ARTHUR PORGES

MOVIE SHOW

(A Story for Lincoln's Birthday)

THERE- THAT'S THE END. Looks like some very bad abstract art, or maybe Mark
Twain's cat throwing its famous fit in a platter of tomatoes! If only I'd had
the good sense to make a copy immediately, before the cheap film deteriorated,
but who could have suspected the old man would do his own amateurish processing
instead of sending the movie out? Obviously, he was a very paranoid sort,
certain that "They" would steal it, or even come after him with a net on
glimpsing his work.

Well, I've kicked myself enough; it won't help, so I'll just give you the facts.
Who knows? Maybe someday they'll dig up new data about what really happened in
that courtroom, and confirm what I have to believe is true, however wild that
is. But, frankly, I doubt it; Elmer Grain was a unique genius, the kind we're
lucky to get once a century. Anyhow, here's what happened.

I had some business in Springfield, Illinois, the state capitol. Some relations
of mine, people I hadn't seen for years, live there, so naturally I looked them
up. The only one who matters in this story is my nephew, Joel, a kid of twelve.
One of his hobbies is photography, and after a magnificent dinner he set up a
projector to show us some of his home movies. The boy's a fine technician for
his age, that was clear, but not very imaginative. All he'd taken were shots of
the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer's cave, and other familiar scenes of the Mark Twain
country.

But then, after about twenty minutes, there came a bit of film that must have
been spliced in, and that caught my eye, which had been glazing over. It was
some shots of a courtroom, with sunlight streaming in, yet the focusing was
pretty bad, the film jerky, the color badly off. So it definitely wasn't Joel's
careful work. Besides, it had a soundtrack, and my nephew's movie was silent,
being just a scenic take. Come to think of it, I don't really know how they get
sound on a movie or camcorder.

But getting back to the strange addition, the place was really packed, and
everybody just dripping with perspiration. A Southern Illinois summer can be
worse than one in India or on the Equator. I guessed from a magnificent old elm
visible w barely w through the dirty windows that the film might have been made
in June or July.

There were three people on trial, it seemed, and a judge, a prosecutor, and, of
course a defense attorney-- or a pair of them; I couldn't decide. Most of this
wasn't clear to me at the time, but only much later, as you'll see.

When the chief prosecutor stood up-- unfolded himself, almost-- to well over six
lean feet, obviously the tallest person there by far, my nephew snorted
derisively, and said, "That's supposed to be Lincoln: You heard the judge call
him Mr. Lincoln. I wonder where Elmer dug him up!" I wasn't so negative; there
was a kind of resemblance. It occurred to me at the time that there were still
enough tall, lanky, loose-jointed young men in Illinois to fit the part.

The sound was awful, and Joel explained that he'd had to improvise by cleverly
hooking up to a not-very-good radio. And the actors were no better. We're used
to the slick stuff, modern movies with high-tech, surround-sound equipment,
which has subtly replaced the slow, stumbling, inarticulate conversations of
real life. These people swallowed many of their words, so we couldn't really
tell much about the trial. I should add that the man who played Lincoln had a
high-pitched voice nothing at all like the organ-tones we're used to in classic
movies. And the cast, as a whole, had no sense of theater; they moved about
aimlessly, blocking each other from the camera, and with none of that controlled
grace of professional actors. Lincoln seemed particularly awkward, a clumsy
bumpkin. You'd think he was going to pitch forward on his nose any minute. I
felt relieved when he sat down next to his partner, whispering something that
made the fellow roar with laughter. Yet, in spite of all this, or maybe because
of it, the events had a remarkable effect of realism. Looking at the crowded
courtroom, I couldn't help wondering what had motivated the old recluse to round
up so many extras, and, presumably, pay them, to make this film.

The three accused men were evidently supposed to be terrified of lynching, to
judge from the hostility of the spectators who jammed the sweltering room.
Certainly, they acted like frightened criminals, huddling together, white-faced,
with wide eyes that repeatedly scanned the jury.

The prosecutor was quite ferocious, and hammed up his part, describing in terms
no judge would permit today their callous murder of a man named Fisher. He was
deliberately inciting the mob, ! felt, and it was touch-and-go whether the
accused trio would live to get an official sentence.

While the prosecutor's diatribe was going on, Lincoln just sat there, placid,
almost smug, a faint smile on his craggy face, which was ugly, yet somehow
endearing, so that I suddenly decided Mr. Grain hadn't done such poor casting
after all. No beard then, of course; this was the young country lawyer, nothing
at all, though, like Henry Fonda. He didn't seem at all concerned about mounting
a defense.

Unfortunately, the film broke off long before the trial ended, almost before it
was even well under way. There came the slapping of the tag-end against the
reel, and Joel turned on the lights.

I immediately cornered the boy and questioned him about the odd bit of movie. It
seems the film had been made by an old recluse, one Elmer Grain, who, as I noted
earlier, must have been some kind of a genius, who turned out in his garage a
host of crazy inventions that probably worked well enough, but had no important
applications or economic value, except for one, a very versatile plastic. That
he had sold for a big enough sum to let him devote his last years to whatever
interested him, which apparently was almost everything nobody else cared about.

