Maddie Ellis and the Malibu Movie Colony is an old-fashioned mystery serial set during the end of the silent movie era. In chapter 15, writer Maddie Ellis’ role in rescuing “Sands of Afar,” the troubled film production that brought her back to Hollywood, is almost finished, but the troubles she has encountered at her new Malibu Colony home are far from over. Join us for Chapter 15 of TNT’s original, old-fashioned monthly mystery serial, “Maddie Ellis and the Malibu Movie Colony.”
Despite a sleepless night, Maddie was up early. A brief, cold plunge into the ocean revived her. So did the sight of a beach that was entirely devoid of beachgoers, celebrities, and the sound of gramophones. She was washed, dressed, and on her way to Mammoth Pictures in less than an hour, but she couldn’t help thinking about the intruder of the night before as she drove into town. If the four cocoa tins had held contraband it was gone now, but the anxiety still lingered, and there wasn’t much she could do about it. She imagined going to the constable’s office in Malibu and telling the station captain that she was worried someone was smuggling contraband in her house because all of the pink tins of cocoa were now yellow. No, she needed more evidence if she wanted to be taken seriously. Maddie resolutely forced it to the back of her mind and focused on the peace and beauty of the coast route.
It was just as well her day had a tranquil start. The rest of it was a pitched battle: defending her plot choices, hammering out scenes and dialogue for the title cards, and watching the existing reels over and over in an effort to determine what could be salvaged and what needed to be cut or reshot.
The modern motion picture was a carefully orchestrated effort. Each production was broken down into its separate parts and parceled out to the studio’s different departments. Writers were usually brought in at the beginning of the process, but Maddie was there to fix the mess left by her predecessors.
Many of her suggestions were practical: placing the Sultan on his throne and having him send his minions to do his deeds instead of doing them himself to spare the actor’s broken leg, and showing just the Djinn’s face in the jewel, instead of the whole whole actor appearing in a skimpy costume and a not-very-convincing puff of smoke.
Some decisions were ruthless. Maddie cut out many extraneous characters, including a live monkey and a pair of precocious street urchins intended to provide comic relief.
“They’re the sons of one of our investors,” Hoffmann lamented.
“You can keep them in the precession scene,” Maddie said. “Their presence isn’t doing anything to move the plot forward, Mr Hoffmann, and we need time to accommodate the new ending.” Privately, she thought the monkey was the only one of the trio with any glimmer of acting ability.
She wished she could cut out leading man Johnny Roberts, too, but he really was necessary. She settled for altering the character he played from a standard-issue action hero to a conflicted man who wrestles with his better angels. Changing Marco Malgari’s character to a protagonist instead of antagonist helped with the balance, and provided an opportunity to develop a secondary love story between his character and Clarice’s. It would give the narrative more emotional resonance, and a stronger motivation for Malgari’s character than evil for evil’s sake.
“It never works,” Maddie told Hoffmann. “Not even Shakespeare could pull off a ‘plain-dealing villain’ who is evil without a motive. Besides, the Sultan has more than enough greed and ambition.”
Marco Malgari was ecstatic. He seized Maddie’s hand and shook it with enthusiasm, so full of excitement he could hardly express himself. “I didn’t really believe it at first when you told me,” he exclaimed. “But I sent a telegram to Pop on the strength of it, and now it really is true! He’s going to send me a letter back telling me it likely won’t last, and to not forget how to use a hammer and a saw, but I don’t care. Even if it doesn’t last, it’s a dream come true!”
Maddie was amused but also happy for the young actor. Here was someone whose wish had come true. She remained adamant that the wishes granted by the Djinn in the story drive the narrative, arguing that each wish showed the measure of the person making it.
“If you must use magic it needs to be at the core of the story, not just a convenient Deus ex Machina that rattles and clanks to life when the characters get into a fix they can’t get out of on their own,” she told Milo and Hoffmann.
She had an ally in Milo on the matter of limiting the Djinn’s powers, but he argued against her over the problems of time travel.
“It’s the twentieth century, Maddie,” he said. “There have never been and will never be djinns, but time travel will likely be a real possibility before long.”
