BOGIE DOES HOLLYWOOD – THE RIDE!
What Happens When a Virtual-Reality Maestro
Resurrects the Stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood
and Puts Them Into a Porn Flick?
Hank Gross
Published by Hank Gross at Smashwords 2010
© 2010 Hank Gross All Rights Reserved
Registered with U.S. Copyright Office
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Author's Note:.Much of the legal information presented fictionally in this book comes from an article in High Technology Law Journal by Professor Joseph J. Beard of St. John's University School of Law entitled, "Casting Call at Forest Lawn: The Digital Resurrection of Deceased Entertainers." Any errors in my interpretation of that material are mine.
Chapter One
Exhibit A
"Play it, Sam," said a disembodied voice in cyberspace.
I clicked the mouse embedded in my force feedback gloves and instantly found myself tooling along Wilshire Boulevard in the passenger seat of a yellow Kissel convertible with spoke wheels and a flat windshield, wind blowing through my hair, a pair of dice doing the Charleston from the rearview, and Humphrey Bogart at the wheel. Gone were the articulated servo-mechanisms of the virtual reality apparatus, the gimbaled chair, the high-tech eyephones, the tactor bodysuit. This was the Golden Age of Hollywood, and – as the man assigned by an Internet entertainment site to review this cutting edge VR "ride" -- I was totally immersed in the latest entertainment based on the reanimation of deceased stars," Bogie Does Hollywood" -- and on my way to visit a celebrity whorehouse with the premiere tough-guy of American film.
He was wearing dark slacks, a white shirt open at the collar, a white sport jacket, no hat, and his trademark cynical scowl, and he was smoking a Chesterfield -- one of the hundred a day that would kill him from throat cancer at the age of 57. But now he was still years away from all that, and God, it felt good to be out for a drive with the man. You just knew he was a man. He didn't need to posture or steroid up, didn't need to slit his eyes and hunker down like Bronson or Eastwood nor swagger and bulge like Schwartzenegger or Stallone. Effortlessly, he projected an air of charming hardness, healthy ennui, and robust good naturedness about him. He smelled of fresh cologne and stale tobacco. Just sitting beside him, I felt instantly ballsy myself, a couple of regular guys off on an adventure.
"Where are we headed?" I asked him rubbernecking like the tourist I was in the sunny California morning, the boulevard cyberregressed to the Hollywood of the thirties -- low storefronts, small homes, and stretches of land still being farmed. He kept his eyes on the road for a couple of seconds before turning to me; I couldn't be sure if this was a matter of noir cool, sound driving habits, or simply "system latency" -- the inescapable electronic reality that even the multimegabyte processing capacity of this amazing apparatus needed time to analyze and respond to my question. This done, Mr. Bogart could look me in the eye with confidence, give me that famous cracked smile of his, and say, "Kid, we're headed for a little place I know of called Pleasure Palace of the Stars." He stepped on the gas, and as I vibrated to the drumroll of the Speedster's4.9 liter, straight-eight engine and felt the calfskin seat press against my back, he added with a sly rasp," Best little hookjoint in Hollywood!"
As we cruised along, Bogie did most of the talking-- again, whether this was shrewd dramatic technique or simply thrifty computer science I couldn't tell. Chuckling, he reminisced about his teenage pranks at Phillips' Academy in Andover, from which he'd flunked out, and, touching the scar on his lip, told me how he'd been wounded on a troopship in World War One. "Gave me a permanent lithp, kid, but tho what, eh?"
He honked his horn as we passed the shaded frontage of Schwab's drugstore, where scores of stars are alleged to have been discovered. Pola Negri, wearing a cloche hat with a little brim, was lounging outside, one leg crooked slightly forward so that the outline of her knee was visible through her pleated skirt. The movies' greatest vamp after Theda Bara recognized Bogart and waved. "There's one bundle of dame for you, uh?"
"Gosh," I said, turning to look as we sped past. The limpid-eyed star of the silents, known internationally as "The Magnificent Wildcat," blew us a kiss. "You must know everyone in this town."
He stared straight ahead for a second. "Yeah, kid, just about." He slowed the car and jammed the heel of his hand on the horn to get the attention of two men in suits walking ahead of us. They turned, and I realized they were George Raft and a youngish Ronald Reagan.
"What's up, gents?" called Bogie. They grinned and shook their heads at us. "Well . . ." drawled Reagan.
"Don't give me that aw-shucks malarkey, Ron," Bogart ragged him. "Sound off like you got a pair."
Reagan smiled mellowly, but there was a glint of steel in his eye. "There you go again, Humphrey," he chided.
Humphrey chuckled and gassed the engine. "Coupla tough guys," he said to me as we squealed past the two stars. "Fact, Georgie used to be a real hood before he started playing 'em on screen, did ya know that?"
I nodded."
You did? Whoo! And that Ronnie, Jesus, always on a soapbox about taxes and the military and yapping about some new dame with a Kewpie-doll face he has the flutters for, Jane Wyman. Jesus!" We turned up into the Hollywood hills. "You know why I'm going to a cathouse?" he asked.
I shook my head.
"I mean, I'm a married man, you know."
