Ciné Rimettato
by A. R. Morlan

 

All those kinds of neat special-effects-type things will become standard features of PCs over the next five years. Our whole thing has been to take technology and not have it be a barrier. So anybody who has got the creativity doesn't have to learn the bites and bytes. 
—Bill Gates, "The Emperor Strikes Back," Entertainment Weekly, January 7, 2000 
(In 1995) [Dusty Springfield] had just won a round in her battle with cancer and seemed to be in no hurry to get back to the recording studio. "Although if someone let me record an album of every cover I've ever dreamed of singing, I might think about it," she cooly intoned. 

Sadly she never got to make that album. But here's what it might have sounded like … 
—Rob Hoerburger, "The Sound of … Pop" from "The Lives They Lived," The New York Times Magazine, January 2, 2000 

Roger Ebert had nothing to do with the creation of Ciné Rimettato per se, but that essay he wrote about the CR "remakes" for his "Questions for the Movie Answer Man" column sure as hell made things a lot harder for guys like me and Keith, and never mind the intellectual property attorneys representing all those film makers Ciné Rimettato had (take your pick here) ripped off, venerated, or just plain perplexed, befuddled, and baffled. 

Not that a person could blame Ebert. He'd been inundated with so many e-mails and letters asking about the films Ciné Rimettato … reworked, that he felt obligated to download them for himself, just as thousands of webheads had already done for the past five or six years. 

And, like most of the others who'd logged on out of curiosity or boredom, or just plain stumbled on the sites after following random links associated with someone or something they'd wanted to know more about, Ebert was hooked. 

Because Ciné Rimettato wasn't the typical microcinema site of short films, featuring Blair Witch Project spoofs or anything like those wonderful Billy Crystal Oscar-night movie send-ups. Parody had nothing to do with it; not one word of dialogue was changed, and each CR "film" was—where applicable—shot-by-shot true to the original. Even as they were wildly, wondrously, and wholly changed, by virtue of the smallest of alterations to the cinematic fabric of the whole. 

And while Ebert was as lavish with his praise as he was with the tacit warnings that Ciné Rimettato's films broke just about every copyright, fair trade, and intellectual property law known, his message was unmistakable: 

These films are the best thing you'll never see at your local multiplex or rent from Blockbuster. 

He didn't need to tell anyone to seek them out—people simply did. 

Which is why I was sitting through my third viewing of Ciné Rimettato's The Terminator (all of CR's "remakes" were clearly labeled as such), watching Lance Henriksen's Terminator blast all the unfortunate patrons of club Tech Noir who stood between him and Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor, waiting for my partner Keith to come back from his interview with one of the actors from another CR remake of a classic, the former Stand by Me, now CR-dubbed The Body. 

Even though I'd already seen it twice, I still reflexively jumped in my chair when Henriksen crashed through that club window—I don't know if it was the actor's quietly determined expression, or his smaller-than-the-original-Terminator's frame flying through that glass, but I was spooked. Me, a twelve-year veteran of the FBI's Profiling and Behaviorial Assessment Unit, who'd sat across too-small wooden tables in more than one maximum security prison spending quality time with serial killers who'd told me with smiles in their eyes that they'd be able to unscrew my head from my neck easier than I could open up a jar of olives … if they felt like it. I suppose the whole effect of this particular remake was the small-threat factor; how something seemingly innocuous and gentle can become so fearsome when it attacks. James Cameron had basically said as much years before this "film" emerged bit-by-byte on the Web, he'd wanted to cast Henriksen in the role, but the special effects technology back in the mid-1980s was insufficient to allow for a lean, compact "Terminator" … a situation remedied by the time T-2 was made, but apparently the initial casting glitch niggled at the mind/minds behind Ciné Rimettato … or more correctly, "Cinema Put-Right." 

Not feeling up to a continued adrenalin surge so late in the afternoon, I shut off the video, and, in anticipation of Keith's arrival, I turned my chair around to face the VCR on Keith's desk, the one with the tape the lab guys had created from our download of The Body. 

