So Much of It
"Thanks for all the joy you've given us, you will always be our superstars." Aqua - "Back to the 80's"
5:30 A.M., the sky was already blue, the sun was already up and shining, and everything was oddly silent. Hannibal Smith stood in the middle of the lot and looked up to the sky. His eyes moved one way, then another, as if trying to catch a glimpse of something up above, but there was nothing, even the birds were nowhere to be found in that vast sky this morning. It was unreal how quiet everything was, not a sound to be heard on land or up in the air, like everything was dead, or at least put on pause, frozen in time.
It was only temporary. Everything was temporary. All of life was only temporary, but this moment right here, it was especially only temporary. Before long this place would be full of noise as everything was set up. This was the lot where the latest Aquamaniac movie was shooting, this was where Hannibal would once more climb into his giant rubber monster suit and step out into the water and sink below the surface, hoping his lungs didn't explode before his cue, and then slowly rise up and come out of the water and maul some pretty girl on the beach, again.
This was the face of Hollywood today, or one of them anyway. Cheap B-movies were just that, a dime a dozen, cheap and easy and quick to make, cheap and easy and quick to edit, finalize, ship out, and nobody got rich doing them but they pulled in a profit bigger than the budget spent on making them, so the cycle repeated until you had 20 movies in the same series and they were all more or less the same.
The other side of the coin was you spent tens of millions of dollars on a big budget movie and drew in the top growing household name actors that everybody knew and everybody flocked to see, put them in some kind of plot just so long as it ran 90 minutes or two hours, and in turn pulled in tens of millions more than you put into that. That was the business, that was the industry, people wanted to see movies, and they would see movies, whatever kind of movies they were didn't matter much, as long as they were something to watch there would always be an audience willing to come see them.
This was a business Hannibal knew very well, it was an industry he'd grown up in and around. He grew up in California, he spent much of his life before the Army in Los Angeles, he grew up around Hollywood, he'd gone to the movies every week just like every other kid his age; sometimes several times a week, usually at the expense of the truant officers who tried to chase him down and catch him, and always to no avail. He could still feel the strain from watching so wide-eyed at famous movie monsters of the day: Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Invisible Man…he also remembered all the sequels that were to follow, Dracula's son and daughter, the bride and son of Frankenstein, the Werewolf of London, and the She-Wolf of London, the Mummy's hand, his tomb, his ghost, his curse…Kharis was the original zombie, no, the original Jason Vorhees, no matter what you did to him, you couldn't kill him, only get rid of him for one picture and then he'd be back, just as strong and deadly as before. And you bought it every time, no matter how many movies they did, all of them were just as terrifying as the one before.
Fast paced action also ran rampant in many of the films he saw growing up, and he probably saw as many full length action movies as he did the weekly cliffhanger serials. Tarzan and Dick Tracy and Ace Drummond, The Whispering Shadow, John Wayne in the non-western Hurricane Express, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and the infamous Perils of Pauline, had all been a weekly part of his life growing up, followed in years to come by Captain Midnight, Batman and Robin, Zorro, The Phantom, The Lone Ranger, The Green Hornet, Superman, the Shadow, and countless others. The kids of today had no idea what it was like; you spent your formative years only seeing these heroes in comic strips or reading about them in books or hearing them on the radio, and then all of a sudden there they were on the big screen for the first time, they became real in that instant that they popped out during the credits in glorious black and white, just as lifelike as the oh too real news reels that ran before every feature film. Youth today had no idea how any of it was, how good it was, or how good they had it that they came into the world seeing the figures that would someday become their heroes, already plastered all over every TV screen, movie billboard, T-shirt, everything.
Commercialism of a hero franchise wasn't anything new but it had been after his time. In his day you had the radio programs you listened to every night, you had the comics that you read and re-read a hundred times waiting for the new ones to come out, and you had those movies, those once in a lifetime opportunities to go and see your heroes for 20 minutes every week, and you walked away from it with only the memories, and they were enough.
