Page 49 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 19

this. If any other mystery hides here, it’s who is Magnus Bishop. Pay atten-
tion, I tell my students. There’s a quiz at the end.
Somehow backtracking the facts of Ryan and Kick as a Famous Cou-
ple is irresistible. I often tell my film students that it never offends me that
a particular lifestyle is presented on screen as long as it makes dramatic
sense and the lighting is good. Despite what Ryan’s starstruck mother
taught him, life is not always as pat as the movies. So let me continue,
hopefully with a compassion for people who once were my friends, the
job of the editor. That’s all that remains, you see, when you’re not as much
of an urbane traveler as you think you are, and they leave you behind to
pick up after them.
All I know for sure is that no matter what they once were, they’ll never
ever be the same. That’s why, after all, everyone comes to San Francisco.
This is how love, or what passes for love on this planet, goes haywire.

8

Movies are made or betrayed by editors sitting alone at their Mov-
ieolas viewing and reviewing hours of footage. A sequence is picked here.
A close shot inserted there. The editor punctuates the director’s hours of
linear footage with sometimes no more than the subliminal flash of a sin-
gle frame. The cinematographer’s angles are cut to intensify the perspec-
tive on a scene. Actors’ timing is re-paced. Character becomes dramatic,
comic, romantic, elusive, mysterious, more vulnerable, more vicious. Plot
tightens, or jump-cuts to the surreal. Emotions are led, guided, seduced,
betrayed. Beauty and terror collide. Scenes juxtapose, repeat, invert. Vil-
lains ride unrepentant into the sunset. Beauty takes a fall on a banana
peel. Editors, usually women in the film industry, give American movies
their final glossy vision. Under a scissors, decisive as the Three Fates, places
and people appear and disappear. Faces end up on the cutting room floor.
These days, everyone in America is writing a screenplay. Ryan’s was
titled Half of Noah’s Ark, “Because,” Ryan said, “San Francisco, especially
the Castro, has one of every kind.” All of us play the lead in the movie
we’re living. If that conceit of our times has any truth, Warhol made it
quite clear that our movies are at best short subjects. “Everyone,” Warhol
playing Mephistopheles, had whispered into a hanky over a microphone,
“will be famous for fifteen minutes.”
Ryan had the good sense to avoid moving to Hollywood when he left
the Midwest for California. Instead of El Lay, he took his life on location
to San Francisco. “I’d never move to Hollywood,” he said. “You can get

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