Read Online Amnesiascope: A Novel by Steve Erickson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Steve Erickson
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he acknowledged the impact of The Death of Marat on his own work. All in all, watching this picture was one of the highlights of my career as a critic, I assured the readers—“an unforgettable movie experience”—and at the end of the piece I posed the haunting question as to what had become of Sarre, who must now surely be dead. I could only hope, I concluded, that he lived long enough to see his vision vindicated. Reading over this final coda practically brought tears to my own eyes.
My only real concern about the review was that there is no such movie as The Death of Marat and there is no such director as Adolphe Sarre. I made them up. Borrowing here and there from the French Revolution, I made up the movie’s plot, though only in bits and pieces, of course, since the critic never wants to give too much away; I made up the actors, I made up the sets, I made up camera angles. I made up cinemascope. The one thing in my review that was real was that there was indeed a filmmaker named D. W. Griffith, though the interview referred to I made up as well. By the time I got home from the newspaper after turning the piece in, I was already beginning to wonder what I was going to say when I was confronted with the fraud, as I would be in short order, if not momentarily. My best hope was that Dr. Billy O’Forte was the assigned editor on the piece; he would get the joke right away and maybe a good laugh out of it too, and then the two of us would have time to figure out what to do about my jape. We could just tell Shale I’d reviewed something else and gotten hopelessly bollixed on the job, and dump it altogether. Shale wouldn’t be happy about it but, all in all, not reviewing any movie was probably preferable to reviewing one that didn’t exist. A quick call to Dr. Billy, however, determined that he was not the editor on the piece, but that in fact Shale himself was editing. Shale wasn’t so likely to laugh about it. It would be like the time I wrote about that strip joint as the spiritual center of L.A. and had it thrown back in my face, with the difference being that there actually was a strip joint.
Any minute now Shale was going to call. I kept turning the telephone off and back on, figuring I might as well get it over with. This is the last straw, he would say, except—being Shale—he wouldn’t say it like that; he’d be tactful about it, sensitive to the deeper personal despair that had led me to this moment, his heart heavy with journalistic responsibility. Finally the phone rang. It was an odd conversation. He talked about trimming the second paragraph and rewriting the first sentence of the third; he argued that the middle section of the last graph was unnecessary. “Good piece,” he concluded.
“Uhm. …”
“Coming into the office tomorrow?”
“No, I. … Shale?”
What? he said; and Nothing, I said; and we hung up. For a while I sat there trying to figure out what was going on, and then it hit me: of course he was going to shame me into confessing. He was going to see how far I would let things go before I stopped them myself. Or. … Or it was a joke, I thought. He was turning the whole thing back on me, and there was no way it would get that far anyway, once it went to copy editors and fact-checkers and the art department. Was there a chance in hell that one of those anal-retentive twenty-year-olds in fact-checking would let this get by? So for the next forty-eight hours I jumped at the phone every time someone called, half mortified and half relieved I’d been discovered. When I didn’t hear from the copy editors at all, I actually relaxed, because that had to mean Shale killed the piece; the copy editors always had some complaint. But then one of the fact-checkers phoned, a particularly constipated kid who was constantly trying to argue with me over things he knew nothing about: “I want to ask you about your film review,” he mumbled, timorously since I’ve always made it a rule to
My only real concern about the review was that there is no such movie as The Death of Marat and there is no such director as Adolphe Sarre. I made them up. Borrowing here and there from the French Revolution, I made up the movie’s plot, though only in bits and pieces, of course, since the critic never wants to give too much away; I made up the actors, I made up the sets, I made up camera angles. I made up cinemascope. The one thing in my review that was real was that there was indeed a filmmaker named D. W. Griffith, though the interview referred to I made up as well. By the time I got home from the newspaper after turning the piece in, I was already beginning to wonder what I was going to say when I was confronted with the fraud, as I would be in short order, if not momentarily. My best hope was that Dr. Billy O’Forte was the assigned editor on the piece; he would get the joke right away and maybe a good laugh out of it too, and then the two of us would have time to figure out what to do about my jape. We could just tell Shale I’d reviewed something else and gotten hopelessly bollixed on the job, and dump it altogether. Shale wouldn’t be happy about it but, all in all, not reviewing any movie was probably preferable to reviewing one that didn’t exist. A quick call to Dr. Billy, however, determined that he was not the editor on the piece, but that in fact Shale himself was editing. Shale wasn’t so likely to laugh about it. It would be like the time I wrote about that strip joint as the spiritual center of L.A. and had it thrown back in my face, with the difference being that there actually was a strip joint.
Any minute now Shale was going to call. I kept turning the telephone off and back on, figuring I might as well get it over with. This is the last straw, he would say, except—being Shale—he wouldn’t say it like that; he’d be tactful about it, sensitive to the deeper personal despair that had led me to this moment, his heart heavy with journalistic responsibility. Finally the phone rang. It was an odd conversation. He talked about trimming the second paragraph and rewriting the first sentence of the third; he argued that the middle section of the last graph was unnecessary. “Good piece,” he concluded.
“Uhm. …”
“Coming into the office tomorrow?”
“No, I. … Shale?”
What? he said; and Nothing, I said; and we hung up. For a while I sat there trying to figure out what was going on, and then it hit me: of course he was going to shame me into confessing. He was going to see how far I would let things go before I stopped them myself. Or. … Or it was a joke, I thought. He was turning the whole thing back on me, and there was no way it would get that far anyway, once it went to copy editors and fact-checkers and the art department. Was there a chance in hell that one of those anal-retentive twenty-year-olds in fact-checking would let this get by? So for the next forty-eight hours I jumped at the phone every time someone called, half mortified and half relieved I’d been discovered. When I didn’t hear from the copy editors at all, I actually relaxed, because that had to mean Shale killed the piece; the copy editors always had some complaint. But then one of the fact-checkers phoned, a particularly constipated kid who was constantly trying to argue with me over things he knew nothing about: “I want to ask you about your film review,” he mumbled, timorously since I’ve always made it a rule to
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