"Out There in the Dark is an old school Hollywood blockbuster. . . . A terrific, grab-you-by-the-throat movieland epic."
---Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
Since leaving Berlin, the proud, distinguished émigré director Dieter Seife has had to content himself cranking out B movies for Superior Pictures in Hollywood during World War II. Finally, Superior's founder, Arthur Lustig, gives Seife the chance to prove himself on a lavish, three-hankie "woman's picture" titled The Big Betrayal.
Set to star is Harley Hayden, the young (and 4-F) actor who's engaged to Lustig's daughter. Though the town's biggest names are in uniform, Seife is convinced he can find a better male lead for his movie. Hayden counters by hiring a disgraced ex-cop named Roarke to look into Seife's private life---does the secretive German have something to hide? What Roarke uncovers is dangerous, disturbing . . . and, maybe, a very different mystery than it seems.
With its atmosphere of lockstep patriotism and rampant paranoia, Wesley Strick's Out There in the Dark provocatively speaks to our own time even as it brings to life the sordid side of 1940's Hollywood.
"Out There in the Dark is an old school Hollywood blockbuster. . . . A terrific, grab-you-by-the-throat movieland epic."
---Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
Since leaving Berlin, the proud, distinguished émigré director Dieter Seife has had to content himself cranking out B movies for Superior Pictures in Hollywood during World War II. Finally, Superior's founder, Arthur Lustig, gives Seife the chance to prove himself on a lavish, three-hankie "woman's picture" titled The Big Betrayal.
Set to star is Harley Hayden, the young (and 4-F) actor who's engaged to Lustig's daughter. Though the town's biggest names are in uniform, Seife is convinced he can find a better male lead for his movie. Hayden counters by hiring a disgraced ex-cop named Roarke to look into Seife's private life---does the secretive German have something to hide? What Roarke uncovers is dangerous, disturbing . . . and, maybe, a very different mystery than it seems.
With its atmosphere of lockstep patriotism and rampant paranoia, Wesley Strick's Out There in the Dark provocatively speaks to our own time even as it brings to life the sordid side of 1940's Hollywood.
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Overview
"Out There in the Dark is an old school Hollywood blockbuster. . . . A terrific, grab-you-by-the-throat movieland epic."
---Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
Since leaving Berlin, the proud, distinguished émigré director Dieter Seife has had to content himself cranking out B movies for Superior Pictures in Hollywood during World War II. Finally, Superior's founder, Arthur Lustig, gives Seife the chance to prove himself on a lavish, three-hankie "woman's picture" titled The Big Betrayal.
Set to star is Harley Hayden, the young (and 4-F) actor who's engaged to Lustig's daughter. Though the town's biggest names are in uniform, Seife is convinced he can find a better male lead for his movie. Hayden counters by hiring a disgraced ex-cop named Roarke to look into Seife's private life---does the secretive German have something to hide? What Roarke uncovers is dangerous, disturbing . . . and, maybe, a very different mystery than it seems.
With its atmosphere of lockstep patriotism and rampant paranoia, Wesley Strick's Out There in the Dark provocatively speaks to our own time even as it brings to life the sordid side of 1940's Hollywood.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466860537 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/17/2013 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 372 KB |
About the Author
Wesley Strick began his screenwriting career in 1985. His credits include Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear and Mike Nichols' Wolf. Strick has also been one of Hollywood's busiest script doctors, collaborating with Tim Burton, John Woo, and others. He lives with his wife and sons in Los Angeles.
Wesley Strick began his screenwriting career in 1985. His credits include Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear and Mike Nichols’ Wolf. Strick has also been one of Hollywood’s busiest script doctors, collaborating with Tim Burton, John Woo, and others. He lives with his wife and sons in Los Angeles.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams
Dowling knew Roarke would be hungry, knew he'd jump at the offer of a civilized business lunch. But he couldn't be seen with Roarke inside the grill. So the two men ate in the parking lot, in the backseat of a Lincoln-Zephyr limousine like the Chicago mobsters rode around in, with curtains drawn across the back windows to keep busybodies and lookie-lous from peeking.
"Did Bill Fields really say, 'I never drink water — fishes fuck in it'?" Dowling began, as his driver brought out two Caesar salads and passed them over the front seat with a pair of cloth napkins from the studio's executive dining room. Dowling munched a leaf of lettuce, then finished his thought, which wasn't so much a thought as a gag: "Well, I've always been leery of Musso and Frank's. Screenwriters like the food."
Roarke laughed — maybe a little too hard, but Dowling was the only game in town these days. The ex-cop was still under a cloud, being investigated on a corruption beef not only by the Los Angeles County prosecutor, but also by CIVIC, the Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee. And he was newly alone, his wife having ditched him (and taken their daughters) without leaving so much as a note. (Even a scribbled screw-you would've been nice.) Roarke's meals were desultory, undelicious, just something to swallow down between scotch and beer binges.
