The flame of the candle is flickering tonight as I write beside it. I suppose that brings me back to the subject of my previous blog: Laurel and Hardy and their movies. When cinema began, around 1900, movies were first called ‘the flickers’.  That was because the projection machines were primitive. The image moved but it flickered, like the flame of my candle is at the moment. movies were very short. So the action was quick, far quicker than in a play on the stage. It was their attraction to audiences originally, I imagine, and still is today of course.

But it was also the sheer miracle of being able to see a picture that moves. When I was a child and a young man, going to the cinema was still called ‘going to the pictures’ (i.e.) to see the moving pictures and, to return to ‘the flickers’, going to the cinema was sometimes also called ‘going to the flicks.’ Another word for a movie, a film, was ‘a picture’ and still is. We still talk about a star’s next ‘picture’ or that was a ‘great picture’ and the motion picture industry.

However, originally the word ‘movies’ didn’t refer to the end product or to cinema in general. The ‘movies’ were the people who made them, the first colony who came out to Hollywood. It was a derogatory term. Those film pioneers who arrived in that quiet rural suburb of Los Angeles weren’t to be trusted, weren’t respectable: ‘Oh he or she is one of those movies,’ residents would say.          

A few years ago I wrote a play about the early days of cinema. It was called ‘Mickey and the Movies’. I see now that my title had that double meaning of ‘Movies’: the films and the people who make them. In the play, Mickey Malone is an Irish immigrant boy in New York who gets himself involved in a studio there and eventually find himself going with some of the ‘Movies’ to Hollywood. By accident he becomes a child star. I was trying to portray the improvisational side of filming comedy in silent films: a basic scenario, a camera and improvised action (which was how our dear friends Stan and Ollie began).

When I wrote my own scenario, I wanted to include a scene where Mickey sees his first ever moving picture. I wanted to try to capture the wonder of seeing a picture that moved for the first time. And it is that wonder, that magic of celluloid (what the director Orson Welles called the ‘ribbon of a dream’) that intoxicates Mickey and leads him to take any old job at a studio in Fort Lee, just outside New York before ending up in Hollywood.

My play kept flickering in my mind as I watched the movie ‘Stan and Ollie’ the other week and it has come back to me since. Maybe I will revive it as my final production next year. I have been thinking about it, though it will need an extensive re-write. The script begins with Mickey and his father and brothers on the ship from Ireland to New York. But if I rewrote it the play would begin in the present (with a modern day descendent of Mickey) and in an entirely different location.

A year or so after we did the production, I was in LA, staying in West Hollywood for a few days and I found myself with a morning to kill before catching my plane home. I was in that limbo we’ve all been through: what do you do with your final few hours  before you go to the airport. My dear friend and collaborator on ‘Mickey’, Phil Watkins, had given me a book on the silent star Rudolf Valentino as a gift after the production. So I thought I’d see if I could find dear old Rudy’s grave in my final hours in Hollywood. He was one of those stars, like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, who tragically died young (aged 28) and he was buried, after unprecedented outpourings of public grief in both New York (where he passed away) and in L.A. (where he lived and worked) in the old Hollywood Memorial Park. The old cemetery had been beautifully restored but with the new kitsch name of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.  So off I went to find him.

The grounds were so extensive, I could have spent all day there. In the dazzling sunlight, the beautifully manicured lawns were so green it was like they were filmed in technicolor. And there was a huge lake with swans in the middle. When I went through the gate I was given a map which showed where everyone was resting. So many stars, moguls, directors, writers, musicians dotted among the grounds and in several huge mausoleums, which is where I eventually found Rudy.

As I sat on a bench resting for a minute and looked over the verdant green it seemed like one big Hollywood party. Except there were no more cocktails, scheming, or intrigue or romance or just plain fun but only silence, the silence of the grave. All that intense striving in whatever direction was over now. Like the end of a movie, I was just left with the cast of characters, with the names, either elegantly carved on marble monuments or engraved more modestly on brass plaques in the earth. One I stumbled over, I found very moving: it said ‘Hannah Chaplin’ and ‘Mother’. It was Charlie Chaplin’s mother who had been brought over from London by Charlie and his brother Sid. It appeared that she had died there in 1928. Seeing that plaque led me to write a play about Charlie’s early life.

As I sat there in the heat, a chill of sadness came over me. It was the accumulated  tragedy behind some of their lives I guess. I found myself saying a prayer for them and a thank you for all the pleasure they had given me through their work. I was there to pay my respects, I realised.

It was sad in another way too, because many of them were big stars with legions of fans and out there in the public gaze. But now, of course, so many were forgotten (except to film historians, students of cinema and movie buffs like me).  I thought it would be sobering for some of today’s stars with their big egos and tantrums to sit on that bench, to remind themselves of their own mortality, to remind themselves that they might be forgotten too.

And that is where I would begin my script: with a descendent of Mickey looking for his grave in the opulent lawns of a Hollywood cemetery, looking for Mickey the forgotten star.

I used to have a big old book, when I was eleven or twelve years old. It was called ‘Immortals of the Screen’ and had stills and photos of old movie stars in it: basically any stars who had passed away before 1966, when the book was published. It included a lot of silent stars and the book helped nurture in me an interest in film history. Not a few of the stars in that book were buried in that cemetery. And in a way they are immortal: through the movies they appeared in. We can still see them and hear them and study them, especially the great ones. And we can still be entertained by them.

Moreover, so many great movies have been lovingly restored and are now streamed or on TV or DVD or blue ray. I was watching the blue ray of one of my favourites: ‘Casablanca’ the other day. It looked more pristine than it probably did when it was first released in 1942.  The black and white photography glowed and Ingrid Bergman looked more beautiful then ever and even Bogart looked reasonably dashing. And my favourite actor, Claude Rains was as witty and suave as ever. But to think that I was watching actors from 77 years ago. Their performances were still alive, thanks to moving pictures. And here they were performing in my own lounge thanks to later technology, enabling me, if I was so inclined, to be able to watch them over and over again; to enjoy their performances even more or to study them. It is the same, of course, with recording and the human voice. We have over a century of recordings of musicians’ performances too. Quite a miracle isn’t it?  A kind of resurrection. A shimmer of the true resurrection which I believe in.

In a few days time I shall be leading the annual school Drama tour to Budapest, which I have mentioned in a previous blog. Therefore I shall be in Hungary, known to Marcus as Pannonia, where he led his legions. It will be appropriate, then that hopefully my next blog will be written there, between performances.

Ave atque Vale until the next blog.

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Neilus Aurelius