here?”
“He would be totally opposed to voting for the sale, as am I, and I will be voting all the shares he accumulated over his lifetime against the sale.” She raised the window.
Stone finally got the car to the guard at the gate. “Mrs. Calder’s car,” he said, and was rewarded with a security pass placed on the dashboard. He drove on. “That was a very good statement to the press, Arrington,” he said. “Have you been rehearsing?”
“Rick asked me to have something ready to say,” she replied. “I’m glad you liked it.”
“The studio should hire you as its spokesperson,” he said. “Which way is stage four?”
“Straight ahead, then right, then left,” Arrington said. “I used to pick up Vance after work when he was shooting there.”
Stone followed directions until he saw a large sign proclaiming the stage number. Perhaps a better identifier of the stage was the large group of golf carts parked along the road between the stages, indicating that most of the people attending the meeting worked on the lot. There were only two cars parked on the road, the Rolls belonging to Mrs. Charles Grosvenor and the Bentley Mulsanne of Terrence Prince. Stone parked near them.
“Let’s not go in right away,” Arrington said. “I’m sure they’ve reserved seats for us, so let’s make an entrance.”
“Fine by me,” Stone said. “Dino, Mike, you want to make an entrance?”
“Sure,” Mike replied.
“Damn straight,” Dino said. He seemed to be enjoying himself.
More golf carts arrived and were parked carelessly along the road.
“I wonder how they find their own carts when they come back?” Arrington asked. “They’re all identical.”
“Then it doesn’t matter which one they take, does it?” Stone pointed out.
“I guess not.”
Others arrived on foot and made their way through the large door, which was propped open. There was an unlighted red bulb above the door with a sign saying DO NOT ENTER WHEN RED LIGHT IS LIT.
“It’s oddly quiet,” Mike said.
“Soundstages are soundproof,” Arrington explained. “After that door is closed, a freight train could pass, and you wouldn’t hear it from inside.” She sighed. “Vance’s funeral was held on this stage,” she said. “The studio didn’t have an auditorium big enough.”
Stone remembered the elaborate service in a cathedral set on the stage, complete with stained glass windows and a boys’ choir. He also remembered that, because of a packing malfunction, he had been wearing a suit owned by the corpse. “How many shareholders are there?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” Arrington replied. “Forty or fifty, I think.”
“Then why are they holding the meeting in a building big enough for a Busby Berkeley dance number?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Rick must have his reasons.”
No one had arrived for a minute or two. “Are you ready for your entrance?” he asked, checking his watch. It was ten minutes past two.
“Why not?” Arrington replied.
Dino jumped out and held the door for her. They formed a very short column of twos and entered the soundstage.
Stone had expected to see the audience at once, but instead, a broad, carpeted path led toward the interior, and on either side were larger-than-life blowups of stills from Centurion Studios over the past decades. It was impossible to walk quickly by them; they continually stopped and commented on this photo or that.
There were several with Centurion’s biggest pre-Vance star, Clete Barrow, who had died at Dunkirk, in World War II, and a dozen or more were of Vance Calder, in various costumes: business suit, western gear, on horseback, driving a vintage racing car, and one in the rigging of a pirate ship, with a sword in his teeth. They made their way slowly down the path, turned a couple of corners, and emerged into a dimly lit, cavernous space.
Suddenly, a spotlight came on and found Arrington, and from the darkness beyond, a roar of shouting and applause welcomed her. She stopped and waved, as if she had just walked onto a stage. It struck Stone that the noise was being made by more than forty or fifty people, but when the lights came up a bit, that was as many as he saw.
Stone, Mike, and Dino followed in Arrington’s wake as she proceeded down the center aisle, where Rick Barron awaited to seat her party in the fourth row.
Stone spotted Jim Long, in a wheelchair, seated next to Mrs. Charles Grosvenor, in the first row left. Seated across the aisle from them was Terry Prince, his back to Stone.
Rick walked up a couple of steps to a raised platform and took a seat in an arced row of a dozen people, presumably the Centurion board of directors.
Lined up across the edge of the platform were larger replicas of the Oscar, several dozen of them.
Stone was impressed.
54
Stone expected Rick Barron to call the meeting to order, but that did not happen. Instead, the lights went down, and in the darkness a screen must have been lowered, because suddenly a large, wide-screen image of the Centurion main gates, filmed from above, appeared, and the music of a full symphony orchestra welled up.
The camera was in either a blimp or a stabilized helicopter, and it rose and began to move slowly over the studio grounds, past the administration building and over the soundstages. Various standing stages, like the New York street and the small town square with its courthouse passed beneath. Then the camera moved over the lake, where an eighteenth-century sailing vessel was anchored.
In the distance could be seen the main street of a western town, with its Boot Hill at one end. From the opposite end of the street a man on horseback was at full gallop in the direction of the camera, which descended to ground level to meet him. As he approached the camera he reined in the horse, which skidded to a halt in a small cloud of dust, as its rider jumped gracefully to the ground. The man was Vance Calder.
Tall in his heeled boots, wearing a buckskin shirt with fringed sleeves and the Stetson he had worn in many westerns, Vance looked wonderfully handsome, Stone thought.
Vance slapped his horse on its ass, and it galloped off-screen, while he walked to the side of the street, outside the saloon, swept off his hat and tossed it a few feet to where it landed on one end of the hitching post. He leaned against the rail and contemplated the camera for a moment, allowing the audience to take in his lean figure, his graying hair, and his deeply tanned, finely cut face. He smiled, revealing a beautiful set of teeth.
“Hello,” Vance said, in his beautifully modulated baritone. “I believe we’ve met before.”
The audience of film people went nuts, and it was as if the dead man on the screen had anticipated this, because he paused until the noise subsided, before continuing. “Welcome to my home for the past half-century,” he said, waving an arm around him. He pushed off the rail and began to move with the camera up the street, past the sheriff’s office, the general store, and the undertaker’s parlor, continuing to speak as he strolled.
“I’ve made seventy-five films at Centurion, from westerns… to comedies… to romances… to war films… to police procedurals and just about every other kind of picture…”
And as Vance strolled and talked, something magical happened. Without his so much as pausing for a breath, the actor’s image dissolved as he continued to speak, through a series of shots of him in different costumes, on different sets around the lot. It was completely seamless, something that could only have been accomplished by a ghost-or a superb film editor.
Finally he reached the town square, and dressed in a brassbuttoned blue blazer and gray flannel trousers, and an opennecked white silk shirt with a colorful scarf tied at the neck, he took a seat on a park bench in front of the courthouse, crossed his legs, and continued.
“Centurion has survived, intact, over all these decades, because of the management of people who wanted more than to rake in big grosses, who wanted to make fine motion pictures, films that will still move audiences a hundred years hence, and beyond. The more than seven hundred films made on this lot since the late thirties have won more than a hundred and fifty Oscars, for everything from costumes, makeup, and production design to