There had also been much to say for the silent films from before his time. He'd had the privilege of seeing them run again in the movie houses when he was growing up, and he was sure he had been just as mesmerized as the original audiences had been. He'd been scared senseless by the great unmasking of the Phantom of the Opera, he didn't sleep for a week after seeing Nosferatu and his extensive shadow, during a run of Roland West's original adaption for The Bat, he spent most of the movie on the edge of the seat in front of him and practically on the head of the man sitting in it. The Phantom Carriage drove him to the floor of his row and he spent half the film watching through his fingers. He'd bitten his nails down to practically nubs watching Lon Chaney as Alonzo the Armless, a killer in hiding in a circus, ever with the suspense that somebody would discover his secret that he had killed to protect.
Also today, few people knew that famed magician and escape artist Harry Houdini had had a brief career as an actor; but Hannibal had seen almost every film the man had done, from the serial The Master Mystery to The Man from Beyond where he played a man frozen for 100 years, to Haldane of the Secret Service, a film Houdini had also directed. Today the films were probably lost or destroyed, one of Hollywood's many casualties to fire and decay, but he still remembered the action and the thrill of it all. For no more than that man had graced the silver screen, it had been time well spent towards entertaining the masses.
Pearl White and Ruth Roland, the two queens of the action cliffhangers in the 1910s had been among his first boyhood crushes, not just because they were pretty, but because of the assertive, adventurous characters they played. Mary Pickford might have been America's Sweetheart, but she was too much angel food cake for his liking. Louise Brooks, in that same era she seemed to be at the top of the game but in the years to come, she got no respect and no love, and though he'd never gotten to meet her when he was a younger man haunting Hollywood in his spare time, he always felt sorry for her. The more time passed, the harder it was not to feel sorry for everybody. Pearl and Ruth had both died young, Pearl's downward spiral had been the cost of her work in the industry, the cost of being a stunt woman in a time before actors were heavily insured and protected by every union and organization known to man. Clara Bow, in her heyday she was the IT girl, the public loved her but Hollywood shunned her because she could admit she came from poverty and from nothing, and she didn't pretend to hobnob with the snobs, she managed to keep it real and she too paid a price for it. Most of her legacy she'd left behind was gone now, most of her films were feared to be destroyed or lost forever, so about the only thing the future generations would know her for would be the IT girl and nothing else, lest her scandals didn't stand the test of time in Hollywood gossip. What a terrible way to go down in history, only one accomplishment remembered out of many.
They'd all graced the screen in a time where nobody got to hear any of them utter a single word, and it didn't matter, their beauty and their ability as believable characters in their films spoke volumes instead. They made it work for them and it had worked at the time, and in the long run of the industry of Hollywood, it paid off in the end. Even today, 60 years after their prime, people still remembered them, some more fondly than others.
As a boy, Hannibal had attended hundreds of movies, more than his middle aged brain could ever hope to remember. And every single one of them had had a lasting impression on him. But the ones he would always remember most of all, and the fondest of them all…were the comedies.
The strange thing about it all was, it wasn't even something that he'd thought about for a good long while, years, how many he couldn't even begin to guess. And he probably would've gone through the rest of his life never really giving it another thought, if it hadn't been for what happened two weeks ago.
The plan had gone off without a hitch, as usual, Hannibal had been able to map out and anticipate every single detail…except his misjudged leap off a moving train and the sickening CRUNCH his ankle made when he landed on it. Usually anytime he got injured during the line of duty, the only sound they ever got out of him were a few low grunts, this time he lay curled on his side sounding like a sick cow until the others caught up with him. When the spots and bright colors left his vision, he'd been able to hop to his feet but past that, it was obvious walking wasn't going to go over well, never mind running if they had to. So, they'd loaded up the van and found a small town doctor at his home to see how bad the damage was. By the time they got Hannibal on the table for the doctor to examine him, his ankle was already the size of a grapefruit and it was obvious he'd never be able to get his boots back on.
"You wrenched it good," the doctor told him, "You would've been better off flat out breaking it."
"Yeouch!" Hannibal replied when the doctor touched his ankle, "Why's that?"
"We can do something with a break, this is going to have to heal on its own."
"Oh swell," he said unenthusiastically, "Let me guess, just go home, put some ice on it, keep it elevated, take it easy, that kind of stuff?"
"Pretty much," the doctor replied.
"I didn't need you for that, pal," Hannibal told him.
