart and his fine teeth still
gleaming in the half darkness, when Ted, general errand boy at the
office, came straddling over intervening laps and laid a compelling hand
on his shoulder.
"Say, Luck," he whispered excitedly, "the audience author's with Mart,
and they both want t' see you. And, say, I guess you're in Dutch, all
right; the author's awful mad, and so is Mart. But say, no matter what
they do to you, Luck, take it from me, that pit'cher's a humdinger! I
like to died a-laughing!"
CHAPTER SEVEN
BENTLY BROWN DOES NOT APPRECIATE COMEDY
Luck unhooked his hat from his knee, brought his laughing jaws together
with that eloquent, downward tilt to the corners of his mouth, sat up
straight, considered swiftly the possibilities of the next half hour, and
paid tribute in one expressive word of four letters before he went
crawling over half a dozen pairs of knees to do battle for his picture.
His picture, you understand. For since he had made it irresistible comedy
instead of very mediocre drama, he felt all the pride of creation in his
work. That was his picture that had set the Acme people laughing,--they
who had come to carp and to talk knowingly of continuity and of technique
and dramatic values, and to criticize everything from the sets to the
photography. It was his picture; he had made it what it was. So he went
as a champion rather than as a culprit to face the powers above him.
Martinson and Bently Brown were waiting for him near the door. They were
not going to stay and see the next picture run, and that, in Luck's
opinion, was a bad-weather sign. But he came up to them cheerfully,
turning his hat in his fingers to find the front of it before he set it
on his head. (These limp, wool, knockabout hats are always more or less
confusing, and Luck was fastidious about his apparel.)
"Ah--Mr. Brown, this is Mr. Lindsay, ah--director who is producing your
stories." Martinson's tone was as neutral as he could make it.
Luck said that he was glad to meet Mr. Brown, which was a lie. At the
same instant he found the stitched-down bow on his hat, and from there
felt his way to the front. At the same time he decided that there was
going to be something doing presently, if Mart's manner meant anything at
all. Mart was a peaceable soul, and in the approaching crisis Luck knew
he would climb hurriedly upon the fence of neutrality and stay there; and
Luck could fight or climb a tree as he chose.
They went outside, and Luck turned his eyes sidewise and took a look at
Bently Brown. He measured him mentally from pigskin puttees to rakish,
stiff brimmed Stetson with careful dimples in the crown and a leather
hatband stamped with horses' heads and his initials. In a picture, Luck
would have cast Bently Brown, costume and all, for a comedy mining
engineer or something of that sort. You know the type: He arrives on the
stage that is held up, and is always in the employ of the monied octopus,
and the cowboys who pursue and capture the bandits have fun afterwards
with the engineer,--so much fun that he crawls out of an up-stairs window
in the night and departs hastily and forever from that place. You are
perfectly familiar with the character, I am sure.
Luck, after that swift, comprehensive glance, was not greatly alarmed. In
that he made his greatest blunder. He should have reckoned with the
wounded vanity of the little author who believes himself great. He should
have reminded himself that Bently Brown was not a comedy mining engineer,
but that touchiest of all mortals, the nearly successful author. He
should have taken warning from the stiff-necked, stiff-backed gait of
Bently Brown on the short walk to the office. He should have read danger
in the blinking lids of his pale eyes, and in his self-conscious manner
of looking straight before him.
In the office, then, luck basely deserted one Luck Lindsay, and left him
to fight a losing battle. For Bently Brown was incensed, insulted, and
outraged over the manner in which _The Soul of Littlefoot Law_ had been
filmed. The story had been caricatured out of all semblance to its
original self. Littlefoot Law had been shown as having no soul whatever.
Instead of being permitted to make the final, supreme sacrifice of his
life for the honor of his enemy,--which would have revealed to the
audience his possession of a clean white soul in spite of his bad
character,--he had been made out a little fiend who would shoot you on
the slightest provocation. The girl had been thrust into the background,
and the hero had been made into a coward and a paltry villain; they were
all desperadoes upon the screen. Never in his life had Bently Brown been
made to suffer such an affront. Never had he dreamed that his work would
be made a thing to laugh at--
"They certainly did laugh," Luck lazily interrupted. "And believe me, Mr.
Brown, it takes real stuff to collect a laugh out of that bunch. It will
be a riot with the public; you can bank on that. By the time I get a few
more made and released, you can expect to see your name in the papers
without paying advertising rates." Whatever possessed Luck to talk that
way to Bently Brown, I cannot say. He surely must have seen that the
little, over-costumed author was choking with spleen.
"It was a farce!" The small, yellow mustache of Bently Brown was
twitching comically with the tremble of his lips beneath. "A bald,
unmitigated farce!"
"Surest thing you know," Luck agreed, with that little chuckle of his.
"At first I was afraid the crowd wouldn't get it; I didn't know but they
might try to take it seriously. Now, I know for certain that it will get
over. It will be the cleanest, funniest, farce-comedy series that has
ever been filmed." Luck sat up straight and pulled a cigar from his
pocket and looked at it absent-mindedly. "Say, those boys of mine are
certainly real ones! I wouldn't trade that bunch for the highest-salaried
actors you could hand me. Do you know what made that picture such a
scream? It was because there wasn't a bit of made-to-order comedy
business in the whole film. Those boys didn't think about acting funny
just to make folks laugh. They were so doggoned busy having fun with the
story and showing up its weak points that they forgot to be
self-conscious. If I'd had a regular comedy company working on it,
believe me, Mr. Brown, it might have turned out almost as rotten a farce
as it would be as a drama!"
Had Bently Brown owned under his pink skin any of the primitive instincts
which he was so fond of portraying in his characters, he would have
killed Luck without any further argument or delay.
Instead of that he spluttered and stormed like a scolding woman. He
lifted first one puttee and then the other, and he shook his fist, and
he nodded his head violently, and finally was constrained to lift the
leather-banded Stetson from his blond hair and wipe the perspiration
from his brow with a lavender initialed handkerchief. He said a great
deal in a very few minutes, but it was too involved, too incoherent to
be repeated here. Luck gathered, however, that he meant to sue the Acme
Company for about nine million dollars damages to his feelings and his
reputation, if _The Soul of Littlefoot Law_ was released in its present
form. He battered at Luck's grinning composure with his full supply of
invectives. When he perceived that Luck's eyes twinkled more and more
while they watched him, and that Luck's smile was threatening to
explode into laughter, Bently Brown shook his fist at the two of them,
shrilled something about seeing his lawyer at once, and went out and
slammed the door.