Wendy and I met one night to talk about changes she wanted to make in the Peter and the Wolf scene.
We were in the Willy Wallace, a quiet pub near Wendy's house in Balmain, and she was flicking through a paper edition of Victor, so well-thumbed and scribbled upon that even a smart-reader would probably reject it. After getting the beers I sat and watched her reading.
That was nearly the sum of our personal relationship - me watching her. She made these meetings in pubs to relax me, or perhaps to help me overcome the tightness of my heart. I should explain that we had been working together for several months now. I have mentioned my initial attraction to her, but even after so long my love was unrequited - you can't make an unwilling audience interact. She had made it obvious from the start that she wanted my skill, but that our souls must stay in different rooms while we were together. And yet my love grew daily in the typical, nonsensical, way love does. So struggle on I must; and since the hardest part of my work was done and the screenplay written and programmed, I could now concentrate on her. But all I could do was watch her reading.
She said, "Listen to this, Tim. He's talking about Peter and the Wolf. 'So now I am forced to think of it I suppose my warm memory is because of the beautiful woman I met there.'"
"So what?"
"It's what I want to talk about tonight. I want to change the script to include that woman."
"Who is she?"
"But I don't want you to tell Victor."
Wendy was wrapped in her thoughts then, her eyes radiating inscrutably. I did not think she was listening to me, and I was glum at her growing indifference to me. I finally said, "I love you Wendy."
Immediately, she put her drink down, pulled out the script and a pencil and said acerbically, "Bloody hell, Tim. I thought we were trying to work." She had not even paused to think about a response, perhaps indifferent to my sensitivity.
"But I don't want you to tell Victor," I said. This will give the old bastard a nice surprise, I was thinking at the time, planning the best way to change the script expecting Tim to make his expertise available. On reflection I think I should have included him even more in my plans, for it was asking a lot for him to take my ideas on trust. It was his script even if I was the boss, and he was such a sensitive little boy; it was because I was not thinking of him I did not expect his outburst.
"I love you, Wendy," he said.
Well it's not that I didn't expect it, but that I didn't expect it at that moment. He shocked me out of my reverie and forced me to think of him, for he was essential to the film project and I could not lose him - even neglecting all notions of friendship which, despite appearances, I never did. Slowly I put my drink down, wishing like hell he hadn't chosen now, right at the beginning of the movie. Why not months ago? Why not next year? Why now? I had to defuse the night, get us back to work, and hope this wouldn't interfere with the project. As gently as I could, and with a genuine smile (for he was indeed my friend), I said, "Bloody hell, Tim. I thought we were trying to work."
It was not a dark pub, and he did his best not to crumble completely ...
I finally said, "I..."
"Yes, Tim?"
I wanted to pour out my heart, but instead I quoted from the bogus Australian poet Ern Malley. "'I remember the last words of Stalin as the shadow was still across his face - "the emotions are not skilled workers."'"
I think she understood, for she paused thoughtfully before replying, "If you were writing that down, would you need to end it with three lots of quotation marks?"
I said nothing. She asked, "Are you all right, Tim? Do you feel like working more tonight?"
I took a long swig on my drink, sighed and took out my computer. "So what's the new story," I asked wearily. One day I must have the courage to get my feelings in the air. One day I will tell her that I love her - perhaps when I decide whether it would be stupidity or courage. It is a pity that not enough is hidden between us.
The way Victor tells the story of his performance of Peter and the Wolf one would imagine it went perfectly. Both his description in Victor: my varying life, and the way he made me write the screenplay suggested this, with only veiled suggestions of a slight technical problem. It would have made a pretty boring film if Wendy hadn't found someone else who had been at the performance then Victor's version would have been set down as history, since this was going out as a Class 3 or 4 biography film.
We all concede that it was a tribute to his reputation and excellence as an improviser that he was selected to do the piece, for it must be daunting to improvise a story in front of a thousand children, especially when it had never been done before. You may not remember this early experiment in improvised interactive storytelling. The chairs in the auditorium had been fitted with small consoles, each with 4 buttons and a small display. The display gave four alternatives for updating the story as it progressed and the audience voted accordingly. The votes went to the computer which counted them and sent the results to Victor's display so he could make up the story. That was the easy part, for there was an altogether bigger computer which had to compose the music to fit the story - remember we started with Prokofiev. Sometimes it was simply a matter of rearranging the score according to whether the wolf or the wood-cutter was winning. Other times whole new sections had to be composed in the right style, in real time, and the resulting music sent to the displays from which the musicians played. Victor had told me that there was no need for an orchestral conductor since he provided the cues and the music displays also showed the beat and kept time. I have since found out the real reason there was no conductor: every conductor in the country was outside the Town Hall demonstrating against the performance which they perceived as monstrous and sacrilegious to the ghost of Prokofiev.