"Lauren Bacall," I said.
"Who?" he countered, and I realized he had yet to meet the stunning 18-year-old with the Chippendale gams, tawny blonde hair, full lips, and throaty voice who would become his fourth wife, bear him two children, and make him happy for the rest of his life.
"Sorry, my mistake."
"Mayo," he said. "Mayo Methot." He sucked the last of his cigarette, tossed it from the car, reached for the pack on the dash, and stuck another between his lips, lighting it with a wooden match struck against the maple door panel. "Sluggy, I call her. You've probably read about us in the mags. The Battling Bogarts. Hah."
"I have, yes."
"Tried to kill me twice already. She's off in London now, so I'm free to have a little fun on my own." I nodded nonjudgmentally, as cool as he, as he drew thoughtfully on his cigarette, letting the smoke hover beneath his nose for a moment before sucking it in. We negotiated a few more turns, and then he pulled the car over to a scrolled iron gate between two long concrete walls. He tapped the horn, and we waited, the sporty auto with the eagle hood ornament and spare holstered in the front fender idling contentedly except for a precessive little jerk every few cycles, probably a spark plug, I diagnosed. A few moments later a female voice with a German accent squawked, "Who is there?"
"Bogie."
A bell chimed, and the stately gates swung inward. We passed through them and followed a curving path through orange, elm, and avocado trees, then gardens, and finally through a vast carpet of lawn that came right up to a great stone mansion. We crunched around a blue gravel circle and stopped beneath an overhang supported by pillars. A youthful Mickey Rooney, wearing a red jacket, bow tie, and valet's cap, was standing there, smiling at us. Like Bogie, he was entirely digital yet wholly believable. Bogie turned off the engine, flipped Mickey the keys, and got out of the car. I followed suit and trailed Bogie to the door, glancing back briefly to watch Mr. Rooney drive off with the car, his shoulders jouncing enthusiastically, like Huck Finn with a new raft. As I walked behind Bogart, a fleeting reality attack reminded me that I was not actually traipsing the grounds of a magnificent estate but merely treading a conveyer belt in a machine pelted with a bad hair day's worth of wire yet drawing less juice than a toaster, but which, like anti-lock brakes tracking a skid, responded so unerringly to my gait, and its psuedospace so ideally to my gaze, that the illusion quickly reasserted dominance. This was indeed one heck of an assignment. "Good kid, that Mickey," offered Bogie. "I always give him a nice tip when I come here." A sly look. "Ready for some action, kid?"
"I guess," I said; and then the door opened, and before me, auraed in a sequined gown and a wrap of feathers like a hostess in a Gold Rush saloon, stood the establishment's mistress, played by no less than the supremely elegant, mysterious, and flawlessly pixelated Marlene Dietrich.
"Come in, boys," she greeted us. "How nice to see you again, Humphrey."
"Our pleasure, Madam," said Bogie, and he wasn't kidding about the madam part. As limned by Lamarr's staff of high-tech phreakers, the blue-eyed Capricorn brought an austere sensuality to her role, the amused ennui of a woman who, like Bogie, had seen it all and then some; who knew very well she was beautiful but treated it as something afar, frozen in marble atop somebody else's pedestal. Yet her reserve had a warm aspect to it, as well, evident in the maternal tenderness with which she cradled a small white poodle in the crook of one arm; while Bogie's own sensitive side expressed itself in his instinctive reaching out to pet the yipping animal, pulling back only when it snapped at him.
We passed through a tapestry-draped foyer and into a posh sitting room with vaulted ceilings, crystal chandeliers, mirrored walls, and swagged draperies. At Miss Dietrich's urging, we took seats around a marble coffee table and sipped minty tea served, in my own case at least, by one of the four unseen robotic arms that in virtual space belonged to Norma Shearer, MGM's reigning femme star of the 20's, appearing here in a cameo as a domestic.
"So," said Bogie with a smirk. "What's good today?"
A thin smile crossed Miss Dietrich's porcelain-doll face, and she touched his arm gently. "Ever do it with a gorilla, Bog?"
"Every time I sleep with Mayo." Marlene's eyes crinkled at the corners. "I'm talking about a giant one. The Great Ape himself."
"Kong?"
"And his beloved, Fay Wray."
Bogie looked at me. "What do you say, kid?"
"It's up to you, Mr. Bogart."
Bogart exchanged a knowing look with Miss Dietrich. "Kid's a little new at this."
Miss Dietrich rested her hand on my knee." You're going to love it, darling. Especially hyperPOV."
"HyperPOV?"
"It allows you to get intensely into any of the participants' POVs -- their points of view. It's a kind of erotic warp speed. You activate it by pressing three, four, four again, then one" -- she was referring, of course, to the buttons on the joystick I'd just about forgotten I was still clutching -- "and then button two lets you cycle through the characters as often as you like. To come out of hyperPOV, you click one twice."
"It does enhance the experience," agreed Bogart.
I looked at my fingers. "Three, four, four, one, then two."
"Right."
"One to exit."
"Right."
"Kid's on the ball," said Bogie, and then to the sublime Miss D., "Play it, Marl."
