Chapter 3 The Ghost in the Blue Screen

Americans have no idea about this, but what passes for their imagination is completely contained in an old warehouse building just off an overpass of highway 101 a few miles north of San Francisco. A cash register and check out counter still sit in front of the building’s lone window that faces the street. Before it became the home of Luke Howard’s Illusion Factory, this was the headquarters of the retail clerk’s union Local #1138. Their hand-painted sign remains the only identifying marker on the outside of the warehouse.

As you get closer to the front door, you’ll see a reptilian hand reaching out to the checker side of the counter. It’s Luke Howard’s idea of a joke. Having observed him here from the days since he was excitedly building models and matching matte paintings for his first movie, that weird combination of car chase scenes and space aliens, I’ve only seen the man actually make people laugh a handful of times. After he became famous a lot more people do laugh, but it’s not actual. I can tell the difference.

For the first few years, Luke refused to acknowledge my presence in the warehouse. Perhaps he was so focused on the illusions one can project onto a two dimensional screen in a dark room, he forgot that we exist in other forms. Could there have been a better place for me to hide than the Illusion Factory? There aren’t many places for homeless ghosts to go. When the last business closed in Paperson and the last resident moved to Sacramento, it took me three years to find this new home. Ethereal travel only permits us to move a few hundred yards a day and then only in fog. Can you imagine the traffic jams if that weren’t the case?

I’m sure that Luke saw me in those first few years. If you look at some of the matte work thirty seven minutes into that first movie, you’ll see my silhouette in the upper right hand corner of the shot. Arguably it looks like a discoloration in the film stock, but Luke Howard is a perfectionist. He examined every frame of his first movie with a magnifying glass. Those who aren’t in the business of illusions always underestimate the level of precision involved. I watched as he worked frantically to get it out of the master. He even re-shot the scene twice.

Still, it wasn’t until about three years ago that Luke was forced to acknowledge my presence in his Illusion Factory. I wasn’t a virus in one of the Silicon Graphics Indigo Workstations. I wasn’t a shadow from some unaccounted light source next to the blue screen, canvass for America’s mass imagination. I wasn’t some special effects technician’s prank with the lariat in Image Maker. He called in a Feng Hsui specialist from Hong Kong. For three thousand dollars a day, the woman ordered the server room reoriented, made them run network wires transversely instead of parallel to the walls, and forced them to move the trailer for the model-making shop away from the Best Buy parking lot behind the Illusion Factory. That poor shyster never saw me and I’m almost certain that she never really tried. At the end, she deposited his check immediately before he took the next flight back to Hong Kong.

I knew then that Luke Howard had begun to understand that he was dealing with a real ghost, not the kind you make with CGI or in-camera effects. That was when I began planning my return to Paperson.

Even when he shows up at the Illusion Factory by surprise, it seems that everyone there knows he’s coming. In most any other workplaces, they’d be clearing out the empty pizza boxes and half-emptied cans of Pepsi and Jolt Cola from the conference table. The programmers would be taking down the video games they play while brainstorming. With Luke, that’s not what they worry about. He doesn’t care how things look in the building. He’s never minded the spike-haired graphic artists or even said a word about the number of his employees who have purple or pink hair. The only thing that matters is what shows up in the dailies. Luke hits the door and they cue up the screening room as if they run the dailies there 24/7.

Luke’s own project isn’t going well. To be honest, none of his own film projects in the last thirteen years which happens to be since the day I took up residence in the Illusion Factory have made much of a dent either financially or critically. Once in a while the supervisors even dare to whisper that Luke’s done. When special effects genius consisted of paintings, models, and even blue screen, Luke was the master. Ever the visionary in this realm, Luke was the first major movie maker to insist on going full CGI. It’s just that he doesn’t have the same feel for effects that are purely digital. Others insist it’s the scripts. Luke Howard hasn’t put his own name on a movie in close to seven years. The last one, a parody of a nineteen thirties detective story done with live actors playing on digitized backgrounds, went straight to VHS.

At one level, it doesn’t matter. The Illusion Factory does contract work for other production houses and still has no peer. Thirty seconds of a house going over a waterfall is three days work and half a million dollars. A two minute segment of an underwater city being destroyed by an earthquake went for seventeen million. It’s easy money. Even if the bit isn’t done all that well, the director uses “special effects by the Illusion Factory” in the promos. It’s not the quality of the work. It’s the brand name that sells the tickets and gets them a spot in the rotations at the multiplexes. The money in commercials is even better. Much of the time, that’s just a matter of taking stock bits and flipping the perspective or changing the lighting and it’s a quick fifty thousand for what amounts to fifteen minutes work by a sixty eight thousand dollar a year junior graphic artist.

Taco Bell paid Luke Howard a billion dollars just to put the characters from his new trilogy on their napkins and drink cups. Financially, he doesn’t need to make another movie. In fact, it might be even more lucrative if he didn’t.