Out of all the re-creations, this one had us stumped. Until it appeared a couple of years ago, we'd been working under the assumption that CR was something of a would-be casting director's wet dream. Except for putting Harris Glenn Milstead (the actor known as Divine) in the Sydney Greenstreet role of Ferrari in Casablanca (along with the better-known almost-cast Ann Sheridan as Ilse Lund and Ronald Reagan as Rick Blane), which in turn may have been attributable to Mr. Ebert's 1985 review of Trouble in Mind, in which the good critic actually compared Divine's performance as Hilly Blue to Mr. Greenstreet, the recasting of each CR "production" was based on Hollywood lore regarding actual screen tests or offers turned down. Hence, "Ten Scenes from GWTW" consisted of the epic's ten best, most memorable scenes redone with women like Paulette Goddard and Bette Davis (who, in my opinion, did a far superior "reading" of the "As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again" speech in that backlit field), while the revamped The Cable Guy gave the world what might have been Chris Farley's most unique and—ironically—just about funniest performance since the airplane bathroom sequence in Tommy Boy. Putting Farley's two-time film partner David Spade into the Matthew Broderick role was a bit of a departure, since no one could be sure he would've gotten the role even had Farley decided to take it. But even Keith (who normally isn't into comedies) had to admit the result was eerily hysterical. 

Figuring out the how of these films had been the job of the guys down in the FBI's tech department, and they'd filed their jargon-filled reports over a year ago with the newest Attorney General. But the why continued to stump everyone brought in on the case … which is why one of the Assistant Directors up High had the last-ditch idea of having a profiler or two try to get into the head of this particularily elusive Unknown Subject. Even Keith had to admit it beat the hell out of looking at crime scene photos and delving into the psyches of human mutants who killed, raped, or blew up people for what basically amounted to sport and/or what they considered a basic need. 

Before I leaned over to turn on The Body, I glanced over my shoulder at the greenboard where Keith had started our list of personality traits for the CR UNSUB which, despite the immeasurably vast difference in each criminal's crime, wasn't all that different—so far—from that of the majority of serial killers we'd dealt with over the years: 

white male 
middle-aged (35–45) 
college education/tech school/self-schooled (??) 
cinema buff 
single 
lives alone/self-employed 
owns large house/loft/converted warehouse 
needs storage space for multiple computers 
no criminal record/possible legal background/aspirations 
peripheral film/theater ties/aspirations 
speaks/understands Italian (possible B.A.?) 

That was about it. Five exquisitely remastered, rethought, and reconceptualized movies later, each done with artistic thoroughness and imagination despite the self-imposed constraint of remaining as true to possible to the original work, and we'd come up with a profile that added up to three-quarters Unabomber and one-quarter D. W. Griffiths, with a trace of computer geek thrown in for seasoning. 

But The Body challenged our profile. Before it appeared (and was brought to the attention of millions of Web surfers, thanks to all the links—the crucial one to Stephen King's own site, or because of the original cast's subsequent careers)—we'd considered our UNSUB to be someone who felt slighted in his own life, and who sympathized with actors who'd been passed over for or who'd not taken roles which might have changed their careers. The type of guy who'd been passed over for promotions, or whose previous programming efforts had been co-opted by his employers. (That the software which made Ciné Rimettato possible wasn't owned by any of the Big Names in the biz was a given; if it was it would've been selling for $1K a pop in every computer supplies store and catalogue around.) 

Yet there it was. The Body as no one had ever imagined it back when it was known and loved by moviegoers as Stand by Me. Although the original casting had never been in doubt, the makers of Ciné Rimettato had, decided to put something right that no one had previously considered to be wrong. 

I've been a fan of Richard Dreyfuss since American Graffiti came out when I was a senior in high school, and I adored his narration of Stand by Me … but when I saw The Body, I was first dumbfounded, then exhilarated, as much as I'd been when I first read the novella upon which the movie was based. 