“According to Islam, God created both djinns and angels, and since they are invisible, it’s difficult to prove that either or both do or do not exist,” Maddie remarked dryly. “But you cannot change the past, Milo, no matter what means you use to get there.”
Maddie was determined to send the time travelers back to the present.
“It’s the only ending that makes any sense,” she said for the tenth time. “Yes, Allen loves the Queen. Yes, Omar loves the handmaiden, but they have to return to the present, because if you leave them in the past you’ve taken them out of the stream of time, and made it so they can’t exist. Think about it. How can a future event alter a past event? Our heroes can go into the past, I’ll grant the Djinn that, but they can’t stay there. The only way to fix the paradox is to send them back to where they belong.”
Hoffmann never did follow this logic, but in the end he relented, placated by the promise of sequels about the two leading men and their quest to return to the past. “That’s a good title, ‘Return to the Past,’” he said. “Write it down Rutherford!” He ordered his assistant.
Maddie was exhausted by the time she left the studio but she stopped at the hardware store on Santa Monica Boulevard and Fifteenth Street on her way home that evening and bought a fire escape ladder, a padlock for the garage, chain bolts for all of the exterior doors, and the tools necessary to install them. She said a silent apology to Belle and Daniel for making holes in the doors.
The bolts and the padlock wouldn’t deter a really determined burglar, but she felt safer for it when she was done. The ladder she hauled upstairs and stored in her bedroom closet, where she could easily reach it if she needed it. She had intensely disliked the feeling of being trapped upstairs while someone prowled below.
The week passed quickly. Maddie rushed to town each morning and returned home each evening exhausted. Her sleep was not disturbed by intruders, but she was still troubled by the intrusions, and a lingering sense of unseen menace.
Maddie’s second weekend in Malibu was far less eventful than the first. The summery weather turned from July back into January overnight. Saturday was gray and drizzly. Sunday brought rain.
The joy and wonder of having the ocean just outside the door was not diminished by clouds and wet weather, but she found that the “fugitives from fame” were fickle and were only drawn to the shore when it was sunny and warm. Milo was staying in town. Louise wrote to say she and Hal wouldn’t be out that weekend but that they hoped to see her soon. Maddie was surprised to find herself feeling a bit lonely. She spent Sunday morning in a desultory fit of cleaning, and the afternoon in her study with a fire burning in the little green-tiled fireplace and a thermos of coffee at her elbow.
On Monday, Maddie made her way back to the studio to assume her new role as chaperone. She was not confident in her ability to deal with the actors. She had raised her two younger siblings mostly on her own from a young age, but actors were another matter entirely, at least, Johnny Roberts was. On the first day of filming with Isabel Flores on the set, Roberts behaved like a spoiled child. He was rude and difficult. Nothing suited him. He seemed to be deliberately trying to make Isabel cry. She was a trouper and didn’t let it show, but it was uncomfortable to witness and her doctor quickly called for a halt. Milo readily agreed, frustrated. Roberts stormed away in a cloud of cigarette smoke, fuming literally and figuratively.
“We’ll do it without him if we have to,” Milo told Maddie and Hoffmann with uncharacteristic fierceness.
Milo wasn’t one of those autocratic auteurs who drove their actors to hysterics or had fits of temperament, but even he was being pushed to the breaking point. “Isabel can do the scenes without Roberts and we can film him separately and then cut the scene together.”
“Why don’t we use his anger?” Maddie suggested. “He loves her, but she doesn’t love him. She loves her people and can think of nothing else other than delivering them from the Sultan, but he feels that she is somehow his. He discovered her tomb in the present day. He traveled back in time to save her. He feels that her debt of obligation entitles him to her devotion, but it doesn’t.”
“But that is not how a romance works,” Hoffmann said.
“But it is, all too often, how life works,” Maddie said. “Roberts can give you an authentic performance of an angry man but he isn’t going to convince anyone he’s a tender and devoted lover. Leave that role for Marco and let Roberts rant.” Hoffmann relented. Milo and Maddie worked together on yet another rewrite.
“It’ll never work,” Milo told her, gloomily. “Roberts won’t take direction.”
