He shakes his head and puts out his hand and she pulls him up to standing.
“Things didn’t work out exactly as I’d hoped,” he says.
He starts to walk and Sylvia follows and says, “You know, you really shouldn’t slag Hugo Schick the way you do. You two being in the same union and all.”
“I knew you’d think that,” he says, “but I’m not a pornographer, Sylvia.”
“So what is it you sell to these guys, Mr. Smith?” sarcastic on the last two words. “Tours of the underworld?”
He stops walking and says, “I sell them Terrence Propp prints.”
She looks at him, confused, and he just smiles and starts walking again.
“I was supposed to be a dealer with some connections to the mystery man. Only nobody’s buying these days. They suddenly think I’m a fraud. They think Propp is dead and I’m trafficking in second-rate imitations.”
“That’s hysterical,” she says.
“Not when you’re trying to buy film on your good looks.”
“This is going to sound a little cruel, but don’t you find it just a bit ironic?”
He lets out an annoyed sigh and says, “Irony is a constant once you reach my age.” Then he just stares at her and when he speaks again the tone of his voice is completely different.
“Don’t you wonder why I brought you here tonight, Sylvia?”
Now it’s her turn to give a stare. “You live underneath the streets in an old diner, hiding from everyone. I should try and figure out your motives?”
“I brought you here,” he says, unchallenged, “for two reasons. The first was simply to show another world, another dimension, that’s operating, at all times, separate from your world—”
“You know so much about my world—”
“—It’s dark and it’s hidden. And for a stranger it can seem obsessive. Insular. Unsettling and alienating. Parts of it might even seem brutal and perverse. To someone like you, Sylvia, everything would look angled and shadowed and haunted.”
“What’s the second reason?” she says.
“That’s a little harder. I wanted to show you that within those shadows, inside the brutality and perversion, you can find moments of humanity if you train yourself to look closely enough,” he reaches out and touches her camera, “and you can capture them. You can hold them. You can make a rosary of these images.”
“A rosary?”
He nods.
Sylvia shrugs, “Why should I want to?”
Propp squints at her like the answer should be obvious.
“To gain grace,” he says.
“Grace?”
He makes a kind of awkward, noncommittal shake of his head, pushes his hands in his pockets and takes a step toward the mouth of the alley. Then he turns back and like a teenager impulsively asking for a date he says, “You want to go to the movies?”
She keeps herself from blurting out the immediate yes that’s answered that question her entire life. She says, “What’s playing?”
He holds up his satchel and says, “How about the suppressed cut of The Wizard of Oz”?
She stops walking and Propp smiles and looks at her with raised eyebrows, a kind of challange, an invitation to doubt him.
“Give me a break,” she says.
He takes a few steps back, opens the satchel and pulls up a dull silver film canister, just a flash of it, then drops it back down into the bag.
“Suppressed?”
“You never heard of this?” he says. “What kind of film animal are you?”
“The Wizard of Oz?”
His shoulders slump, he swings his head in the direction of the alley’s mouth and they start walking again, more quickly this time.
“It was the first week of November, 1938. There was some unspoken tension on the set, you know, with Victor Fleming taking over for George Cukor. And this was after Cukor had already replaced Richard Thorpe. You add to that the concern about the aluminum powder—”
“Aluminum powder?”
“They’d had to rush Buddy Ebsen to the hospital. Found out he was having allergic reactions to the Tin Man makeup. They had to replace him with Jack Haley. C’mon, Sylvia, you know all this, right?”
She just gives him a blank stare.
“Anyway, the first scene Fleming shoots is the yellow brick crossroad bit where Dorothy meets the Scarecrow. Only the raven they had sitting on Bolger’s shoulder got loose and started flying around the studio. Bergswich, the unofficial MGM animal expert — he was really just an assistant electrician — he wasted a whole day trying to catch the damn bird. So, you can imagine, right, when they finally get down to filming that scene the actors are a little tense, okay? And things got a little out of hand at one point.”
“What do you mean?” she can’t help asking.
He lifts the satchel up in the air.
“Supposedly,” he says, “they burn the offensive scenes. Only somebody, maybe Mervyn LeRoy, maybe Louis Mayer himself, pockets the cut stock and it sits for years in some Beverly Hills vault. But like everything else, Sylvia, eventually it surfaces again. Makes it out onto the gray market. I’ve had my reel for over a decade now.”
This one she just can’t believe. “What could possibly be offensive about The Wizard of Oz?”
“Any number of things. But this had to do with Dorothy’s relationship with the Scarecrow. Wait till you see what was cut from the dance scene. That yellow brick road was on fire. They—”
“No,” she says and stops as they emerge back out on Voegelin.
“What?”
“You’ve gone too far, Propp. There was nothing erotic or sensual or in any way sexual about Judy Garland’s dance with Ray Bolger. There just wasn’t.”
“Not in the print you’ve seen, no.”
“Not in any print.”
He waits a few seconds, biting off a smile, seeming to study her face, the ever patient patriarch.
“Why, Sylvia?” he finally says. “Because you don’t want it to be? Because you’ve always looked at that moment in that movie, that dance, that image,” emphasizing the syllables until they sound foreign, “in a very specific way. And you don’t want to believe there could be another way to look.”
“That’s not it at all,” she says. “It’s because your story isn’t rational. It doesn’t fit the context of the movie. There’s no reason why they would have filmed that kind of thing. It just didn’t happen.”
“But it did, Sylvia,” Propp says. “And if you want to come to the Ballard with me, they’ve got a sixteen millimeter projector just waiting to be used.”
They stare at each other until Sylvia says, “All right, Propp. You show me,” and they turn left down Voegelin and head toward the Canal Zone.
The old Ballard Theatre sits down on Bonnefoy Drive sandwiched betweeen a former paper mill and a nonfunctioning electric company transformer station. It’s always been one of the smaller cinemas in town, with less than a hundred seats, but from the start it had a subtle elegance to it. Nothing overwhelming like the Skin Palace. More a quiet charm, an unspoken confidence and a discreet style, from the amber glow of the wooden walls to the coziness of its mini-balcony. There was something about the way the Ballard offered homemade quilts to every customer when the quirky heating system failed every January. But most of all there was the silent and graceful demeanor of the eternal usher, a small, ghost-faced, foreign-looking man in a black suit who remained at the Ballard no matter how often it was bought and sold. The rumor has always been that he lived in the theatre and never went outside. He reminded some patrons of a refugee funeral director, but Sylvia always thought of him as more of a secular monk in the celluloid faith.