Mostly the work consisted of showing up on sets that some would-be Wobbly was trying to organize, and threatening to bust skulls. Road-company Pinkerton-type crap. Table scraps. But Roarke wasn't complaining. Instead, he was watching Dowling as the production head munched his Caesar while running two fingers through his brush cut. Whether it was the brush cut, the thick hide, or the way he chewed his lettuce, there was something of the hand-fed farm animal about Chester Dowling. Roarke half-expected him at any moment to go oink, or moo, or even baa.
Instead, he said, "This one's for Mr. L."
Roarke tried not to look surprised or unsettled. But it was a very long way from the back lot to the executive suite.
"Mr. L is concerned." Dowling lowered his voice, for effect. "Some young actor's been seeing Ellie."
It took Roarke a moment. "Lustig's daughter?"
Dowling nodded. "A knockout. Not just cute — built. Bestlooking sheenie chickadee I ever laid eyes on."
Roarke smiled. "And your eyes are all you'll ever lay on her, I'll bet, Chet."
"You and me both." Dowling laughed. Then: "This young actor, he's under contract with the studio. Bit parts, walk-ons, 'Tennis, anyone?' Handsome kid, though. Not John Garfield handsome, don't get me wrong. He's no Ty Power, but nothing to sneeze at either. Great set of muscles on him, too, make you think of Weismuller without the —"
"— Leopard-skin jockstrap," Roarke joked.
Dowling came to the point: "Mr. L's nervous the kid could be using his daughter to — you know, to curry favor. Or worse, chiseling her for dough. But he doesn't want to risk ticking off his little girl without hard evidence. So he sends me — the House Goy — on an errand to find out what's what with Mr. Rising Star. Is this kid on the level? Does he gamble, drink, sniff coke? Is he straight or queer? If he's queer, then it's cut-and-dried, open-and-shut, no? If he's straight, well, is he getting anything on the side, running with the chippies same time he's screwing — I mean, doing — I mean, dating — Eleanor?"
Roarke gestured that he'd gotten the gist.
"But he doesn't wish to know how I come by the information. That's very important to Mr. L., alright? It's vital that the boss not — how best to put it? — dirty his hands. No offense."
Roarke shrugged. "Lustig started as a glove maker, isn't that right? Stands to reason he'd be sensitive on that score."
Chester smirked, then glanced at his gold watch. "I got Lubitsch on Stage A shooting The Man Who Wore Mink. I got Von Sternberg on Stage B helming Awful Wedded Wife. On top of all that, I got Seife on Stage C, lousing up Midnight Masquerade."
"Fascinating." Roarke smirked in return. "Here I thought we had a beef with the Jerries, and the Jerries are all you got on the lot." With a fingernail, he freed a sliver of anchovy from between his front teeth. "Maybe you fly in the Führer himself, to guest-direct the Follies of Nineteen Forty-one?"
"In all fairness?" Dowling shot back. "These Kraut directors you're bellyaching about, they ran away from Hitler."
"Ran away," Roarke agreed, "to live another day and make another dollar. With which, god knows, I have no problem — just so long as these saintly refugees we're weeping for don't turn around and airmail their salaries straight back to Berlin."
Dowling shrugged. "Germany's one of our big markets. If Roosevelt's not at war with 'em, neither is Superior Pictures. Anyway, these Teutonic SOBs, you gotta hand it to them, they know how to stand up to the talent. All day shouting through a megaphone seems to come natural. Hell, maybe just as well we've stayed outta this war." He pulled back the curtain on his side, rolled down the window and stuck out an arm, waving for his driver, who stood by the front fender. To Roarke: "Let's wrap it up so I can return in haste to my private hell."
Roarke unlocked his door. "Gimme two weeks. I just need a couple of things: this matinee idol's name, and an advance to cover the first week, standard rate." (Roarke regularly asked Dowling for forty dollars a day, and invariably took twenty-five.)
Dowling had the money out before Roarke finished speaking.
The ex-cop counted a hundred and a quarter. "Want a receipt?"
Dowling shook his head. "Let's do this on the honor system. That way there's no paper trail leads back to Mr. L or the studio. I can't even give you a pass to get on the lot."
The honor system was no favorite of Roarke's: indeed, it was the very system that had tripped him up in law enforcement. But Roarke didn't object. Whenever he held cash in his hand, the former vice cop found himself incapable of making even the most elementary moral distinctions. It was the darnedest thing.
*
That same afternoon Roarke dropped by the lot and right away hit the expected snag at the main gate: no drive-on, the studio cop said with a grin. Roarke couldn't fault the beefy bastard: this was his one chance all day to high-hat someone else.