And the irony is, Kevin Spacey wasn't a major player in Hollywood when the film was cast in 1985; hell, he was only twenty-six, much too young to play The Writer, and way too old to play any of Ace's gang. But matters of age and time meant nothing to the genius who created the digital miracles of Ciné Rimettato. 

So, there he was, parked on the back road, newspaper in hand. As genuine-looking and as character-specific as anyone might want, playing a role wholly unlike Verbal Kint or Seven's John Doe or Buddy Ackerman in Swimming With Sharks, or even the suburban love-slave Lester Burnham in American Beauty. About the only thing Keith and I could ascribe to another movie Spacey had been in was his hairdo, which was straight out of his smallish role as the editor Osborn in Henry and June, a sort of modified bangs over the forehead thing, very mid-eighties in this particular context. And the voice was Spacey, voice analysis proved it (as our tech guys had likewise proved was the case in every CR revamp; no impressionists or imitations were utilized, à la Humphrey Bogart's voice in the "You, Murderer" episode of Tales from the Crypt, back in 1995—a scant five years before Bogart's Casablanca role was itself CR recast), but he'd never, ever uttered any of those lines in any of his movies or filmed stage performances to date. 

The verbal cadence, the dry inflections, the explicit subtext, it was all there … only Spacey had never stepped into a recording studio to dub those lines. I don't know why, considering that other CR "actors" had turned in posthumous "performances," but this particular movie, out of the whole CR "catalogue," gripped me. Maybe it was the way the actor's performance changed the entire subtext of the movie—what was only slightly dark, tempered by Dreyfuss's innate deft touch with words and subtext, was now far more edgy, intense, with undercurrents of unshakable mourning. Definitely more in tune with the performance of the young Writer, Gordie La Chance. Oh, I'd noticed earlier (who hadn't, really?) that Richard Dreyfuss and Wil Wheaton didn't look all that much alike, what with their different hair and eye color, and body types, and their voices weren't that similar either (although when it comes to a twelve-year-old boy, who knows what he will sound like at forty or so), but it wasn't a major issue in the film, and give the strength of the movie as a whole, it didn't actually matter … until Ciné Rimettato came along. 

And the irony was, a person could appreciate both films, for what they were and for what they weren't; I think Keith was right when he said the titles said it all. One film was King's The Body, and the other was what it was, period. 

Another irony was that of all the CR "movies" this one was changed the least … and actually improved upon in a few scenes—the small technical problems concerning the infamous train-on-the-bridge scene and the subsequent swamp-crossing/leech sequence had been cleaned up, not in a flashy manner, but as if to say, As long as I'm doing one change, I'll just fix these small glitches— 

More of an afterthought, really; I didn't catch them myself until Keith and I ran the original film side by side with the remake, with the sound turned off, just to catalogue the actual differences. Which is when we came across the UNSUB's signature … a detail that simultaneously brought our profile closer to that of what I now considered a "real" criminal even as it made out elusive quarry far more quirky and human than either Keith or I had dared to hope for, given the virtually reflective firewall of graphic mastery he possessed. … 
 
"Thought you'd be sitting on your can, Rune." Keith's voice echoed warmly in the small confines or our temporary office space; I'd been so engrossed in Spacey's piquant line-reading of how his younger self had become the "lost boy" that summer of 1959 that I hadn't heard Keith open the door or come in. And given Keith's hefty 250-plus weight, stretched over a six-four frame, said frame not known for being light on his oxfords, his voice made me start visibly in my chair. 

I thumbed "pause" on the remote, and turned around to face him. Luckily for my neck, he sat down so that we were almost eye to eye before he added, "You were right, my man, the guy didn't have much more to say than the tech guys upstairs already told us. But it's a shame you lost the coin toss … they were filming when I arrived. Could've used an extra—" 

Keith's teasing aside, he was right about it being a shame that I'd lost the coin flip. Not that either of us expected that interviewing the lone person from all the CR remakes who'd actually worked in computer programming in the early 1990s would lead anywhere, but I had seen more of Wil Wheaton's film work than Keith had, and I knew that Keith would never have thought to ask him for an autograph. 