The doctor got him fitted with a compression bandage to help reduce the swelling and gave him some painkillers to take when and if necessary and sent them on their way.
It wasn't like none of them had ever been tripped up by an unforeseen injury before, but the others were not used to Hannibal being the recipient of said injuries, especially when it meant he wouldn't be able to run or go with them. And it was debated if Hannibal would even be safe in his apartment alone lest Lynch come sniffing around. Murdock had volunteered to stay with Hannibal incase he needed any help, Hannibal had been touched by Murdock's offer but insisted he would be fine on his own. Besides, he'd added, he couldn't possibly rob Face of a whole weekend with Murdock at the penthouse he was currently scamming. And ooh Face had had a killer glare for him when he said that.
Once back at his apartment, he resolved himself to staying on the couch until further notice. It was the first time in weeks that he'd actually gotten a chance to see what was on TV at night now. Par for the expected course, most of it wasn't anything worth watching, and the rest was more of the same. Then he turned to another channel and stopped when he saw something familiar. A black and white film with lively music playing to match the fast paced sped up events of the film. Apparently he'd lucked out and stumbled into the middle of a Robert Youngson marathon from the 60's, and he spent the next three hours watching commentated highlights of comedies from the silent era between the mid 1910s to the early 1920s. By the end of the second documentary, he didn't even remember that his ankle had been throbbing, he'd laughed until he couldn't breathe, then until he started choking, and then finally he laughed until he had tears running from his eyes. All those old familiar friends that he'd grown up on, and hadn't seen for many years, it was just like those 40 years had never passed.
That, however, had merely been the start of things. The next night he turned back to the same channel and saw it was an all night silent comedy marathon. Six hours of shorts starring Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, the classic three where Hollywood had been concerned for close to 60 years. Therein lay the problem though; brilliant though they were, they had come to overshadow all the others, and now they were about the only ones remembered by time. Fortunately the TV station had other plans. Every night that week there was a marathon: Mack Sennett's comedies with Mabel Normand and 'Fatty' Arbuckle, Ben Turpin, the Keystone Cops; then a night of shorts starring both Buster Keaton and 'Fatty' Arbuckle together, essentially the only time in Buster's whole career that he was caught on camera smiling and laughing at anything. Then a night of Hal Roach's endless comedies with Laurel and Hardy, also some with Charley Chase, Snub Pollard, and Edgar Kennedy – the man who perfected the 'slow burn', which carried over well into his later years of being hassled by the Marx Brothers in their films.
Then a night of full length films by the Great Stoneface, Buster Keaton in all his glory in 'The General', 'Our Hospitality', 'The Navigator', 'The Cameraman', or as Hannibal always referred to it, 'the beginning of the end'. Then a night of Chaplin's full movies, from early on and very zany with 'Tillie's Punctured Romance', to the slightly more serious 'The Kid' and to the perfectly half and half 'The Gold Rush', to the much more melancholic but still comedic 'Modern Times', a semi-silent film when Hollywood had already plunged head-on into the sound era. He watched and he remembered and he tried to think when the last time was any of these had been shown, to anybody? Many of them, he would've guessed it had been 30 years since he'd last seen them, and for all that he hadn't missed a step, he still remembered all the vital parts of every film.
By the end of the week, his ankle had gone down to close its normal size and Hannibal was able to do more than just get up and hobble around from room to room and back to the couch, but he still wasn't in any condition to run from anybody if need be, go on a dangerous mission, or even run through his own obstacle course. He put on a pair of sneakers that he was able to loosen one up as far as it would go and still stay on, and lightly walked out of his apartment and headed down to the local movie theater. He spent each night going to a different latest hit 'comedy' film that had come out that year. As a kid he was constantly scrambling to swipe up dimes and nickels so he could pay his way into a movie on the days he cut school, now a ticket to an evening feature cost $4, not counting concessions. Talk about inflation.
He couldn't even remember half of the names of the movies he went to, sometimes he sat through and endured to the end to see if it was worth his time and money. A couple other times he walked out because he was sure it could only get worse. One time he'd fallen asleep halfway through the movie, and only woke up when the usher was shaking him because they had to clear everyone out and clean up for the next showing.
