Three By Finney by Jack Finney

Author:Jack Finney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

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CHAPTER EIGHT

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The same reception cop—after the same exchange of mutually admiring smiles and glances—found Marion’s name on a list of expected visitors. Mine wasn’t on it, but Marion just told him that that was all right, and he explained how to find Stage 2. Then we walked back down the same little studio street, bright with sunlight and busy with people now, that we’d walked up last night in silence and moonlight.

Through a pair of gray-painted steel doors onto Stage 2, another enormous barnlike building; far across the gloom of the vast concrete floor we saw a brilliantly lighted set filled with people. The sound of a hammer on wood echoed—actually did echo—through the great enclosed space, and a man in white carpenter’s overalls walked in after us and hurried by carrying a two-by-four.

Approaching, we saw that the set represented three sides of a great room almost fantastically modern in its furnishings. Huge unframed paintings—smears and swirls of color—hung on the walls; statuaries on pedestals and in wall niches were intricate assemblages of metal, plastic, wood; the rugs and furniture were white; but everything else, including the actors’ clothes, was aggressively colorful.

They weren’t working, we saw as we walked—more and more slowly and timidly—toward the set. They stood or sat talking, drinking coffee from plastic-foam cups, as three workmen in white overalls worked to shift the angle of a small metal track spiked onto plywood sheets. The track led to the set, projecting a yard or so onto it. And at the track’s far end stood a wheeled camera, low to the ground and so big there was a seat mounted behind it on which a thin nervous-faced man peering through a viewfinder sat as though mounted on a small tractor.

We stopped at the edge of the set, a few people glancing at us. Across the set from us two men, not in party clothes, stood talking earnestly; they looked to be in their middle twenties, both with sideburns and fairly long hair. They wore sweaters and wash pants; working clothes. Glancing at us, they continued talking, then one of them, a clipboard under his arm, walked across the set toward us. As he approached he lifted his brows questioningly, and Marion smiled at him. “I’m Marion Marsh.”

He consulted his clipboard. “Right.” He smiled back then, pleasantly enough. “Well. Mr. Hiller hopes to get to you, Miss March.”

“Marsh, Marion Marsh.”

“Marsh; sorry. He hopes to get to you; meanwhile . . .” He glanced around, then pointed to a big gray wooden box stenciled with the studio name. It stood beside the set a yard from where the white-carpeted floor began. “Would you sit there, please? At all times. Don’t move.” He smiled again and walked back to the man he’d been talking with; Mr. Hiller, I assumed.

The overalled men got their track shifted. A pair of men in dark-green work shirts and pants pulled the camera slowly along it and just onto the set, then dragged it back

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