"Come with me," she said, and, setting down her dog and rising in an ado of feathers, she led us to what seemed to be an ordinary window and, like a hacker opening a file, flung the panes ajar. The daytime view beyond was erased in a trice and night fell instantaneously, not just within and without Marlene's adult entertainment emporium but encompassingly throughout my mind. It was like being reborn into another world. The drawing room, and Bogie too, were utterly gone, and I was in a steaming tropical jungle, fifty yards from a clearing in which scores of painted natives wearing masks and loincloths were frenziedly waving torches around a scantily-clad blonde woman tied to a post. Startled, I jerked my head about, but in every direction could see nothing but inky rainforest. The shrieks of exotic birds scraped my ears like trains making emergency stops, while drumbeats pummeled me with menacing wavefronts of sound. Sweat formed on my brow. My nose prickled with the scents of moss and lichen mixed with the hormonal essences of fear and sex. A spear missed my ear by inches and twanged into the tree behind which I was crouching. With both awful terror and thrilling anticipation, I realized I was on Skull Island in the year 1933, about to witness Miss Wray be sacrificed. I can not deny it: the bondage and peril of her situation was spectacularly sexual. There, before my ogling eyes, the shapely 25-year-old strained against her bonds, her eyes saucery with fright, her breasts heaving beneath her thin dress, the bottom of which had bunched up around her buttocks. The chanting and drumming grew louder, throbbing and ominous, probing my deepest Freudian cavities of race and sex and species and evoking primal dreamscapes of the dawn of time, when the facade I now call civilization was but the barest play of shadow on my crude amebic brain. From behind my tree I peeked in naked awe and terror, waiting, hoping, hungering for Miss Wray to be ravaged.
I jumped as three gongs rang out, then distant roars, then three descending notes, just like in the movie, signaling the impending entrance of the star, the Harry Reems of the monkey kingdom: Kong. The natives and Fay looked toward the sound, and I too, quaking as the thunderous bellows of the huge beast grew louder until, with a deafening snarl, the mighty gorilla burst from the jungle into the clearing. He was gargantuan, fifty feet tall from his scaly brown toes to the furry slope of his head. His eyes blazed, the dank caves that were his nostrils flared, and his rubbery lips peeled back to expose a beartrap of ivory fangs. As the natives scattered in terror, Kong gazed curiously at the strange creature tied to the post. He approached her, snorted, and beat his chest. Then he brought his head close to hers and brushed his huge wet nose across her breasts, as a St. Bernard might test a fallen sparrow.
Trembling, I pressed the designated keys and was instantly hyerPOVed behind Fay's eyes, the monster inches from my face, his hair grazing my cheeks like the bristles of brooms, his breath strong, musky, masculine, full of jungle sex and power, and as warm as the exhaust from a clothes dryer. I pressed two, became Kong, and was rewarded with an unparalleled vista of Fay's cleavage and a womanly aroma that sent shudders of desire through me. Little wonder the great ape was turned on. Overwhelmed, I keyed quickly back to omniscient and was returned to my post behind the tree. With elaborate care, the monkey sniffed Miss Wray from top to bottom. A mewl escaped his inner tube lips, the age-old sound of a lover smitten .Likewise, the fright in Fay's eyes softened, and it was clear she was attracted to Kong, as well. As with Spence and Hepburn, Gable and Harlow, Leigh and Olivier, and of course Bogie and Bacall, the electricity between these two was palpable.
With claws like small canoes, Kong freed Fay from her post, cradled the squirming lady gently in his giant paw, and turned toward the jungle. Jamming the thing back into hyperPOV, I zoomed past Fay and once again was Kong, five stories high and crashing through the trees as if they were cornstalks, clutching Miss Wray in my paw like a luscious lady lollipop. Wow. Nor was I alone in my appreciative voyeurism. "Hoo wah!" I heard from nowhere in particular, and realized it was Bogie in some cybercorner of my mind enjoying Exhibit A along with me. In that mode, I marched with my captive until I realized I was being pursued by a rescue party comprised of the filmmaker and crew who had come to Skull Island with Fay in the first place. The filmmaker was also in love with Fay -- join the club, Jack. Armed with guns and gas bombs, the group seemed confident of victory. Fat chance, if Kong and I had anything to say about it. We waited until they began crossing a deep ravine using a fallen tree as a bridge, then lifted the log like a pencil and sent all but two of them plunging to their deaths. On we marched, taking on a Tyrannosaurus rex in hand to hand combat -- a first for me -- and battling a huge lizard that tried to eat our beloved. We erred, however, when we put Fay down in order to fend off a winged Pterodactyl. The filmmaker rescued our ravishing heroine, and the two jumped off a cliff into the water below and escaped. Back we stomped to the clearing, biting, roaring, enraged, only to be gassed by the filmmaker and slowly fade into unconsciousness.
When the fog cleared, I was out of hyperPOV and peering omnisciently over Manhattan. Kong, who'd been brought to the metropolis as the "Eighth Wonder of the World," had broken free of his chains and was causing panic in the city as he searched for Fay. Finding her at last in a hotel, he smashed his paw through the window, kidnapped her, and carried her to Macy's on 34th Street, apparently wanting to take her shopping. Hounded by police, however, he was forced to take refuge by climbing the Empire State Building. And there, atop the then-tallest building in the world, the Scream Queen of the Thirties and the megachimp of all time consummated their tragic love.
