Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

by Louis Joseph Vance

The finding of Nelly's body crushed beneath the wreckage of a motor-car on the beach some fifty miles north of Los Angeles, gave the story of the Summerlad shooting an extended lease of twenty-four hours only on front-page space in the newspapers. In none of these was the ownership of the car called in question; in which circumstance Lucinda thought to detect the influential hand of "Mr. Bellamy Druce of New York," finding further support for this surmise in the fact that even Bel's name came in for astonishingly occasional mention, considering his active part in the aftermath of the affair, and especially considering the civic zeal ordinarily displayed by the local press in playing up the presence in "the Queen City of the Sunny Southland" of personages of social or financial consequence in the East.

Then, since the death of the unhappy woman had defeated all hope of lurid court proceeding, and rendered piquant exploitation of "wild life inside the movie colony" an open invitation to actions for criminal libel as soon as Summerlad got well enough to reckon damages to his reputation, the cause célèbre went into quick eclipse. The newspapers of the third morning carried brief notices inconspicuously placed to the effect that Summerlad was reported out of danger, though his complete recovery promised to be a matter of many weeks, and that the body of his wife was being shipped East to her parents. And the affair was never mentioned more.

Lucinda spent the best part of that day (and a good part of the next two as well) in the projection-room with Zinn and Wallace Day, her new director, sitting in judgment on thirty-six reels of film, the accumulated sum of Nolan's fumbling with about two-thirds of a picture.

Not that such extravagance was anything extraordinary under prevailing methods of production. It remains to this day quite in order for a director to photograph between fifty and sixty-thousand feet of scenes on celluloid, only forty-five hundred feet of which will ever be revealed to the public. The ordinary photoplay, Lucinda learned, runs to not more than six reels, or six-thousand feet of film, approximately one-fourth of which is devoted to reading matter, leaving forty-five hundred feet or less to carry on the story in terms of pictorial action.

The more than seven miles of photography which constituted Nolan's legacy to his successor would consequently require boiling down to about one-twelfth its length to make room for the third of the picture which he had left undirected.

This monumental feat of waste had been achieved by means of photographing every scene, even the simplest, in inordinate length, over and over again, and from every conceivable angle, much of the time with three cameras in simultaneous operation, and by making provision to break up each scene with close-ups of the principal players heaving their chests and mugging intimately at audiences as yet undreaming of their treat in store.

Thus it came to pass that Lucinda, who had at first welcomed the prospect of the seclusion which the projection-room was to afford her, the freedom which those blank black walls would insure from consciousness of fleering eyes and tongues over-ready to whisper evil concerning her relations with the wounded man—Lucinda, long before a fourth part of the rough footage had been unreeled for her inspection, began to find inexpressibly tiresome the sight of her shadow-self mincing and simpering through endless repetitions of business with which she was already conversant to satiety, and with all her heart wished herself back again in the uncompromising glare of the Kliegs, where at least, though onlookers might mock and mouth lies, she would have work to do that would help her to forget.

As it was, though her eyes were constant to the screen, her attention was forever flagging, her thoughts harking back along old trails where heartaches haunted....

The lively disputes between Zinn and Day which from time to time interrupted the procession of the scenes, as those two debated ways and means to cut and eliminate and avoid retaking, contributed little to the relief of her afflicted spirit. Hourly its burden of boredom grew more nearly insufferable, toleration of it more seemingly insane.

The business as a whole seemed so stupid, so puerile, so hopelessly inconsequential.