A Graveyard for Lunatics

?Yeah, I think you can be trusted.? And she stopped. ?Here I am, rattling on. You didn?t come here to listen to an old hen lay forty-year-old eggs. How come you?re the only writer ever came up those stairs??

Arbuthnot, Clarence, Roy, and the Beast, I thought, but could not say.

?Cat got your tongue? I?ll wait. Where was I? Oh!?

Maggie Botwin slid back a huge cupboard door. There were at least forty cans of film stashed in five shelves, with titles painted on the rims.

She shoved one tin into my hands. I looked at some huge lettering, which read: Crazy Youths.

?No, look at the small print typed on the tiny label on the flat side,? said Maggie.

?Intolerance!?

?My own, uncut version,? Maggie Botwin said, laughing. ?I helped Griffith. Some great stuff was cut. Alone, I printed back what was missing. This is the only complete version of Intolerance extant! And here!?

Chortling like a girl at a birthday party, Maggie yanked down and laid out: Orphans of the Storm and London After Midnight.

?I assisted on these films, or was called for pickup work. Late nights I printed the outtakes just for me! Ready? Here!?

She thrust a tin marked Greed into my hands.

?Even Von Stroheim doesn?t own this twenty-hour version!?

?Why didn?t other editors think to do this??

?Because they?re chickens and I?m cuckoo,? crowed Maggie Botwin. ?Next year, I?ll ship these out to the museum, with a letter deeding them over. The studios will sue, sure. But the films will be safe forty years from now.?

I sat in the dark and was stunned as reel after reel shuttled by.

?God,? I kept saying, ?how did you outwit all the sons-of-bitches??

?Easy!? said Maggie, with the crisp honesty that was like a general leveling with his troops. ?They screwed directors, writers, everyone. But they had to have one person with a pooper-scooper to clean up after they lifted their legs on prime stuff. So they never laid a glove on me while they junked everyone?s dreams. They just thought love was enough. And, God, they did love. Mayer, the Warners, Goldfish/Goldwyn ate and slept film. It wasn?t enough. I reasoned with them; argued, fought, slammed the door. They ran after, knowing I loved more than they could. I lost as many fights as I won, so I decided I?d win ?em all. One by one, I saved the lost scenes. Not everything. Most pictures should get catbox awards. But five or six times a year, a writer would write or a Lubitsch add his ?touch,? and I?d hide that. So, over the years I??

?Saved masterpieces!?

Maggie laughed. ?Cut the hyperbole. Just decent films, some funny, some tear jerkers. And they?re all here tonight. You?re surrounded by them,? Maggie said, quietly.

I let their presence soak in, felt their ?ghosts? and swallowed hard.

?Run the Moviola,? I said. ?I never want to go home.?

?Okay.? Maggie swept back more sliding doors above her head. ?Hungry? Eat!?

I looked and saw:

The March of Time, June 21st, 1933.

The March of Time, June 20th, 1930.

The March of Time, July 4th, 1930.

?No,? I said.

Maggie stopped in mid-gesture.

?There was no March of Time in 1930,? I said.

?Bull?s-eye! The boy?s an expert!

?Those are not Time reels,? I added. ?It?s a cover. For what??

?My own home movies, shot with my eight-millimeter camera, blown up to thirty-five millimeters, and hid behind March of Time titles.?

I tried not to lean forward too quickly. ?You got a whole film history of this studio then??

?In 1923, 1927, 1930, name it! F. Scott Fitzgerald, drunk in the commissary. G. B. Shaw the day he commandeered the place. Lon Chancy in the makeup building the night he showed the Westmore brothers how to change faces! Dead a month later. Wonderful warm man. William Faulkner, a drunk but polite sad screenwriter, poor?s.o.b. Old films. Old history. Pick!?

My eyes roved and stopped. I heard the air jet from my nostrils.

October 15, 1934. Two weeks before Arbuthnot, the head of the studio, was killed.

?That.?

Maggie hesitated, pulled it out, shoved the film into the Moviola, and cranked the machine.

We were looking at the front entrance of Maximus Films on an October afternoon in 1934. The doors were