"I must've come into the wrong room," Hannibal had said as he rubbed his eyes and stood up, "I thought this was supposed to be a comedy. A film that gets two chuckles out of you over a course of two hours does not a comedy make."
Disappointed in the industry he used to love so much, Hannibal left the theater and caught a cab back to his apartment complex, and spent the rest of the night watching old movies on his TV.
Sound comedy was a different type of comedy than the silent films had, different, but still good, usually. Of course every era of film had its share of stinkers, but Hannibal seemed to recall there being so much fewer stinkers in his day. Nostalgia was nine tenths of the law of human memory, but even nostalgia only went so far, a movie was either good or it wasn't. From the 30s to the 50s and even then into the 60s the 3 Stooges entertained the masses. Yes, they were funny, Hannibal would admit that. But they weren't original. He was one of the few people old enough to acknowledge that. Most of their gags that people laughed at had already been done before, years before back in the silent era.
Pies being thrown in people's faces, or rather shoved, the first rule of a good pie fight, you never throw a pie, you get right up to the person and shove it directly into their face, was nothing new. Even when the 3 Stooges did it, it was nothing new. That went back to Ben Turpin in 1909, and then in Mack Sennett's films of the 1910s, but they didn't really become an epic part of comedy until later on. Laurel and Hardy were noted for having the biggest pie fight of the time in their film 'The Battle of the Century', 3,000 pies used by everybody thrown at everybody, a whole bakery's inventory for a single day. That was the charm of their films, sometimes the hijinks were contagious, sometimes everyone else just stood around and watched while Stan and Ollie destroyed things for whatever reason. But, as Hannibal recalled, the last great pie fight used in a film was in 'The Great Race', and that was 20 years ago.
Many things the 3 Stooges did that kept audiences laughing from that day to this, were not their own innovations. Buster Keaton had originated Curly's 'Disorder in the Court' antics in a little forgotten film called 'Sidewalks of New York', forgotten largely because it was a sound picture, and after Buster's career had ended, nobody was interested in the great Stone Face once he started talking. He had also originated the idea of either needing a longer arm or a shorter wall 25 years before the 3 Stooges tried it to retrieve a television knob while installing a set. Even that live oyster in the soup that snapped, that also went back to the silent era. Even they weren't immune to being copied. All those sound effects that really sealed their humor, the same trick was always used overseas in the 'Old Mother Riley' movies years later, kooky sound effects for head bops, nose twists, face slaps, the works. And it always worked, because people loved slapstick humor, they especially loved an amplified variety of slapstick humor. That was why silent films generally went over better with newer audiences when they had little sound effects of their own added to them.
Who were the actors these days? He hardly knew them now, so many just seemed to be clones of each other. Of course, it was asinine to assume one actor could replace another or become a duplicate of that person, case in point there would never be another Shirley Temple and everybody knew it, and yet nobody could shut up about it; though that one was no skin off his nose, if Mary Pickford was angel food cake, where Hannibal was concerned growing up, Shirley Temple was raw cane sugar and would give you pure cavities by comparison. But who was out there today, who could compare with, say, Boris Karloff? Christopher Lee's Dracula didn't hold a candle to Bela Lugosi's adaptation, only buckets of dripping blood. The newer Mummy and Frankenstein movies didn't set out to tell a love story around the horror, they just horrified and sickened audiences, and somehow they became the bigger hits for it, what was wrong with this picture?
Another that he remembered quite well that had never and could never be replaced or even attempted, the Dead End Kids, who then became the East Side Kids, who later on became The Bowery Boys. When he was a kid, they were the Dead End Kids, very serious, very dramatic, very dark, then they gently segued into the more comical but still serious and dramatic East Side Kids, and then when he was grown up, before and while he was in Korea, they went all the way to screwball. By that final run around the bend, they were shooting movies in 6 days a piece, churning them out for every Saturday morning crowd, not necessarily a way to get rich, but definitely famous, the names and faces they wouldn't forget, and he wouldn't forget, though by now many had. In today's world, they were forgettable, because they were expendable and disposable, because though they were a gang made up of bumbling boobs always looking for fights, they were all heart; in the beginning they weren't there just to bust guts, they were there to tell a story, in contrast to today when movies were made for a big opening box office payday. Oh how the mighty had fallen.