Leaning back in my chair until it made that metallic screech I knew Keith hated, I asked, "So, what did he think of The Body? I'm assuming he hadn't seen it—" 

"You're one for one on that account. Said he'd been too busy. Not that he wanted to. I got the impression it wasn't his all-time favorite role—" 

I shook my head. For a profiler, Keith could be so pitifully obtuse. Of course, he didn't have subscriptions to Premiere, Movieline, and half a dozen other movie- and TV-related magazines like I did, or he'd have known that Wheaton was probably the last actor who'd want to watch his younger self on screen over and over. We knew he'd been too busy to have done the CR transformations himself; aside from his two-year stint in computers, he'd been visibly busy acting, with almost all of his downtime accounted for. But still, he was the only actor who'd both been part of a Ciné Rimettato and had the knowledge necessary to create one … plus he'd worked with one of the other CR replacement "stars," Henriksen, in one of those historical films Ted Turner made a few years back. It wasn't enough to make Keith or me change our profile (which excluded the actor on over half the points), but we'd been working on this case for over two years already, hitting dead end after blind alley after firewall, so we'd hoped that a fresh perspective might help. And when we'd gotten word that he was doing another historical for Turner, down in Virginia, there didn't seem to be much to lose by heading over there to talk to the man. 

"—but he did admit to having seen parts of some of the others. 'Just browsing,' naturally," Keith smiled; we both knew that Keith Athmore isn't the typical FBI agent … apart from being tall, big, and black, he happens to look like a hirsute version of the actor who played John Coffey in The Green Mile, so there is an inherent intimidation factor which would prevent anyone, no matter how innocent they knew they were, from actually admitting they'd downloaded or even looked at a Ciné Rimettato film, no matter how enticing Roger Ebert's essay made them. 

"But he'd heard of it, no?" I rocked back and forth, filling the room with those screes until Keith planted his shoe sole on the armrest of my chair. Satisfied that I was pinned down, he smiled and said, "Oh, yeah, he seemed to know what I'd come for—made the whole movie-computer connection without my having to bring it up. Had a hell of a time getting him to watch the thing was all—" 

"I would've loved to have seen that." Glad that Keith has a B.S. in Psychology in addition to experience as a detective in the Chicago police department, I asked, "His reaction tell you anything?" 

"I only got him to watch the parts that were changed … he was on lunch break, and the director told me I could have him for an hour or so … man, it was strange, watching this guy wearing a Civil War uniform, sitting there in a director's chair with a bottle of fancy spring water in one hand and a remote in the other, watching himself from half a lifetime ago … the look on his face, while he was shakin' his head. I knew right off he hadn't seen it before; he was obviously shocked. The parts with Spacey affected him, but now that he was seeing it … he felt bad about the substitution, said the other actor was a friend and all, but he was drawn in by the thing. And those parts where they changed stuff? Adding the image of the oncoming train during the shot where he and the Sliders guy are running on the bridge, and when they fixed the color values so the shot of him and the other kid blended in better with the rest of the frame? He was impressed with that, and the way they added bruises to the arms and shoulders of him and the other kid who fell off that bridge … he said he'd wondered about that, since the characters did supposedly fall a hundred feet off a bridge onto rocks and all. He said whoever did this has an exceptional eye for detail, same stuff our tech eyes and the people over at Pixar, DreamQuest, and everywhere else said. And he agreed with us about the cat; he admitted to seeing it when he was 'browsing' the other films … although he could've found out about it from Ebert's article. Ebert did mention that, didn't he?" 

I craned my neck backwards, until I heard some of the bones pop; closing my eyes against the glare of the overhead light, I said, "Yeah, Ebert mentioned the cat. I suppose because he has one. I missed it when I read the article, I suppose because I don't have one." 