When filming resumed, Roberts stormed and raged through his performance. He was like a man possessed. He burned with intensity. Maddie did her best to insulate Isabel and Clarice from him with the aid of Isabel’s doctor, who proved to be a staunch ally. Clarice had another champion in Marco Malgari.
The tension between the two men continued to grow until the day Marco intervened between Roberts and Clarice, and Roberts punched the younger man in the stomach. Marco doubled up with pain. A second later, Roberts was laid out flat on the ground. Although he was smaller and lighter than Roberts, Marco was stronger and more agile. He hooked Roberts’ feet out from under him with his leg, and levered him over using his back. After that, Roberts left Clarice alone, and Marco earned her staunch friendship.
Marco’s affection for Clarice was clearly what Hoffmann had hoped to see in the screen chemistry of the film’s leads. They provided the touch of romance that the famous screen lovers Isabel Flores and Johnny Roberts could not.
“Perhaps the critics will regard it as a bold storytelling choice,” Hoffmann said, but he sounded doubtful.
Writers were usually among the first people involved in a new film project. They finished their work long before filming began. Being called in to fix an ailing script was different. It required more hands-on experience, but even so, writers were rarely required on set once filming recommenced. Chaperoning the actors was an education for Maddie in the contemporary art of filmmaking.
Scenarios and scripts were usually written sequentially, but that was not how films were shot. Scenes were grouped together to make best use of resources—sets, costumes, subsets of actors. There was no point in paying people to be at the studio if they weren’t needed that day, but even so, there was a lot of waiting involved in any film shoot, while the set was dressed, the lights adjusted, and a hundred other details managed. Sometimes multiple takes were shot. This was very different from the early years of cinema, when directors often made things up on the fly and reshooting scenes was an unheard of waste of precious film stock.
Maddie got to know the camera men, the director of photography who was responsible for the camera, the lighting crew, the property master, and the ladies who did the makeup and the costuming. She also got to know the actors better.
There often wasn’t much to do for hours on end. How the actors spent that time spoke volumes about them. Isabel was required to wait less than her costars. When they did not need her on set she returned home accompanied by her doctor. When she was required to wait, she read a book, usually one in her native French. Maddie was amused to see that Clarice really did crochet—some kind of pretty, delicate lace, not socks.
Marco was a fidget who did not like to sit still unless he had something to do. He passed the time by whittling. He always had a folding knife and a piece of wood in his pocket. He told Maddie he was carving a series of toy animals for a nephew back home. He made her a tiny seagull and an artfully carved little lamb for Clarice. The ladies who handled his costumes were always in despair about the quantity of wood curls and splinters that attached themselves to his garments.
Roberts was always late, leaving the cast and crew waiting for his arrival. He stormed and smoked when he wasn’t in front of the camera. Sometimes he would hurl himself into a chair and pour his heart out to anyone who would listen. Sometimes he just paced the floor. He was hell on his costumes and equally hard on his own wardrobe. He was always taking off his collar, tie, and jacket, and misplacing his watch, lighter, and collar studs, and then flying into a rage when he needed them and couldn’t find them.
Maddie stopped wondering what had come between Johnny Roberts and Isabel Flores and wondered instead why they had ever come together in the first place. Johnny ranted and restlessly paced. Isabel seemed like someone under a spell, wrapped in private misery, but perhaps she was simply in pain. Her doctor was her frequent companion.
Hoffmann was determined to pack in as much work as possible to make up for the time lost while the production was suspended. The days at the studio were long and exhausting. Maddie was always grateful to head home to the quiet of the beach. How could she have ever thought it was lonely?
By the end of the month, the job that had taken her halfway round the world was mostly over. There would be more meetings, arguments, and fine-tuning when the film was being edited, but the main job—writing and pitching the new scenario—was already at an end, and so was her role as chaperone. She had another two months in the lovely house on the sand before the Harringtons returned to Los Angeles. She meant to enjoy it. At least, that’s what she thought as she drove the little red Nash Roadster along the coast route at the end of the last day of principal photography.
She left the Djinn to grant his wishes, and the players to play out the story, and drove back to the beach, the road stretching ahead of her with the promise of new challenges. But Djinns, once summoned, are not always easy to dismiss…