Roarke promptly ruined his day. "I'm from the Breen office," he announced, flashing a phony card. Joseph Breen, the movie censor, was a practicing Catholic, but Roarke had learned that in Tinseltown he was treated like the pontiff. The card had paid for itself many times over. Roarke got waved right in.
*
Harley Hayden was playing the third male lead in a college comedy, some B-picture fluff featuring wacky fraternity high jinks, guys in letter sweaters driving jalopies, and girls in angora and bobby socks beside them. This one, a grinding eighteen-day shoot, was titled Phi Beta Caper.
Today Hayden was sitting in a standing classroom set, the same set they'd used for the Andy Hardy pictures, on loan to Superior. Though he was twenty-five at the time, Hayden easily passed for the college freshman he was playing. Roarke picked him out immediately from a copy of Photoplay he'd skimmed at a stand on Vine en route to the lot. Hayden looked fine in the publicity photo. In person he looked even better.
He was taller, for one thing. Even seated at that desk, you could tell he was a good six feet, six one. Most movie stars were little men with large heads. A better proportion for the big screen, or so they said. Ladd, Bogie, Dick Powell ... shrimps, all. Not Hayden (though his relatively small head might have kept him from becoming a major marquee name).
Hayden had an athlete's posture, relaxed but alert, and it worked just right in the scene — he was playing an A student whose best friend was a young drunk about to wash out of school. Harley's thick, full head of chestnut hair didn't hurt either. The natural wave created a prodigious pompadour with one strand that fell boyishly onto his forehead.
The eyes were Hayden's main asset, though. Even at a distance (Roarke stood behind the sound cart, about thirty feet from his quarry) those eyes impressed. Not just because they were a bright limpid blue. Plenty of bright limpid blue eyes in Hollywood. Besides, they were shooting black-and-white.
Maybe it was the eyebrows — their natural shape, the way they cocked and curved. Their contour gave Hayden a perpetual look of shy enthusiasm, proud self-effacement, "aw-shucks" but tempered by a faint, furtive amusement. And all this before he'd opened his mouth, hit his mark, done anything but show up.
Someone shouted for quiet on the set, they started rolling film, a third voice called "Speed," and the director yelled "Action." Roarke was pleased to note that the word was pronounced with no trace of an accent, Germanic or otherwise. Probably because it was an unimportant, low-budget programmer destined for the bottom of the bill, Superior had seen fit to entrust an American with the property.
The freshman lush stumbled through the door into the classroom. Teacher was just writing a complex trig equation on the blackboard. Now he turned around and, watching his inebriated student clumsily finding his seat, did a slow burn.
The poor hungover kid was seated next to Hayden. In a stage whisper as he plopped down, the young star asked, with exaggerated innocence, "So what'd I miss?"
Eyes front, as he copied the equation, Hayden replied sotto voce as the camera tracked in for a two-shot:
"Spring semester."
"And Cut! Print that one."
Hayden waited with a hopeful look as the director made his way over to the two desks.
But the director had nothing to say to Harley — because Harley was barely in this picture, a foil at best, the straight man. Still he listened hard while the director gave his notes to the star ("Take a beat as you come in, pivot in front of the professor, then lunge for your seat like this was an ocean liner caught in a gale") as though the notes were for him, for Harley.
And it was plain to see, Harley was an A student, not in a book-learning sense, rather in the way he was soaking up all the moviemaking secrets being revealed here. Working hard without putting a hair out of place. As the lights were reset, Roarke realized what it was about Hayden's eyes that reached out, appealed. It wasn't the eyebrows. No, it was a slight squint that conveyed a look of not-quite-getting-it mixed with wanting-to-get-it-real-badly-but-preferably-at-no-one-else's-expense.
Not that the director noticed. But the director, after he was finished sucking around his young star, did notice Roarke — that is, he glanced at Roarke's unfamiliar face behind the klieg lights with a flash of irritation. The ex-cop scuttled ratlike into the shadows, then let himself out the stage door.
And tailed Hayden for what felt like miles across the lot as the actor ambled past prop men and girl extras, offering one and all a wave, a smile, a warm hello. Harley never glanced back, never gave the impression of a guy who sensed he was being followed, a guy with anything to hide. By the time they reached his trailer Roarke was logy and perspiring, while Hayden looked dewy and fresh. Chalk it up to the decade Roarke had on the actor, or his dark serge suit, or Hayden's superior genes.
Hayden's trailer was divided in half, what those racy film folk call a double banger — Harley had to share it with another juvenile on another picture. Roarke waited in the shade, taking a seat on a bench, lighting a Lucky. Much beguiling "atmosphere" strolled by, mostly in small chattering groups. Some of the girls dressed like Babylonian slaves, others as flappers or Okies. All of them oblivious to the ex-cop — so displaced he might have been another studio extra. Then along came a lone female vampire all in black, with tapered teeth and a drop of dried blood on her lips. She stopped to ask Roarke for a light. After she smiled her thanks and sauntered off, the former vice cop reflected that loitering on a studio lot was like buying a box seat at a cathouse for crazies — minus the expenditure of cash, the physical act, the social disease.