"The thing's never in the frame long enough to register the first time through," Keith tried to mollify me, but I still hated it when he brought up the whole subject of the cat and the article, and how we'd missed the mention of the former in the latter. Trying to work the conversation back to the interview, I asked, "And you asked him if there was a cat anywhere on the set, I suppose." 

"Oh yeah, right off. He was adamant, there were two animals in the film, the dog in the junkyard, and the deer on the railroad tracks. No cat. But he was sure the cat in the CR version was a real one, and not an animation. Said it looked like it was smaller in the Casablanca CR, and obviously bigger in his movie. He did have a suggestion … not that it would be viable—" 

"What wouldn't be 'viable'?" 

"He said that since whoever did these films probably lives on the west coast, like you and I think, and since the cat obviously ages from picture to picture, chances are it might be the pet of whoever's doing this … and a vet might recognize it from a picture. Not that dark long-haired tiger cats are uncommon, but he thought it might be worth a shot. Something we could cross-reference in our databases … I asked him if he knew how many people in the U.S. own cats—" 

"Still, it might be an option … we've pursued stranger leads. You didn't insult the guy, did you—" 

"No, no he was cool. More shocked that anyone would do what they did to the movie than anything else. Man sure doesn't like to live in the past, though. Just zapped through what he didn't need to see. None of that ego-tripping crap like you see on TV with a lot of actors. 'Course you're the expert on that, eh? How is that satellite dish workin' out?" 

Keith had yet to stop ribbing me about that extras-added dish system I'd bought last year; in addition to HBO, Showtime, Cinemax and Encore!, and more eclectic options like The Independent Film Channel, Sundance, and Turner Classic Movies, I had the new AllFilm, EuroFlix, and AlTerNate channels to savor at will. I'd told myself that the dish was purely for research; the CR UNSUB seemed to have wide-ranging tastes, and clearly he'd had to download visual and aural data from almost every film or TV show his virtual "actors" appeared in prior to the creation of each "performance" … but no profiler can or should live 24/7 in the mind of his UNSUB. 

And even Keith didn't know about Birkita; she was someone wholly untouched and unsampled by the UNSUB, given the fact that the type of indy films she appeared in were in and of themselves so close to the results of the CR UNSUB's labors—quirky, seemingly oddly-cast movies whose subject matter was geared to a mindset totally at odds with multiplex tastes. Typical hardcore indy fare, the kind of movies that showed up—in much shorter form—on those microcinema sites like AtomFilms, Short BUZZ or Bijou Café. The kind of stuff our UNSUB steered clear of, films that couldn't take additional tampering, lest they become parodies of pastiches of recreations. 

Besides, Birkita had only been a regular in indies since 1999 or so (she'd done one film in the late eighties). That meant that she'd never have been under consideration for any roles in major Hollywood productions filmed between the 1980s and the first five years of the century, the kind of movie our UNSUB claimed as his own personal playground between 2000 and 2005, when his films first and last appeared on the Web. And aside from the surreal tour de force GWTW mini-epic (which clocked in at a trim forty-six minutes, opposed to the original 231 minute running time) and Ilsa in Casablanca, the CR UNSUB had devoted his efforts to replacing male actors with male actors … even if Keith had thought that Divine was a woman, which I suppose was something of a tribute to the talent of the late female impersonator. 

(I kept telling Keith that he really did need to go find himself a life outside law enforcement, but he'd go, "Then why is CourtTV on basic cable?") 

Reluctantly putting Birkita and her filmography out of my mind, I rubbed my closed eyes before lowering my head and facing Keith. "The dish is fine. What else did he have to say? Any thoughts on how the UNSUB did this?" 