In the screening room, Luke never sits in the front row. Usually, the supervisors sit at the table that takes up the front middle with their notepads. Luke’s spot is in the peanut gallery, a seat in the upper right hand corner. His routine goes like this. He has them play the daily at normal speed three times in a row, beginning to end. The fourth time, he looks at it in slow motion with no volume. He then makes everyone leave the room except for the projectionist. The fifth time, he uses a series of signals with the guy in the projection room to let him know exactly when he wants the run stopped, slowed down, sped up, or repeated. He makes his notes. After that, he watches at theater speed and volume alone before he invites the crew back in to view the run again.

As he watches run four, I’m certain that Luke Howard is trying to figure out where I’ll show up on the daily. I don’t make an appearance in every one. I do it just often enough to remind him of my presence. I wonder too if he’s trying to figure out where I am in the screening room as he watches. If he only knew. If he only understood.

Luke raises his right hand and waggles two fingers at the projectionist who goes back twenty frames to a spot where a woman is rolling down a hill in a tornado. The flying cow is about to appear from the left side of the screen. The cow’s a bit out of proportion and the shadow doesn’t match the maelstrom around it. Luke’s eye is so good, he usually picks it up in a run or two.

“Dammit…it’s not quite in synch,” Luke mutters.

He means the sythesizer chord that plays atonally in the background. Luke is the one director in America who understands that moviegoers see with their ears as much as they see with their eyes. For this bit, they need to feel the cow before they can see it.

“Run it brighter,” Luke tells the projectionist by pointing to his eye and making an upward motion with his right palm.

I think my most famous appearance in a Luke Howard movie was in his first big outer space epic. There was a long line of starships getting ready to attack. Luke used models that he ran in endless loop, an old technique that he made fresh by painting in little variations in each ship on the film stock. With most of them, the frames are moving too fast for the viewer to even see this sort of detail, at least in any conscious way. It was the crazies who found me in the scene. I was surfing on top of one of the starships, arms up, robes blowing in the solar wind, and at one point I wave to the audience. I’m there for less than five frames, just above sumbliminal. The crazies caught it the first time the print went to VHS.

Luke still doesn’t acknowledge it. What they don’t know is that Luke spent hundreds of hours trying to get me out of the VHS transfer and again seven years later in the initial DVD release in the boxed set edition, he tried to edit me out. I’m not sure when, but he got obsessed somewhere along the line.

This time, Luke signals for a stop frame. “Where are you, you fucker?” he mutters.

It’s a good guess, but I’m not in the frame yet.

“Luke, is there a problem?”

The projectionist pokes his head out the sliding glass window of the booth.
“No, nothing.”

“I’m pretty sure he’s in this one Luke.”

“And you were going to tell me when exactly?”

“We would have, but.”

“But what?”

“Well, it’s like he’s in a different frame every time with this one.”

Luke shakes his head angrily and I laugh hysterically.

Luke pulls out his cell phone.

“Look, can you contact Jan Grady. I’d like her to meet me down here.”

One of my favorite games in the screening room is to sit right behind Luke and to do exactly what he does. He moves his left hand over the arm rest. I move my left hand. He scratches himself, I scratch myself. He turns around, I slip behind him and turn around. I’m convinced that he feels my presence at this point, but he still can’t seem to catch me.

Movies are based on an optical illusion. If still frames move at a rate above a certain speed, the eye and mind conspire to see them as continuous motion by implying connections between the frames that don’t actually exist. Human beings blink up to hundreds of times a minute. I show up in between. In a sense, I’m a counter-movie, that which exists but only appears when the eyes are momentarily closed. There’s nothing you can do about it, the blinking is autonomic. I do remember hearing once that Japanese scientist did some live experiments during World War 2 with prisoners turned into human subjects. They forced their eyelids open with clamps and kept the subjects pupils dilated. Every one of the subjects went insane in a matter of hours. Some bits of experience, we’re simply not meant to see.

Am I going to let Luke Howard find me on one of the frames for his tornado movie? Maybe I could hide behind that flying cow or the spinning newspaper?

Luke makes another cell phone call, “Did you find Jan Grady?”

In a few years, Luke or maybe his competitors at Magyc City, the ones who used to be his employees, will announce that it is now possible to put any event you can visualize onto a movie screen. Maybe a generation from that date, you’ll be able to sit at home, choose some options off a menu, and create any scene you care to. Think of the porn you could make. The only problem and it’s one that Luke Howard is all too aware of himself is this. Only certain people have the kind of imagination that makes these sort of capabilities worthwhile. It’s just that Luke is starting to wonder if he’s still one of them.

It was three months ago that Jan Grady sent Luke Howard the e-mailed memo.
“Luke, I think I have a way to deal with that ghost in your blue screen. I need to drive to the Sacramento Delta, but I’m pretty sure that’ll work out. You now how they say the things you pick up in college don’t really matter. Well, I’m not so sure.”

“Let the Adventure Begin” I say.

I wonder if Luke hears me. I’m standing right behind him. He’s not even blinking right now.