Clutching the building's spire in his right hand and Fay in his left, the towering primate raised her to his face and gazed passionately into her eyes. She looked back at him with longing as the baboon hooted, slapped the base of the tower with his foot, shook its mast, and nibbled her earlobes, his hair pincushion erect as he displayed for her; and Fay, responding, began grooming him, picking, from his field of quills, lice the size of tadpoles.
"Don't make me wait any longer!" she begged him. Bringing her to his mouth, Kong extended his tongue and ran it tenderly along her cheek. Carefully hooking one of his fangs through the front of her bra, he snapped it off, exposing her perfect, goose-pimpled breasts. She moaned as he licked them in a series of upward swipes, as if slurping drips from an ice cream cone. I gave a start as a sound like a buzzsaw Dopplered past my ear from back to front, and a Navy fighter plane roared past me, its wing barely missing my temple. I could feel its wind and heat as it zoomed by, whipped beyond the Empire State Building, and dipped sharply to circle it. Another plane buzzed me to the left, and as I jerked away from it I was nearly beheaded by a plane to my right.
"Oh, honey!" I heard Fay sigh. Kong responded with a rumble of his own, lifted her higher, and fanged off her panties, leaving her fully naked except for her high-heeled shoes. Lovingly, he lifted her to his face and gently inserted one of her legs into his mouth.
"Oh God!" she whimpered, as he pulled her slowly in and out, sucking on her leg as if on a candy cane, pausing at the deepest point to close his eyes and inhale the aroma at the juncture where her legs met, a bouquet duly synthesized for my own perusal. He switched legs and did the same with the other. When she had been raised to an unbearable pitch of excitement, the skillful gorilla held her upright and snaked his tongue in and out between her legs like a cavorting dolphin."
Woo-hee!" I heard Bogart exclaim enthusiastically. Quite enthused myself, I hyperPOVed to the swaying, lurching Kong, was seized by an awful vertigo as I looked down the fifth of a mile to the street, and quickly returned to Fay just as the peerless animal was lowering his lady love to his crotch -- with the result that I suddenly found myself an inch away from a mighty joe young the size of a two-seater Cessna. As half a dozen droning warplanes circled the couple, the stupendous anthropoid slowly began moving Miss Wray up and down on his member, deep sounds of pleasure emanating from his throat with each stroke. From my, which is to say Fay's, point of view, the priapic landscape went by in a blur, and at this point I began to feel a deep blushing unease, like I was in a POV a straight guy was not supposed to visit, no matter this was just a professional call as a journalist, not to mention, in my capacity as one of the jurors for this ride, my civic duty.
I quickly POVed back to a more comfortable orientation, from which I watched Fay wrap her arms around the great rutted stalk and kiss and lick and nuzzle it as she rode chaotically up and down. Pausing to catch her breath, she seemed to notice the circling planes for the first time, and the flashes of fire bursting from their guns. "No!" she cried out to them. "Don't shoot!"
The ape gave a roar fit to blow down a small African nation. "No, I don't mean you, honey," Fay clarified quickly. "I want you to come. Oh, baby! I want you to come in my mouth. I want to taste it!"
One of the pilots, his head in a leather helmet, leaned from his plane and yelled, "Don't do it without protection! Here, take this!" A moment later, a parachute flew out of the cockpit, opened, and settled perfectly on target. Fay struggled with the lines, trying to untangle them. And just then, Kong reared back, let out a bombastic yowl, and the industrial-strength Navy-issue condom, with Fay still holding the lines, erupted into the air. I watched in awe as she jetted away from the Empire State Building, over the Chrysler building, past Times Square, and all the way to the Sheep Meadow of Central Park, where the chute reached its zenith and began settling slowly to earth. A minute later, Fay was deposited safely on the grass. She lay there for several moments, collecting herself, then rose to a sitting position. In the distance we could hear the bellowing of the valiant monkey as the fighter planes, no longer restrained by the woman's presence, let loose their combined firepower. There came one final agonized roar from her dear brute, then silence, then a deafening crash, as if a meteor had struck 34th Street. Even a mile and a half away the ground beneath us shuddered. Fay buried her face in her hands, sobbing.
But then a curious expression came over her face, and she wiped away the tears and murmured, in surprise and joy, "You've come home!"
For a moment I was confused by the sudden emotional shift, as if the ride's scriptwriters had omitted some essential element of plot. But then, as my POV dollied back to reveal her entire naked form, I saw what it was had brightened her mood. Between her legs, comforting Miss Wray as only another woman can, was perhaps the most famous and beloved female star in motion picture history. Abandoning herself utterly to pleasure, Fay fell back on the grass, brought the back of her hand to her forehead, closed her eyes, and opened her mouth wide in ecstasy." Lassie!" she screamed.