Keith wagged one finger at me while feeling around in his breast pocket with the other hand, saying, "It's déjà-vu time—you will observe that I took notes, even though this was nothing new to me … merely so as not to make him think I was wasting his time, which ultimately I was … here goes, Rune, and don't blame me for rehashing this shit— 

"He figured our suspect used at least one thousand processors or around four hundred ordinary computers, mostly without monitors, Macs most likely, for parallel processing, that is. Sorting data: video samples of all the actors used for the substitutions; the entire original movie, meaning, oh, about five to twenty gigabytes per computer. And all that hardware means a whole lot more power. So we were right about the UNSUB living in a single-owner dwelling. A power bill like that would stand out in an apartment complex. And he agreed with the guys upstairs about the UNSUB breaking into Web servers or individual computers through cable services. Servers are always going down, so no one would've noticed if someone broke in, stole some power and got out again. As long as data wasn't taken, who's to link a power loss with something like the Ciné thing? And breaking into home computers would be more time-consuming for less power, but less likely to attract attention. 

"He thought the process would take more power during the image-storing stage, but after that—provided whoever was doing this made the films one after another before sending them out over the Web piecemeal—the break-ins wouldn't have been as frequent. 

"But he said that the UNSUB would need to use additional computers to create those wireframe previsualization whatsits, those things the guys at Pixar and so on told us about—" 

I nodded; we'd spoken to the graphic artists at over a dozen special effects places up and down the coast, who'd said typically, in order to animate a figure in CG—computer graphics, to laymen like me and Keith—a maquette, or sculpture-like figure usually made of clay, is sculpted, then marked with a digitizing pen, in order to make grids on its surfaces, which can be "read" by a laser device and scanned digitally into a computer, where a 3-D wireframe is created. Once a person has this wireframe figure, the next step is to create "previsualizations," or a moving, computerized version of a storyboard, upon which one can manipulate the figures. Not a difficult concept to grasp, especially when animators showed it to us on a computer. They even showed us digitalized skeletons of people and animals, used for motion studies, and stripped-down-to-muscles wireframe images, like the mouse in Stuart Little six years ago. (The guys responsible for that told us that the mouse had 600 thousand individual hairs …) 

Next, we learned how background plates for an animation are shot, leaving a clear field for the figure to be layered in later. The same principle holds true for special-effects shots using humans; if you want someone running around with a hole in their middle, like Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her, you film the scene twice, once without her and once with her, making sure the two match up perfectly, then take out the blue-screening over her middle, and there you go, a woman with a donut middle. I'd seen rudimentary examples of this on cable; shows about movie special effects are big— 

"—but he thought what the UNSUB did was easier than what's being done in regular special effects studios, since the guy didn't have to figure out blocking for the previsualizations—all he needs to do is mimic exactly the same movements the actor he's taken out made, and redo the costumes on a different size frame." 

"What about creating movements the replacements never made? Wouldn't that take up a lot of power? And time?" 

"He didn't think so. Remember the software that guy from MIT came up with a decade or so ago, the program that makes photo mosaics out of stored images? Like the one they used for that poster for The Truman Show? It's basically a single software program that automatically sorts out the images in the file to match the photo you want replicated. Wheaton thought that this Ciné guy developed a similar but more sophisticated software, which automatically scans through a catalogue of digitalized images and motions, and matches the replacement's face and body type to the new movements. He thought it would be a database of textures, skin tones, hair, whatever. The only thing he wasn't too sure about was how the program got around the need for a digitalized wireframe for each actor—he said he was guessing, but he thought that what this person did was measure each actor's body according to found objects in scenes; things like brand-name cans of pop, whatever, that you can buy and measure, then cross-reference them against the body parts of the person to get a numerical idea of that person's body size in relation to the rest of the actors and things already in the individual frames of the movie. Plus he did notice that the early CR films, the Gone With the Wind and Casablanca ones—only what he'd browsed on the Web, mind—looked something like that commercial from Superbowl XXXIV, with Christopher Reeve's head on another body, so it looked like he was walking. Shortcuts, which makes sense if you consider that that cat in the movies was probably a kitten when the Casablanca one was made in the 1990s. The actors were wearing so much clothing in those two movies, who'd notice if the body didn't change from one person to another. Probably refining his art as he went along. But the other two films—not counting The Body—needed people running around with nothing or next to nothing on, so their real bodies had to be used as a template." 