The woman leading the demonstration was Mary. She said they had the largest mobile display in the country showing such slogans as "Leave Prokofiev alone", "A classic is a classic just as it is", and other such terrifying threats to scare the pants off the promoters and programmers responsible. At least they had a programmer who was clever enough to hack into the music composition computer and crash it near the end of the piece, leaving rude messages over the display screens of the musicians. But they, having been trained in late twentieth century conservatoria, could play music from spaghetti thrown at the wall paper, so they just assumed it was what they were meant to play and interpreted it accordingly. The result was fairly raucous, and Victor, sensing something amiss, improvised along with the music, confusing the children in the audience because none of the choices they offered by their consoles were anywhere near violent enough to match the noise of the orchestra. It seems everyone died, not just the wolf, in something resembling the final scenes of Macbeth - that is trees, blood, and not a smile in the house. In Victor: my varied life, a supposedly Class 3 historical document, this scene is described as having "gone without a hitch."
Victor remembered The Interactive Peter and the Wolf episode with some fondness. It was the day before the war started, and he described to me the state of anxiety throughout the country, and how this one afternoon of pleasure in the Sydney Town Hall with a wonderful orchestra and a thousand beaming children seemed to dispel that mood.
The inclusion of Mary into the scene really required no change to the script, so Victor didn't find out about it until the morning of the shoot.
"Victor, you're going to be thrilled," Wendy said as she entered, worrying him with her playful look. "You'll never guess who I've found - someone who was at the original performance of The Interactive Peter and the Wolf. Guess who?" But she was gushing, and he had no time to think, using a fraction of a second to move his lips into protest position before being filled with fear.
Wendy said, "I've found your first wife. You remember her don't you? She's the wife that you gave a whole sentence to in your three megabyte autobiography. Anyway she's agreed to come to the filming. She's demanded a high price, but I think it's worth it to have her there, don't you agree? You can share your moment of triumph with the woman you loved; the woman who was your fiance at the time. Well what do you say, Victor? Get your jaw off the floor and answer me."
He was stunned. He jabbered, "Where did you find... where did you find... where did you find..."
"Mary?" suggested Wendy. "You can't even remember her name?"
"Mary, that's it. Of course I can remember. It's just been so long."
She left him then, leaving him to follow her with shamed eyes, furtively looking everywhere for a face he forgot fifty years earlier when they were barely out of their teens. People live longer these days it's true, but a seventy-year-old body is still a seventy-year-old lump of flesh and bone, and when burdened with dread it sags a little.
Filming began. Victor insisted on playing the entire performance, which would have dragged on interminably in a film. I had protested at this, but varifilm viewers would miss quite a bit if they skimmed it in fast forward.
They were playing the score almost as Prokofiev wrote it, which is how Victor remembered it. This was rather tedious for the children in the audience who had never before had to sit through a story which they could not affect in any way. They were being paid to just sit there, to be just for show, but payment never improves children's behaviour. But they were excited when Mary finally made her entrance at the rear of the hall, bearing a placard reading "Leave Prokofiev alone," and crying, "Shame to the Philistines! Out with the Barbarians!" This was, you understand, bang in the middle of the performance and Victor, unprepared, recognised her and fainted, falling into the front row of the bemused children who were finally free to fight and laugh as Wendy called to cut.
She quickly revived him with the already-mentioned method she learned from films and taken to so strongly - slapping him in the face and calling his name.
"Victor," she bellowed, and again louder, "Victor. Are you here?"
Gradually he came to life, and gratefully took some of the water I brought to him. He sat up and asked, rather feebly, "Why didn't you tell me you were going to do that? You can consider yourself unemployed."
"What? You're sacking me for putting some truth into the story? Wait till the censors hear about that. They'll want some serious justification from you if you're to get the Class 3 you applied for."
Victor closed his eyes and fell back, cursing feebly. He whispered, his face losing such colour it had started to regain, "How much did she tell you?"
"Probably not as much as you didn't tell us. You should at least have told us there was a demonstration at the performance."
"Did she tell you she was dragged out screaming by the security guards? Did she tell you I confronted them myself after the performance - a fairly brave thing to do since they were the most militant musicians in the country - and that I fully justified, on artistic grounds, what the performance was trying to achieve?"
Wendy giggled a little, beckoned to me and put some water on a cloth which she wiped across Victor's brow. He opened a suspicious eye to check this act of gentleness, but she was smiling at him. "You poor old bugger." And to me she said, "We've got him thinking, eh Timmy?"
She silenced my protest with a wink, though I am sure Victor suspected my full complicity in the affair, and said aloud, "Prepare for another take, everyone. Come on. Get moving!" And as she stood she held my arm for a moment. Oh how I want to tell you about that moment, when you touch the skin of what you consider to be an impossible love, which is the smoothest skin of all. But the moment passed, the activity around me quickly destroying any fantasy.
Victor sat up abruptly, smoothing down his coat, and said, "Alright, but if Mary comes in again she must be dragged out screaming immediately."
"Is that how it was, Victor?"
"That's how it was."
And that's how we filmed it - nearly.