Chapter Two
With a slow dissolve and a "Hoo-hah!" overlap in Bogart, the program defaulted to an impeccably portrayed virtual courtroom, where Katherine Hepburn, straight out of "Adam's Rib," rose starchily from the prosecutor's table, traversed the front of the courtroom, paused to ponder the pistachio ceiling, then marched back to the other side and paused again, erect and unsmiling. "Filth!" she proclaimed. "Unadulterated smut! Absolutely disgusting!" Her brown butterfly jacket was cinched crisply at the waist, her hair was bunned severely, and her plain black pumps hoisted her to an imposing five-ten and a half, their tapping now the only sound in the hushed courtroom as she paced the hardwood floor like Ahab the deck of the Pequod.
All eyes were glued to her, the stenographer poised almost painfully above his instrument as he waited for her to speak, the Honorable Spencer Tracy following her movements patiently from the bench, defense attorney Jimmy Stewart pausing in his consultation with his client, the spectator gallery enrapt. The grand lady of the cinema certainly knew how to hold an audience. At last, she moseyed over to the jury box and looked at each of us in turn, silently imprinting us during those seconds with her air of breeding, authority, and cool intelligence. It was from this Olympus, then, that she launched her opening statement in United States v. "Bogie Does Hollywood" -- the cutting-edge virtual reality ride which I'd been engaged to review, and which had been cunningly programmed to interactively, erotically, comically, and with impeccable legal acumen decide the legitimacy of . . . well, itself.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," she began, and I took a deep, nervous breath as she stared directly at me, unconsciously touching the curved frame across my face as one might adjust the lay of one's glasses. As mentioned earlier, I was seated in a comfortable gimbaled chair, Haitianly dreadlocked with a tangle of rainbow cables, which of course I couldn't see now, and sprouting four articulated arms that on cue flexed in on me like the legs of an expiring insect to administer various tactile stimuli. Working in flawless synch with these limbs were the thousands of tactors per square inch on the inner surface of the body suit I'd been sealed into, representing a taxel density equal to that of the thousands of nerve endings on my skin itself – total proprioceptive resolution, the specs called it --rendering the devilish apparatus capable of impersonating anything from a caress to a kick in the butt.
My state-of-the-art bondage was, as I've indicated, strictly professional. The world's leading computer game company, Lamarr Interactive Reanimation, Inc., based in California, had produced a "ride" so exponentially surpassing anything ever created before that its legal, social, and marketing implications were largely unexplored. As a freelance entertainment writer with some modest knowledge of film history, computer animation, and post-mortem intellectual property law, I had been hired by a well known online entertainment site to audit, which is to say interactively "ride," "Bogie Does Hollywood" and convey my findings to its surfers. It had sounded like a fun assignment, but even I, who'd ridden these things before, was unprepared for the total immersiveness of this one, and just prior to Exhibit A I'd reacted with a jolt of fear as the minutely-rendered bailiff Boris Karloff – rhomboid-jawed, amply stitched, and wielding a pair of gnarled hands – entered the digitally packed Los Angeles Federal District courtroom, glared at me in the jury box from beneath the Neanderthal eaves that were his eyebrows, and barked, "All rise! This court is now in session, the Honorable Spencer Tracy presiding."
I had bolted quickly to my feet, my actual feet, watching in awe as the famed, long-deceased actor, cloaked in a black robe, entered from the door to the judge's chambers and swept with graceful authority to his seat behind the bench. "Be seated," he'd said, giving me a conspiratorial wink, and I had complied, becoming aware at that point that I was not just a member but the foreman, no less, of a reanimated virtual jury, and that my fellow panelists consisted of a pantheon of digitally reconstituted legends from the Golden Age of Hollywood: Henry Fonda, straight from the jury room of "12 Angry Men," a paranoid-eyed Peter Lorre, tough-guy Edward G. Robinson, W.C. Fields soused and cynical beside a debonair Fred Astaire, Helen Hayes as a sweet old lady, Gloria Swanson as the has-been actress of "Sunset Boulevard," pinup girl Rita Hayworth, the ever-imperiled serial heroine Pearl White, silent star Lillian Gish, and, to my immediate left, her supple hand nested in mine, Judy Garland at the peak of her fame and beauty.
Here was a perk I hadn't expected. Miss Garland, who was at this moment nuzzling my cheek, wore a yellow skirt and jacket, white blouse, turquoise earrings, and a pink bow in her rich auburn hair, and it appeared indisputable from the way she pressed her shoulder against mine that she was primed and willing to meet me in St. Louis on a moment's notice and croon "Clang clang clang went the trolley" into my eager ears. She smelled faintly of Faberge, the cologne she is known to have favored, and she was gazing at me in a soft, sparkly way that suggested that perhaps, when the trial was over, it would not be impossible for us to get to know one another better.