Then Hayden emerged from his trailer. Roarke almost missed him — some jailbait Valkyries had sashayed past, hefting spears. Roarke caught sight of Hayden as he took a shortcut back to the stage. Hayden now looked even younger — maybe he'd had a catnap. Or (while Roark blinked) a blow job. Or just read a good book. More likely, he'd curled up with a copy of Photoplay and spent his rest period admiring publicity pictures of Harley Hayden. Or maybe Roarke was being hard on the actor because gravity seemed to exert so little force on him.
Roarke decided not to press his luck with the Sound Department; in the afternoon he stood alongside Makeup and Hair. Women mostly, and a few fairies — but a big enough contingent that Roarke blended in, impervious to the bitchy glances.
The rest of the day's work consisted of take after take, in close-up, of the hungover lead asking Hayden what he'd missed. Close-up, followed by medium close-up, followed by extreme close-up. Not even a shot over Harley's shoulder onto the star. But Harley hung in there, take after monotonous take, listening to that same silly question with that same squinting, amiably baffled look, then delivering the "Spring semester" punch line with that same dead-on, uninflected inflection.
Then, without warning, there was an atmospheric shift. Someone shouted "Martini shot," voices grew hushed, they took the shine off the star's nose, ran some more film, called "Cut" — and now, as beefy men carted away cables, mirrors, and lights, and craft and crew folk packed their paraphernalia to break for the day, more beefy men wheeled a bar onto the stage complete with a white-coated colored mixologist and his array of sodas, juices, gin, vodka, scotch, and rum. The director, the cameraman, several tan, pudgy gentlemen in butter-yellow sweaters who looked like associate producers, and the young star all bellied up for martinis, mostly, poured from iced pitchers.
"They do this every day?" Roarke asked the soigné fellow standing next to him: one of the fairies with Makeup and Hair.
The fairy batted his eyes then gave Roarke a look, like he really was a bluenose from the Breen office. Then deigned to reply, "Liquor? It's the lifeblood of this business. Keeps the wheels turning better than a grease gun." Then walked away, twitching his high, round ass — whether as a rebuff or a provocation, Roarke wasn't sure and didn't want to know.
Hayden was also walking away. At his back, the director shouted, "Harley! Get over here and take your medicine!"
Hayden shook his head: "Mama was a Christian Scientist." And though everyone kept shouting for him to join them for a belt, he ambled off the stage with a breezy, "Mañana, fellas."
*
Hayden didn't take long to change out of his letter sweater and frat slacks into something just as casual but a little less ridiculous. All he was carrying were his car keys and script. When he came bouncing down the steps of his trailer, Roarke followed him to the parking lot — same lot where, conveniently, the excop had left a spiffy little hunter green Packard 120. A year ago Roarke had borrowed the roadster from a Negro stoolie who was now in no position to reclaim it, being deceased. Both the county prosecutor and CIVIC had been angling to get their hands on the Packard, but Roarke had — so far — stymied one and all by conclusively demonstrating that he didn't own the car.
Harley drove a powder-blue Plymouth, rusting a bit around the running boards. Roarke followed him west on Melrose in light traffic. But as the ex-cop caught a glimpse of Hayden's face in Hayden's rearview, he blinked. It wasn't Hayden! The man in the mirror wore a pair of black horn-rims with thick lenses. He looked like a junior accountant, not a college freshman. Within three blocks Roarke had managed to follow the wrong Plymouth!
But there was no other Plymouth: Hayden had, in the privacy of his automobile, quick-changed into Clark Kent. At Vine he turned, heading north to Hollywood and Orange: Grauman's Chinese. Hayden pulled his car into the lot (Roarke did likewise). When he exited his car, he was no longer wearing horn-rims; he'd resumed being Harley Hayden. And Roarke realized the quarry wasn't wise to him — quite the contrary, he was nearsighted! No wonder he hadn't yet tumbled to his tail, no wonder he watched the world with a befuddled squint. Myopia was Hayden's Achilles' heel — and his secret weapon as well.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Out There in the Dark"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Wesley Strick.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Prologue: What We Think of As the Legacy,
1. Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,
2. Perilous Passage,
3. The Man You Love to Hate,
4. Dieter Seife,
5. Fumpoo,
6. The Bronze God of Summer's Sunglasses,
7. The Lost Boy,
8. Derek Sykes,
9. Flip,
10. Movie Death,
11. The Healing Circle,
12. Unsere Jugend,
13. The Woman Who Didn't Care,
14. Mit Martin Volker,
Epilogue: The Light,
Copyright,