Was there anyone out there now who could move audiences like Charlie Chaplin had in his wordless social commentary about society cogs in a machine, or in his final speech as the Great Dictator? Was there any actor alive today willing to take the kinds of risks not seen since the likes of Buster Keaton, Pearl White, or Al St. John? No. Maybe the actors today were smarter for it, but they weren't more entertaining for it, unfortunately it was all the more entertaining when it really was a matter of 'one wrong move, and you're history'.
Al St. John…now there was another guy who got no love and no respect anymore. Most people didn't even know who that was, and those who did, few knew him outside of his work in his uncle 'Fatty's' shorts, and the rest had no respect for his work there either. Hollywood was a cruel place, you outlive your prime, and unless you find some way to be remembered as spectacular, you're thrown by the wayside and forgotten, your legacy tramped on and buried like a dead frog in a kid's garden. What a world.
Few items from his life before Vietnam and the A-Team still survived, like many of Hollywood's old films, his belongings had been lost to time, and eventual decay. There was something that remained though. Hell, if Face could have a scrapbook of the Dick Tracy texts, why not? Hannibal dug out the old book he'd put together as a kid with pictures he'd ripped and cut out of his mother's star magazines and off of posters and lobby cards around the city, of his favorite film stars. Seeing the black and white photos from so long ago, mentally recounting the fate of each and every one of them, for a moment he flashed on the end report of the 'Hindenburg' movie, except the Hindenburg had survivors, there were few to be had here: Charlie Chaplin – dead; Harold Lloyd – dead; Buster Keaton – dead; Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle – dead; Stan Laurel – dead; Oliver Hardy – dead; Will Rogers – dead; Charles Parrott – AKA Charley Chase – dead; cross-eyed Ben Turpin – dead; Douglas Fairbanks – dead; Clara Bow – dead; Lou Costello – dead; Moe, Shemp and Curly Howard – dead, Gloria Swanson – just dead; Leo Gorcey – dead; Lillian Gish – survived; Louise Brooks – survived; Huntz Hall – survived.
And that wasn't enough, as he flipped through the pages, Hannibal found himself recalling the tragic aspects of their lives. Roscoe Arbuckle – arrest for rape and murder, 2 hung juries, 1 acquittal, career ruined, dead at 46 just when he planned a comeback. Mabel Normand, Roscoe's leading lady, dead at 38 from tuberculosis. Charlie Chaplin, exiled out of the country for politics, officially because of public disagreement with his keeping such young wives. Buster Keaton, loss of creative independence by MGM, run into bankruptcy by ex-wife, custody of children lost to ex-wife, claims of kidnapping of said children by ex-wife, alcoholism, rehab, escape from rehab, recovery, died of lung cancer. Clara Bow, born and raised into poverty by mentally ill mother who tried to kill her in her sleep, resulting in lifelong bouts with insomnia, scandals about alleged affairs, institutionalized, early onset of possibly hereditary mental illness, dead at 60. Curly Howard, stroke, multiple strokes, failing health, dead at 48. Shemp Howard, slumped over smoking in a cab, dead at 60 from a heart attack. Lou Costello, dead just shy of 53, heart attack.
Hannibal slammed the scrapbook shut and tossed it onto the coffee table. Why was it the people who provided the most services for the world had some of the worst lives and the most miserable and premature endings? He looked at the album he'd thrown on the table, didn't pick it back up, just looked at it.
It seemed a conflict of interests that society put more emphasis on entertainers than the likes of say, doctors, judges, policemen, etc, well, there was a reason for that. Doctors were no longer seen as the saints in surgical garbs they once were, nor should they ever have been, because right from the start there were always plenty of quacks who didn't know what they were doing, plenty others who performed drunk on the job. There was seldom a person alive who hadn't had or didn't know somebody who'd had a bad run-in with law enforcement where the law was not on the side of right. Judges, more of the same, for the right amount you could buy your way out of anything. The contributions of the good were sorely outweighed by the misconduct of the bad, after a while it became obvious why nobody believed in the good of those rare few in the fields. But no matter who you were, where you were, where you came from, what kind of life you led, you went to the movies, you saw somebody on the screen who absolutely sparkled and was absolutely riveting, and for a couple hours, the outside world and all the problems it gave you were forgotten. You left the theater with a little more hope for humanity than you'd had going in. Or at least you used to. Anybody who could do that, who could have that kind of effect, on millions of people, that was a truly remarkable person, especially given the price they had to pay to do that, in which they sacrificed everything, including their privacy, to entertain the masses.