"The State intends to show," Miss Hepburn was declaring, "that the interactive virtual reality ride' Bogie Does Hollywood' -- in which, indeed, we are ourselves embedded at this very moment . . . but let us not get ridiculously metaphysical or infinitely regressive here -- along with its producer, Aldous Lamarr, seated over there with counsel" – she pointed piercingly to the defense table where the synthesized accused, bland as an accountant in a drab gray suit, looked back at her without expression-- "is guilty of willfully and knowingly violating numerous laws of the United States of America, as well as all norms of common decency. We will show that the ride's six episodes, the first of which it has been our unpleasant experience to have just witnessed, are obscene, libelous, exploitative, defamatory and degrading to women; are in violation of countless statutes outlawing sodomy, bestiality, and prostitution; and constitute an infringement of numerous plaintiffs' rights of privacy, copyright, trademark, and post-mortem publicity." She strolled regally while we assimilated this, ran a domestic finger across Tracy's desk, as if checking for dust, then continued earnestly. "In the larger sense, ladies and gentlemen, what is on trial here is reanimation technology itself, which we hold to be as manifestly evil as the genetic engineering of human beings and therefore patently and egregiously harmful to society as a whole. Indeed, as the cost of computer-generated synthetic actors drops, real actors and actresses will inevitably be put out of work, forcing them to toil for unacceptably low wages. In short, reanimation technology is nothing less than theatracide; it will spell the end of dramaturgy as we know it. And this is just one of its evils; we shall illuminate many more in the course of this trial. In remedy, therefore, the People are seeking the destruction of all software and hardware pertaining to this particular 'ride' -- of which, as I've noted, we are all an integral, electronic part, arguably amounting to our collective suicide, but again, let us leave that to the philosophers -- and the banning of reanimation technology altogether. We further seek the maximum fine and imprisonment for the perpetrators. Thank you."
The judge nodded and waited till Miss Hepburn returned to her seat before looking to the defense table. "Mr. Stewart."
"Th-thank you, Your Honor." The tall, lanky star nodded respectfully to the prosecutor, walked slowly to the jury box, and rested his arms on the railing. He wore a light brown suit with wide lapels and trouser cuffs, and a solid rust tie. He inspired immediate trust in me, and I sensed my fellow jurors felt the same. Mr. Stewart leaned on the rail for several seconds, collecting his thoughts. Then he shook his head, as if suggesting the charges just hurled at his client were so outlandish, so mucky and mean-spirited, so downright twisted and unfair that it was going to take a heroic effort on his part to even begin to clear the air for us. "L-l-ladies and gentlemen," he said, still shaking his head, "Lamarr Interactive Reanimation, along with Mr. Lamarr himself, are totally innocent of every charge made in this courtroom this morning. Mr. Lamarr's sole motive in producing the virtual reality ride here on trial was to educate, uplift, and entertain. The charges being levied against him are petty, small-minded, and harassing. They--" Stewart looked pained. "Folks, my client is accused of abusing the rights and sensibilities of deceased entertainers and of the public which still clings fondly to their memories. I submit that it imprecisely the other way round. It is freedom of expression that is being trampled, not just Mr. Lamarr's, but yours, as well. This trial is no more than a witch—"
"Objection!" snapped Hepburn. "Your Honor--"
"--by the same type of mentality that brought Galileo to trial during the Dark Ages. Therefore--"
"Oh, he's no Galileo, for heaven's sake!" decried Hepburn. "He's a sleazy, high-tech pornographer, that's all."
"Overruled, Miss Hepburn," said Tracy. "Please allow the defense to finish its opening statement."
She squared her padded shoulders and glared at the judge, as unbending as the oak that was her own stated self-image, yet briefly touching one of her small earrings. For all her severity, I thought, she was an extremely pretty and sensitive woman. Stewart waited a few seconds to be sure he had the floor. "Therefore," he concluded mildly, "we intend to show, point by point, Exhibit by Exhibit, that the State's case is specious and unfounded. My client is innocent of all charges. Thank you."
"Thank you, Mr. Stewart," said Tracy, as the defense attorney returned to his seat. "The State may call its first witness."
"Thank you, Your Honor," said Miss Hepburn, rising. "The state calls to the stand a man whose illustrious career in Hollywood has spanned decades, from the silents to the talkies, whose name is written in letters of fire and gold across the entire history of motion pictures, whose epics with their casts of thousands are inscribed forever in the annals of cinema, but who has now elected to tarnish that reputation in the service of felony and smut; a man who needs no introduction, who--"
"Your Honor!" complained Stewart from his seat, "if the man needs no introduction, then--?"
"Miss Hepburn--" Tracy interceded gently. "This is a trial, not Oscar night. Please just bring on your witness."
"Of course, Your Honor, the People call Hollywood's greatest showman and the director of the colossal wad of sewage of which you've just seen a portion -- Cecil B. DeMille!"
A rustling in the courtroom was quickly silenced by Tracy as the near-mythic director entered through a side door and strode to the witness stand, followed by a flunky carrying a canvas director's chair with the filmmaker's name and the warning "Keep Off" stenciled on its front and back and a second assistant carrying a megaphone. DeMille wore a khaki shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled to his elbows, and a pair of tan riding breeches that tapered into a pair of calf-high boots. Some sort of optical sighter hung from a leather thong around his neck. He was a moderate-sized yet imposing man with a fierce spirited, autocratic look, the energy of a young bull, and a large head that was shiny bald except for a graying fringe around the back and sides. With commanding presence, he waited while his man replaced the standard witness chair with his own seat. Settling into it, he gazed critically about the room, clearly dissatisfied with the composition and lighting, then brought his framer to his eye and spent several minutes scoping shots, until Mr. Tracy finally saw fit to move the proceedings along. "Ready when you are, C.B.," he said, dipping his head ironically to the legendary impresario.
