Remake

“Nothing,” I said, looking around the room. Vincent’s program must be a weeper simulator. Jackie Cooper was up on the screen, in a battered top hat and a polka-dot tie, blubbering over his dead dog.

“She’s not here,” Heada said.

“I was looking for Mayer,” I said. “He’s going to have to pay me double for The Philadelphia Story. The thing’s full of alcohol. Sherry before lunch, martinis out by the pool, champagne, cocktails, hangovers, ice packs. Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart. The whole cast’s stinking.”

I took a swig from the crème de menthe I had left over from Days of Wine and Roses. “The visuals will take at least three weeks, and that doesn’t include the lines. ‘I have the hiccups. I wonder if I might borrow a drink.’ ”

“She was here earlier,” Heada said. “One of the execs was hitting on her.”

“No, no, I say, ‘I wonder if I might borrow a drink,’ and

you say, ‘Certainly. Coals to Newcastle.’ ” I took another drink.

“Should you be doing so much alcohol?” Heada, the chooch queen, said.

“I have to,” I said. “It’s the bad effect of watching all these movies. Thank goodness ILMGM’s remaking them so no one else will be corrupted.” I drank some more crème de menthe.

Heada looked at me sharply, like she’d been doing klieg again. “ILMGM’s doing a remake of Time After Time. The exec told Alis he thought he could get her a part in it.”

“Great,” I said, and went over to look at Vincent’s program.

Audrey Hepburn was up on the screen now, standing in the rain and sobbing over her cat.

“This is our new tears program,” Vincent said. “It’s still in the experimental stage.”

He said something to his remote, and the screen split. A computerized didge-actor sobbed alongside Audrey, clutching what looked like a yellow rug. Tears weren’t the only thing in the experimental stage.

“Tears are the most difficult form of water simulation to do,” Vincent said. The Tin Woodman was up there now, rusting his joints. “It’s because tears aren’t really water. They’ve got mucoproteins and lysozymes and a high salt content. It affects the index of refraction and makes them hard to reproduce,” he said, sounding defensive.

He should. The didge-woodman’s tears looked like Vaseline, oozing out of digitized eyes. “You ever program VRs?” I said. “Of, say, a movie scene like the one you used for the edit program a couple of weeks ago? The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers scene?”

“A virtual? Sure. I can do helmet and full-body data. Is this something you’re working on for Mayer?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Could you have the person take, say, Ginger Rogers’s place, so she’s dancing with Fred Astaire?”

“Sure. Foot and knee hookups, nerve stimulators. It’ll feel like she’s really dancing.”

“Not feel like,” I said. “Can you make it so she actually dances?”

He thought about it awhile, frowning at the screen. The Tin Woodman had disappeared. Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart were at the airport saying good-bye.

“Maybe,” Vincent said. “I guess. We could put on some sole-sensors and rig a feedback enhance to exaggerate her body movements so she could shuffle her feet back and forth.”

I looked at the screen. There were tears welling up in Ingrid’s eyes, glimmering like the real thing. They probably weren’t. It was probably the eighth take, or the eighteenth, and a makeup girl had come out with glycerine drops or onion juice to get the right effect. It wasn’t the tears that did it anyway. It was the face, that sweet, sad face that knew it could never have what it wanted.

“We could do sweat enhancers,” Vincent said. “Armpits, neck.”

“Never mind,” I said, will watching Ingrid. The screen split and a didge-actress stood in front of a didge-airplane, oozing baby oil.

“How about a directional sound hookup for the taps and endorphins?” Vincent said. “She’ll swear she was really dancing with Gene Kelly.”

I drank the rest of the crème de menthe and handed him the empty bottle and then went back up to my room and hacked away at The Philadelphia Story for two more days, trying to think of a good reason for Jimmy Stewart to carry Katharine Hepburn and sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” without being sloshed, and pretending I needed one.

Mayer would hardly care, and neither would his tight-assed boss. And nobody else watched liveactions. If the plot didn’t make sense, the hackates who did the remake could worry about it. They’d probably remake the remake anyway. Which was also on the list.

I called it up. High Society. Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly. Frank Sinatra playing Jimmy Stewart. I ff’d through the last half of it, searching for inspiration, but it was even more awash with AS’s. And it was a musical. I went back to Story and tried again.

It was no use. Jimmy Stewart had to be drunk in the swimming pool scene to tell Katharine Hepburn he loved her. Katharine had to be drunk for her fiancé to dump her and for her to realize she still loved Cary Grant.