een around for a while...."
"'Around for a while,' I like that. That's a euphemism is what that is."
"And here I am."
"Well, I'll tell you why they sent you to me. You want to know?"
"I--"
"I'll tell you. What I am is the unofficial studio historian at Metro. Meaning I've been here nearly forty years and if I were making real money or had anything to do with production they'd've fired my butt years ago. But I'm not and I don't so I'm not worth the trouble to boot me out. So I hang around here and answer questions from pretty young students. You don't mind, I say that?"
"Say it all you want."
"Good. Now the message said--do I believe it?-- you've got some questions about Manhattan Is My Beat?"
"That's right."
"Well, that's interesting. You see a lot of students or reporters interested in Scorsese, Welles, Hitch. And you can always count on Fassbinder, Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola. Three, four years ago we got calls about Cimino. That Heaven's Gate thing. Oh, we got calls! But I don't think anybody's ever done anything about the director of Manhattan Is My Beat. Hal Reinhart. Anyway, I digress. What do you need to know?"
"The movie was true, wasn't it?"
Weinhoff's eyes crinkled. "Nu, that's the whole point. That's why it's such a big-deal movie. It wasn't shot on sets, it was based on a real crime, it didn't cast Gable, Tracy, Lana Turner, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, or any of the other sure-draw stars. You understand? None of the actors that'd guarantee that a film, no matter it was a good film, it was a bad film, that a film opened, you know what I mean, opened?"
"Sure." Rune's pen sped across the pages of a notebook. She'd bought it a half hour before, had written Film Noir 101 on the cover, then smeared the ink with her palm to age it, like a master forger. "It means people go to see it no matter what it's about."
"Right you are. Now, Manhattan Is My Beat was probably the first of the independents."
"Why don't you hear about it nowadays?"
"Because it was also the first of the bad independents. You've seen it?"
"Four times."
"What, you also tell your dentist to drill without novocaine? Well, if you saw it that many times, you know it didn't quite get away from the melodrama of the big studio crime stories of the thirties. The director, Reinhart, couldn't resist the shoeshine boy's mother falling downstairs, the high camera angles, the score hitting you over the head you should miss a plot twist. So other films got remembered better. But it was a big turning point for movies."
His enthusiasm was infectious. She found herself nodding excitedly.
"You ever see Boomerang? Elia Kazan. He shot it on location. Not the greatest story in the world for a crime flick--I mean, there's not much secret who did it. But the point isn't what the story was but how it was told. That was about a real crime too. It was a--whatta you call it?--evolutionary step up from the studio-lot productions Hollywood thought you had to do. Manhattan Is My Beat was of the same ilk.
"Oh, you gotta understand, the era had a lot to do with it too, I mean, shifting to movies like that. The War, it robbed the studios of people and materials. The big-production set pieces and epics--uh-uh, there was no way they could produce those. And it was damn good they did. You ask me--hey, who's asking me, right?-- but I think movies like Manhattan helped move movies out of the world of plays and into their own world.
"Boomerang. The House on 92nd Street. Henry Hathaway did that. Oh, he was a gentleman, Henry was. Quiet, polite. He made that film, I guess, in forty-seven. Manhattan Is My Beat was in that movement. It's not a good film. But it's an important film."
"And they were all true, those films?" Rune asked.
"Well, they weren't documentaries. But, yeah, they were accurate. Hathaway worked with the FBI to do House."
"So, then, if there was a scene in the movie, say the characters went someplace, then the real-life characters may have gone there?"
"Maybe."
"Did you know anyone who worked on Manhattan? I mean, know them personally?"
"Sure. Dana Mitchell."
"He played Roy, the cop."
"Right, right, right. Handsome man. We weren't close but we had dinner two, three times. Him and his second wife, I think it was. Charlotte Goodman we had signed here for a couple films in the fifties. I knew Hal of course. He was a contract director for us when studios still did that. He also did--"