"Certainly," said DeMille. "Pleasure to be here." Taking his megaphone from his man, he called, "Places everybody! This is a take! Give me everything you've got! Camera!"
Mr. Karloff stepped before him. "Do you solemnly swear to--"
"Boris, you know very well I do," DeMille dismissed him with a wave. He speared his finger at the prosecutor. "Action!" he told her through his megaphone.
Unintimidated, Miss Hepburn moved right in on him. "Mr. DeMille," she began in her rapid-fire, Bryn Mawr delivery, "are you or are you not the director of the ride known by the title 'Bogie Does Hollywood?'"
"You bet I am. Best thing I've ever done --excepting, of course, "King of Kings" back in '27, which was in a class by itself."
"And who hired you to direct this project?"
"Aldous Lamarr, the producer."
"Is Mr. Lamarr in the courtroom at this time?"
"You know as well as I do he is."
"Would you point to him please?"
DeMille signaled to his assistant, and the man pointed to the defendant.
"Mr. DeMille, I asked you to identify Mr. Lamarr."
DeMille frowned and looked at Tracy.
"Please," said Tracy amiably.
"He's sitting right there."
"Beside Mr. Stewart?"
"That's right."
"And he hired you, correct me if I'm mistaken, because of your well-known stature and success as a Hollywood director."
"No picture of mine ever failed to make a profit, if that's what you mean."
"And you're also an acknowledged master of spectacular effects, is that true?"
"An understatement, to say the least . I parted the Red Sea in "The Ten Commandments" in 1923 and split the thing again in the remake in '54. No one's ever done that before."
"I've heard Moses took a crack at it," observed Miss Hepburn dryly.
"Once," DeMille clarified. "I did it twice."
"In other words, DeMille is greater than Moses."
"We worked in different fields," he allowed generously.
"All right, but my point is to establish that you're an expert at creating cinematic effects, a master of fantasy and illusion."
"I think that's a fair assessment."
"And knowledgeable about all aspects of moviemaking, including its legal ramifications."
"Thoroughly."
"Including the law of copyright and what does and does not constitute infringement?"
"Certainly."
"And Mr. Lamarr engaged you for this project with full knowledge of your experience and expertise in these areas."
"Yes."
"And what exactly were his instructions to you?"
"He said he wanted me to goose cyberspace like it's never been goosed before."
"Ah, cyberspace."
Miss Hepburn paced a few steps, then turned back to the witness, her arms clasped in front of her. "Isn't that the peculiar locale wherein this so-called 'ride' takes place?"
"Nothing peculiar about it. Ever make a telephone call, Miss Hepburn?"
The prosecutor stiffened. "I've made many telephone calls, Mr. DeM--"
"Then you've been in cyberspace. It's a fantasy space wherein consensual hallucination takes place; the juncture of digital information and human perception." He brought his finder to his eye. "Step a little to the left, would you?"
"What?"
"You're casting a shadow on Mr. Tracy. And flip that strand of hair back over your head."
Hepburn ran her hand over her coil of reddish hair, then quickly snapped it away.
"Much better, young fella. Yes," he elaborated," cyberspace refers to the imaginary world inside the computer with which the human mind can interface and interact. Indeed, cyberspace includes the space within the mind, as well. The word is an amalgam of the Greek kybern, meaning 'to steer,' and space, which of course--" He looked to the bench and spread his arms in a charade of vastness.
Tracy peered over his glasses at the director. "The court knows what space is, Mr. DeMille. Proceed, Miss Hepburn."
"Now, Mr. DeMille," said the prosecutor, "I'll deal with issues of privacy, exploitation, and defamation later in these proceedings, but for now I want to concentrate on the copyright issue."
"Go for it," the director encouraged her, hitting his stomach with his fist. "Let me have it from here. Camera three, dolly in for a medium. Lines!"
Hepburn looked to me and rolled her eyes. "Mr. DeMille," she went on, "for the ride entitled 'Bogie Does Hollywood' you recreated the likenesses, voices, mannerisms, and perceived public personas of deceased actors, did you not?"
"I did."
"And proceeded to place these reconstructed individuals in roles and situations of your own choosing and design."
"Yes."
"Roles of which the originals may not have approved."
"Conceivably."
"And acting performances which might not have been up to their standards."
"I leave that to the critics."
"Did you ask for or receive these actors' permissions to do this?"
"They were dead, ma'am," said DeMille, "and the dead do not return phone calls -- even mine." The spectators tittered, and DeMille looked at them sharply. "Quiet, quiet, quiet!" he admonished them. "We're trying to take a scene here! Go on, please."
"But their rights were not dead, Mr. DeMille. Copyright is descendible. Somebody owns those rights."
"Presumably."
