In the Hollywood of the future there's no need for actors since any star can be digitally recreated and inserted into any movie. Yet young Alis wants to dance on the silver screen. Tom tries to dissuade her, but he fears she will pursue her dream — and likely fall victim to Hollywood's seamy underside, which is all to eager to swallow up naive actresses. Then Tom begins to find Alis in the old musicals he remakes, and he has to ask himself just where the line stands between reality and the movies.Nominated for Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1996.
“Not much is impossible.”
“The girl seems to have talent but the boy can do nothing.”
Special thanks to Scott Kippen and Sheryl Beck and all the rest of the UNC Sigma Tau Deltans
and to my daughter Cordelia and her statistics classes
and to my secretary Laura Norton
all of whom helped come up with chase scenes, tears, happy endings, and all the other movie references.
I saw her again tonight. I wasn’t looking for her. It was an early Spielberg liveaction,
This liveaction was made in ’84, at the very beginning of the computer graphics revolution, and it had a few CG sections: digitized Thugees being thrown off a cliff and a pathetically clunky morph of a heart being torn out. It also had a Ford Tri-Motor plane, which was what I was looking for when I found her.
I needed the Tri-Motor for the big good-bye scene at the airport, so I’d accessed Heada, who knows everything, and she’d said she thought there was one in one of the liveaction Spielbergs, the second Indy maybe. “It’s close to the end.”
“How close?”
“Fifty frames. Or maybe it’s in the third one. No, that’s a dirigible. The second one. How’s the remake coming, Tom?”
Almost done, I thought. Three years off the AS’s and still sober.
“The remake’s stuck on the big farewell scene,” I said, “which is why I need the plane. So what do you know, Heada? What’s the latest gossip? Who’s ILMGM being taken over by this month?”
“Fox-Mitsubishi,” she said promptly. “Mayer’s frantic. And the word is Universal’s head exec is on the way out. Too many addictive substances.”
“How about you?” I said. “Are you still off the AS’s? Still assistant producer?”
“Still playing Melanie Griffith,” she said. “Does the plane have to be color?”
“No. I’ve got a colorization program. Why?”
“I think there’s one in
“No, there’s not,” I said. “That’s a two-engine Lockheed.”
She said, “Tom, I talked to a set director last week who was on his way to China to do stock shots.”
I knew where this was leading. I said, “I’ll check the Spielberg. Thanks,” and signed off before she could say anything else.
The Ford Tri-Motor wasn’t at the end, or in the middle, which had one of the worst mattes I’d ever seen. I worked my way back through it at 48 per, thinking it would have been easier to do a scratch construct, and finally found the plane almost at the beginning. It was pretty good — there were close-ups of the door and the cockpit, and a nice medium shot of it taking off. I went back a few frames, trying to see if there was a close-up of the propellers, and then said, “Frame 1-001,” in case there was something at the very beginning.
Trademark Spielberg morph of the old Paramount Studios mountain into opening shot, this time of a man-sized silver gong. Cue music. Red smoke. Credits. And there she was, in a chorus line, wearing silver tap shoes and a silver-sequined leotard with tuxedo lapels. Her face was made up thirties style — red lips, Harlow eyebrows — and her hair was platinum blonde.
It caught me off guard. I’d already searched the eighties, looking in everything from
I said, “Freeze!” and then “Enhance right half,” and leaned forward to look at the enlarged image to make sure, as if I hadn’t already been sure the instant I saw her.
“Full screen,” I said, “forward realtime,” and watched the rest of the number. It wasn’t much — four lines of blondes in sequined top hats and ribboned tap shoes doing a simple chorus routine that could have been lifted from
The steps were simple, mostly trenches and traveling steps, and I thought it had probably been one of the very first ones Alis did. She had been this good when I saw her practicing in the film hist classroom. And it was too Berkeleyesque. Near the end of the number it went to angles and a pan shot of red scarves being pulled out of tuxedo pockets, and Alis disappeared. The Digimatte couldn’t have matched that many switching shots, and I doubted if Alis had even tried. She had never had any patience with Busby Berkeley.
“It isn’t dancing,” she’d said, watching the kaleidoscope scene in
“I thought he was famous for his choreography,” I’d said.