I elbowed Keith's foot off my armrest, and turned my attention back to the movie I'd put on pause, keeping the sound muted so I could just watch the images while Keith continued to read from his interview notes. 

The scene with the cat was coming up, but you had to watch closely—literally without blinking—to catch it; right after Gordie and Chris Chambers fire a gun in the alley behind the diner, while the two boys run off, but just before the waitress comes outside to see what's happened, a cat darts across the screen, running low from right to left, on enough of an angle that all you catch is a streak of grey-black fur, and an upright, puffed-out tail. Less than a second of screen time, far less that the other four films, where the cat is more visible, and full-face to the "camera." But the motion blur was too realistic for it not to be a real cat. I made a mental note to try and get a few good blow-ups to send to veterinarians on the West Coast, especially those in major cities—another theory of ours, since the tech guys told us the UNSUB would need a T-1 line to download the CR data to all his Web sites—on the off chance someone might recognize it. 

It certainly couldn't be a worse dead end than the Bureau's attempts to find out who'd paid for all the Web sites (each with a different variation of the phrase Ciné Rimettato surrounded by portions of the revamped films' titles, the directors' names, and so on) used by the UNSUB over the last six years; each site had been set up by an anonymous account, initiated by letters sent from over a dozen different addresses in California, with money orders enclosed bearing as many different phony addresses and signatures. So the sites went up … and remained, untended, not updated, just waiting, connected to the rest of the Web link by link as various search engines and fans slowly discovered the sites, and linked them to other, related sites. 

No matter how much it pained the Department of Justice to admit it, there simply wasn't any way to track down who really set up any of the sites. By resisting the urge to "return to the scene of the crime," the UNSUB had achieved the necessary distance needed to sever his links with his creation. Once the films were out there, and people found them, they mushroomed across the Web; some showing up in whole or in part on fan sites, home pages, or even converted to screen-savers. But then a bunch of people from Keith's hometown of Chicago thought it a good idea to ask the city's resident film guru Roger Ebert about them … which is when things got totally out of hand. 

Not long after that, the original sites were removed by order of the DoJ and the FBI, but who could trace all the other sites that had appropriated them? Or do anything about all the downloads made before the sites were taken down? And how to stop people from sharing what they'd downloaded? 

And the rub was, whoever created Ciné Rimettato wasn't profiting from it. Mixed in with the end credits (or opening ones, in the case of the two older films) were reminders to the viewer that actors do depend on residuals, that copyrights had been extended as of 1998, and that it might not be a bad idea to check out the work of those actors whose work had been excised from these CR films. And every Ciné remake had an attached file, listing the titles and distributors of every other film the affected actors and actresses had appeared in, as well as filmographies of the rest of the actors, directors, screenwriters, and so on, plus additional pleas for the person downloading the movies to go and rent as many of these titles as possible, so that the rental fees might trickle down to the persons affected—or to the studios involved, at the absolute least. There was also the address for the Screen Actors Guild, along with instructions for making an untraceable donation— 

When Keith stopped talking behind me, I tapped the "mute" button, just in time for both of us to hear Spacey wryly comment that finding ways to insult one's mother was held in high regard back in those days. Without turning to look at him, I asked my partner, "What did Wheaton say about the voices?" 

"Well, after he rehashed the synthesizer bit, which he figured involved sound cards, JAZ drives, and a keyboard, like the other guys already told us, he said he could name at least one actress who'd never appear in any future Ciné things—" 

"If any more do appear," I couldn't help but interject, before Keith went on. 

" 'Meryl Streep.' I went, 'Why not?' and he goes, 'Her accent is never the same.' That's when it hit me … everybody this UNSUB's sampled has a distinctive, repetitive way of talking—not monotone, but they don't do accents very often—" 

"Spacey did a southern one for Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," I reminded him, while the junkyard dog Chopper tried to bite a chunk out of Teddy Duchamp's wagging fanny through the wire fence. 