"Mr. DeMille, are you familiar with title seventeen of the United States Code, section one-oh-six,subsections one, three, four, and five, which state that a copyright owner has the exclusive right of reproduction, distribution, public performance, and display of his or her work?"
"I am."
"Exclusive right."
"I heard you the first time."
"And that, in addition, subsection two grants the copyright owner the same exclusive right to create a derivative work?"
"Yes."
"Are you the copyright owner of any of the works in which the actors you've synthesized appear?"
"No, I am not."
"Yet you used these works, did you not, to recreate these actors and actresses in 'Bogie Does Hollywood'?"
"We used them as reference materials, yes.""And what types of works, specifically, did you make reference to?"
"Various types."
"Photographs?"
"Yes."
"Of Miss Wray?"
"Yes."
"And?"
"Frames from "King Kong," clips from her other movies -- she starred in more than a hundred, with such leading men as Ronald Coleman, Joel McCrea, George Raft, and Gary Cooper – soundtrack recordings . . . we accessed a variety of sources."
"And after you'd acquired these various reference materials, all of them owned by others, you did what with them?"
"Computerized them."
"You mean, you entered them into your computers."
"Yes."
"Allow me," said Hepburn, "to quote from the final report of the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works. It states, '. . . the placement of any copyrighted work into a computer is the preparation of a copy.' Is this whatyou did, Mr. DeMille?"
"Yes."
"Without seeking or acquiring permission and without offering or paying any compensation, is that correct?"
"Yes."
"Thank you." She turned airily to the defense table. "Your witness."
Mr. Stewart uncurled himself from his chair, nodded to the prosecutor, and approached the witness stand. He smiled warmly at the director, in whose epic circus picture, "The Greatest Show on Earth," he'd played the part of a clown. "Well, well, well," he drawled. "Cecil B. DeMille. It's sh-sure nice to see you again."
"It would be a sight nicer," returned DeMille, "if you could remember that Cecil rhymes with wrestle, not easel."
"Sorry." Stewart chuckled apologetically. "N-now, Mr. DeMille, you've just stated that you transferred certain copyrighted works into your computers, is that correct?"
"Yes."
"Would you describe how you did this?"
"We used a combination of methods," said DeMille.
"Photogrammetry?"
"That was one, yes."
"Would you explain this procedure to the court, please?"
"Certainly. Photogrammetry involves comparing common points in two or more photos taken from different angles and instructing our computer to calculate a three-dimensional coordinate of the point. Eventually, a complete map of the individual's face in any orientation is created."
"And you created such a map."
"I did."
"For Fay Wray."
"Yes."
"As well as for the other actors in this ride."
"For some of them, yes."
"So, you used other methods for others, is that correct?"
"Yes."
"Would you describe these other methods, please?"
"We hired sculptors to produce busts of the actors, after which grids were projected onto the models and scanned by our computers, thus creating 3D models."
"And, as with the photogrammetry, you used photographs and film stills for reference."
"Yes."
"Were any other methods used?"
"Yes. Direct computer sculpting."
"Describe it, please."
"Animators sculpted the actors' features directly into the computer using something called a two degree of freedom input device to do the sculpting and then a six-degree of freedom device to orient the digital model spatially."
"Again, using photos, film clips, and so forth for reference."
"Yes."
"Did you hire impersonators to reproduce the voices?"
"No, although we could have. Instead, we elected to analyze the vocal patterns of the original actors electronically and recombine them into new dialog."
"Now, tell me, Mr. DeMille, when copying from these reference works, both audio and visual, by any of the various methods you've described, did you at any time copy a particular line of speech?"
"No."
"Did you copy a particular pose?"
"No."
"Did you copy any particular lighting effects?"
"No."
"Did you copy the settings or backgrounds?"
"No."
"Isn't it true, Mr. DeMille, that all you copied were reference points?"
"Yes."
Mr. Stewart scratched his chin. "Well, what's all the to-do about, then?" he asked, turning to the prosecutor. "It appears that, although Mr. DeMille copied from the reference materials, he did not copy any of their copyrightable elements. He merely plagiarized points, lines, angles, and distances. And geometry, Miss Hepburn, has been in the public domain since Euclid's copyright on it ran out two thousand years ago!"
A murmur billowed through the courtroom. "And with regard to voices, what he copied were timbre, decibel, phoneme, vowel, and consonant --aspects of language which have been the common property of human beings since we came here."
"Mr. Stewart--!"
"All Mr. DeMille has appropriated, Miss Hepburn, is data . He's helped himself to facts, and facts are not copyrightable, only specific expression is."
"Mr. Stewart--!"
"Your witness," said Stewart. Grandstanding a bit, he smiled in my direction, the genial country lawyer besting the sophisticated prosecutor with down-home wisdom and humor. I could sense the steam rising within Miss Hepburn.
Marching to the witness stand, she said, "Mr. DeMille, let's call a spade a spade, shall we? Like so many celluloid Lazurus's, you have resurrected actors from the dead and stolen their personas. You may, as Mr. Stewart claims, have begun your heist with parameters, but what you've ended up with is a simulation of the original that is indistinguishable from the original. Clearly--" She stopped short. "Your Honor, what is going on here?"