Varifilms are made with many cameras, though six is usually enough to provide a projector with enough data to simulate a point of view from any direction and distance - at least any viewpoint that audiences are allowed. In a big room, and the Sydney Town Hall is nicely though not stupidly big, cameras are hung from the ceiling by three stings, and by shortening and lengthening those strings each camera can move to any point bounded by the anchor points of the strings. They are oriented by gyroscopes within. The casing is really a computer display so that, using a wide angle lens pointing behind it, the casing changes colour to match the background. So if any other camera is pointed in that direction it is easy to remove the imperfections in the final image. But a human eye can still see where the camera is. The strings that hold them up are virtually invisible while filming, and they are much stronger than a steel rope as thick as your thumb. I mean to say they are strong in tension. Unfortunately they are easy to cut.
This was the only time I've ever known that to be a problem, but then it's the only time I've been filming in a room full of a thousand children. As usual they were searched for weapons on entry, as were their parents and guardians, but only for plastic and metal weapons. None of the security guards could imagine what a little girl would be doing with a forked stick, even though her hair was tied back with elastic, so they let it pass. She knew she would only get one shot before being discovered, though I don't know why she chose to shoot for the overhead camera. In any event she missed it, but the sharp stone projectile neatly sheared one of the strings holding it up.
This was at the moment in The Interactive Peter and the Wolf when the wolf bit off the woodcutter's hand. The orchestra was at fortissimo and Victor was very excited, with the feather in his Russian cap vibrating fiercely. So much animation and noise was there that nobody heard the thwack of the stone slicing one of the strings that anchored the camera. The camera, now restrained at only two points, swung in a beautiful arc towards Victor's head - and it was nearly impossible to see because it camouflaged itself as it went.
The first Victor knew was when the camera flew past him, collecting the feather project from the back of his cap and whisking it off his head, and it continued on the upward side of the arc. He turned to follow his cap as it its arc reached apogee at the Sydney Town Hall Organ, (bumping gently against one of the Sydney Town Hall organ's 'thirty two foot' bass stop pipes), then hurtled back down towards Victor, who stood motionless in confusion. He felt a tug as the principle violoncellist pulled him out of the way by his coat tails, just in time for the return flight of the camera to crash into his lectern and carry it up towards the camera's original position. When it reached the ceiling it was caught momentarily on some other cable and hung precariously with the lectern swinging below it. No one in the hall made a sound as we waited, and within seconds the restraint gave way and the camera swung downwards again. Miraculously, as it swung between Victor and the principal violinist, the camera and the suspended lectern missed everything near their paths, but as they climbed towards the organ again some trailing string somehow wrapped itself around the tenor trombone, which it wrenched free of the trombonist and carried with it.
This time when the camera reached the organ, it came to rest in the fipple of one of the 'thirty two foot bass' stops, the cap fell inside the pipe and the lectern clattered to the floor, dropping the trombone onto the bass pedals of the organ. As it sounded what I was later to learn was a very low G sharp, the feather from the cap blew out of the organ pipe and fluttered away into the ensuing silence. The renegade camera filmed it all faithfully from points of view not normally allowed to varifilm audience, and one they invariably ask for - the business end of a striking weapon.
Victor looked around at the awestruck people slowly reanimating, and he told me later that the image that stuck in his mind, as he fainted yet again, was of the principal violinist of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra restraining, with the help of the principle violist, the principle trombonist and the principal organist of the Sydney County Council, whose fists flailed wildly in his face. Classical musicians seem always to have their own points of view.
As he blacked out I heard Wendy's weary, sardonic voice say "Take five everybody." She tried to revive Victor again, as she did at every opportunity, by slapping his face; she seemed to enjoy it more every time. When Victor opened his eyes, though, he saw Mary pulling her away from him. Mary took the glass of water from me and sat with Victor, helping him to sit up.
"Are you alright, Victor?" she asked. "Please stop hitting him!" she said to Wendy.
"I suppose so," he said. "My head hurts abominably. I suppose I must have hit in on the floor as I fell." Wendy said something childish about the hole in the floor and left him with Mary by his side as she had to go and reorganise the orchestra and sedate the trombonist and the organist who were still complaining and even demanding stunt doubles.
Mary asked Victor, "Do you recognise me?"
"Of course I do, Mary," he answered. He would have walked past her in the street, for he remembered a twenty-year-old face and Mary had let herself grow old, gracefully and naturally. One of the mothers of the abominable children came up just then for an autograph, but Victor waved her away, so intent was he on looking at Mary, and she for her part sat there smiling patiently at him. They were timid, shy and completely speechless. He told me later of his trepidation when I questioned him about the way he treated his other wives throughout Victor: my life varied. "They were Hollywood wives. They deserved everything they got." He added, almost inaudibly, "And maybe I did too."
The meeting was short as filming had to recommence, and Victor was glad to break it off. Mary got up to leave since her part in the film was over. She walked away and said, "Thanks for sending me the money. You had a beautiful daughter called Liz, but she died in an accident last year. She was fifty years old, you know." Then she walked away before he could open his mouth.
He beckoned me to him and said, "Tim, quick. I need a line. Please! I can't think of anything to say." He just sat and stared after her, watching her leave hand in hand with a certain little girl with wild hair. Was it her grand daughter - Victor's grand daughter! - whom she had brought along to see the performance?