Hannibal found his hand reaching out to the book again, he picked it up and flipped through the pages. Aha, there she was. America's original Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, where he was underwhelmed by her screen presence as a child, once he was grown up, and now in his older years he was able to appreciate what she was and what she represented to Hollywood. And yet…ah, Hannibal would never understand it. Charlie Chaplin burnt reels of footage he wasn't pleased with, as if enough films hadn't been burnt and snuffed out already, most of the greats from those days weren't even remembered today and never would be, because all their works were destroyed, in fires, from decay, from age, from melting down the film prints for their silver content to reuse, but most of all, destroyed by willful human hands, who saw no point in preservation, because it was inconvenient, a matter of storage space, a matter of money, a matter of damn the old and bring in the new, further proof of just how disrespectable the industry had always been. But this woman here with the trademark curls in her hair, she had also wished all of her own films destroyed pending her death, why? She thought the public wouldn't care about her once she left this mortal coil, maybe she had been right, but she was also wrong. She hadn't been forgotten, the world still remembered her, still needed her. Still needed all of them, where today they were pushed aside and ignored to make way for newer and supposedly 'better' things, these were the ones that the world could not afford to forget, something had to be done so the world would not forget anymore of them than had already happened over the course of 60 years.
For someone like Hannibal who had grown up with his roots in Hollywood and in the movies and all the magic that went into making them, to consider all that had been lost and who all had been forgotten, to him it was just about as unacceptable, and as painful, as snuffing out a very life in itself. Growing up watching them in the local movie houses, they had been very much alive, and as such they had brought the audiences to life; they stirred up actual raw emotion and made the people feel something, something Hollywood seemed to be avoiding now, lest they offend or upset the wrong people. No, some greats may come through the cracks now and then, but they'd never see genius again as he had seen so many times as a boy.
What was it that Mack Sennett was supposed to have said? "What has become of laughter? There used to be so much of it." So much of it, in a time when you worked without a script, you had no union crew, you just got your actors, a camera, went driving to a choice location, started filming, and all it cost you was the price of the gasoline to drive there, and you could churn out a short that was more successful than the feature film it opened for.
Hannibal was drawn out of his thoughts, out of the memories of one week ago, two weeks ago at his apartment recuperating, a lifetime ago in the movie houses, drawn back, by somebody calling his name. He came back to the here and now and saw that people were around now, getting ready to start shooting for the Aquamaniac movie. And here came the director, and oh boy Hannibal knew that look. At any other time it might be amusing.
"Johnny, what's the matter with you? Why aren't you in costume yet? We start shooting in 15 minutes, and we've got to get this done before we lose the light. Now go on and get your suit on."
Hannibal looked around the set where they'd be shooting the lake scenes, he saw the people, he saw the cameras in place, he saw everything and everyone there, and for the first time in a long time, he thought about what it all meant to him. He thought about this industry and what it used to mean and what it meant now, and for the first time in a long time, even more than usual for a fugitive wanted by his own country, he was starting to feel extremely disillusioned with the whole thing. He turned back to the director and said simply, "No, Sy."
"What?" the director looked like he'd heard wrong.
Hannibal shook his head and told the man, "No, I'm not getting into the costume and I'm not doing this scene…in fact…" he was practically beaming as he said, "I quit."
"What!?"
Hannibal was grinning his usual troublesome grin, and he said to the director, "You don't get to fire me this time, this time, I quit."
And just like that, Hannibal Smith walked off the set and left the studio, grinning to himself from ear to ear. It was now 6 A.M. and his schedule for the day was cleared up, he decided he'd knock around the city for a while and then go find the others. It was a beautiful day in the city of Los Angeles, and he had a plan.