Anyhow, when the old guy died in a fire, Joel found the blistered, blackened tin
of film in the Dumpster, and took it home, where he figured out, quite
ingeniously, I felt, how to run it and even get words out of the sound-track, a
feat that still baffles me, since marks on the edge, near the sprocket-holes,
were all he had to work with. That, and a radio. But when it comes to such
things, I'm as the brutes that perish, as the Bible--I think --puts it.

At first Joel got no sense from the movie. He guessed it was meant to be a
"story" of some kind, but with only a fragment left unburnt, was unable to
reconstruct the plot. By a lucky chance, one of his uncles, a history professor
at the University of Illinois, came to town, was shown the film, and was
cautiously approving of it. He took a dim view of the casting, Lincoln's dialect
was overdone, and his suit neither clean nor well-fitted. He was also put off by
all the sweating as uncalled-for realism. In short, said the professor, a
strictly amateur job of movie-making.

All this increased my own curiosity; I was strangely fascinated by the short
film. I couldn't see Grain producing it just for fun; it was inconsistent with
what Joel had told me about him; so directly on my return to Chicago I made a
point of researching the trial that the old man had appropriated for his film.

The case was an odd one, well-known to Lincoln scholars. It involved the alleged
murder of Fisher by the three Trailor brothers. The prosecutor was an ambitious
politico named Lamborn. The defense was handled by the firm of Lincoln and
Logan.

Well, there was a good reason for Lincoln's smugness while Lamborn waved his
arms and flung reckless accusations. Fisher wasn't dead, but just suffering from
amnesia, safe in a doctor's care, as Lincoln knew well before the trial. So he
just let the prosecutor noose himself, then coolly dropped the gallows'
trapdoor, breaking the man's legal neck, so to speak.

But the Trailor case was not the crux of the matter to me; the film itself was,
so I went back to Springfield and had Joel run it Off again, several times, in
fact. I wondered again how Grain had found so many extras, fitted them out in
clothes the professor admitted were reasonably vintage, and even found an old
courthouse--there are still plenty dating from the 1840s--to film in.

It wasn't until about the fifth showing that I spotted something highly
significant as a clue to the whole mystery. So far, for obvious reasons, I'd
hardly noticed the few objects visible through the dirty windows, but now,
running out of clues, I carefully examined them. There was that huge elm I've
mentioned, a puzzle in itself; disease has almost eliminated those trees. And,
toward the middle of the movie, some birds fluttered down to alight on its
branches. It was very atypical of me to overlook them all this time, since I'm a
longtime birder, a member of the Audubon Society in good standing. No doubt it
was because so much was going on in the courthouse.

Now there are mighty few birds east of the Rockies I can't identify at a glance,
but one peek at these shattered my ego. I did a quick, incredulous double-take.
There were about forty of them huddled together on the lower branches. They
resembled ordinary doves, but just didn't have the right markings. True, they
were not in good focus, and the windows far from clean, as noted, but any
ornithologist worthy of the name, thanks to Roger Peterson's splendid
guidebooks, can tell a bird from its outline, color-scheme, wing-patterns, and
similar attributes; only a glimpse is needed. Yet these had me stumped, and I
made poor Joel run the film yet again.

Then, as I watched with new intensity, my heart began to pound wildly. Those
dovelike forms wheeling and finally alighting in the huge elm suggested
something so exciting--and incredible--that I refused to believe my eyes. Joel
was gaping at me, but I didn't even try to explain--how could I, when I doubted
my own senses?

Almost in a daze, I ran out of the house and rushed to the main library. There I
rounded up five of the best, most comprehensive reference books available, even
one with Audubon prints. It wasn't an easy puzzle to resolve, because I forced
myself to be skeptical, to seek irrefutable evidence. The diagrams, sketches,
and careful descriptions of expert naturalists should have been enough, but if
not, a faded photo showing a lone bird on its perch in a zoo clinched the
matter. It established the truth beyond further question. Fantastic as it must
seem, the birds that clustered in that old elm were passenger pigeons! Once they
had swarmed in uncounted millions throughout the Mississippi Valley, flocks so
large they actually blotted out the sun for hours. But they were massacred for
food and sport; the magnificent forests that fed and sheltered them were
destroyed, and the last of the species died alone, a pathetic little figure in
the Cincinnati Zoological Garden, on September 1, 1914, at the age of twenty-two
years.

How Grain caught the trial on film--some kind of Time Machine, apparently; what
a loss!--we'll never know; and the film itself, incomplete, badly processed,
scorched, and mishandled, is now only the colored blurs you saw. The setting,
the extras, Lincoln himself, those could have been faked, of course, but not the
pigeons--no way!

And looking back on all of it now, I'm not sure which was the more moving,
bringing me closer to tears than I've been since I was a child: Lincoln, as he
truly was, or that flock of doomed passenger pigeons circling gracefully to
alight on the branches of an elm tree in Springfield, Illinois, in the summer of
1841.