"Was he in that?" 

"Yeah. Remember, his hair was grey—" 

"You sure?" 

"Very. Remember, the guy who played Gordie's big brother was in it—" 

"Ohhh … Cusack. Oh, yeah. Him I remember — you sure about Spacey, though?" 

"Extremely. I can bring the video tomorrow. But aside from that one, I don't recall Spacey doing many accents, either. Some of the CR revamp actors' voices changed over time, but the technology to age voices existed back in '91, when they re-dubbed Spartacus—" 

Behind me, Keith rocked backwards on his chair; I could hear it hitting the wall. "Uh-huh, when they made an old Tony Curtis sound like a young buck—but they had to use Anthony Hopkins for Olivier's voice, no?" 

"Considering Sir Laurence had been gone for a while, yes, they did have to use Hannibal the Cannibal's pipes … too bad whoever did this—" I jerked one thumb in the direction of the screen "—wasn't around then. Or didn't have the software up and running …" 

"Know what else Wheaton suggested? He thought that whoever did the films was working on them for at least a good five years or longer before they dumped the first one on the Web in '00—weird how the CG pros we spoke to didn't want to admit the UNSUB was way, way ahead of their own technology, eh? He said whoever did this had to digitally erase the original players from each frame, fill in the missing background with parts cobbled from other shots, then go back and put in the new people—once he got them guys animated, and digitally dressed in costumes, whatever—where the old ones were. He said it's picky, time-consuming work no matter how much the software is programmed to do for you. Then there's the matter of making the mouths move in sync to the dialogue, which he reminded me had to be 'spoken' by the new actors with more or less the same speed and cadence as the originals … he was amazed that someone would go through all that trouble, and for no pay, no recognition. I think the no recognition part bothered him the most … know what he said before I left?" 

" 'Goodbye and good riddance'?" I ventured, finally cocking my head in his direction. 

"Nah, I said the man was cool … he told me how proud he was of the computer work he'd done over a decade ago, and said he couldn't imagine how whoever did this could keep it all in—knowing he'd done something so incredible, so far ahead of the pack, with such potential for the industry, and not saying word one about it in public. That's when he reminded me again that this had to be a one-person gig … if someone developed it while working for a company, using the company's equipment, it wouldn't be the property of the designer. And any software or computer firm that knew about this kind of technology would've sold it, without the designer being able to make stuff like this—" 

"So Bill Gates is officially off the hook now?" I smiled, while the Barf-O-Rama movie-within-a-movie flickered across the screen. 

"Didn't we eliminate him the first day we got this case?" The smile in Keith's voice made me grin; watching the remainder of the storytelling scene by the campfire in silence, I waited until the part where the boys started to take turns watching the campfire, gun in hand, before muting the movie and saying, "In a way it's a shame Gates didn't invent this … if the technology was legal, and in use now, can you imagine how it would change movies? Insurance fees would go down, as long as there was a way for someone who died in mid-filming to 'finish' the performance … no one would need to haul ass back to the redub booth to make 'R' movies 'TV-14,' little mistakes could be fixed in postproduction without the need to bring the actors back or rebuild sets—production costs would go down, and ticket costs would be lower—" 

"Which brings to mind the other thing Wheaton told me, when I was leaving," Keith said softly. "As much as he admired what our UNSUB had done, he said it was frightening, too—he wondered when the time might come in an actor's career when he or she wasn't needed any more. He wanted to know when a producer could say, 'Hey, we don't need So-and-So after all … we have what we do need right here in the database.' Or what would happen when casting directors could pick and choose from every actor who'd ever been on film, be they dead or alive? What he said got me thinking … ever notice that most casting directors are women?" 

"So?" On screen, Wheaton's much younger cinematic alter ego was having that bad dream about his brother Denny's funeral, as Keith said simply, "So … what if we've been limiting our own profile?" 

"As in—?" 

"I know all them programmers we talked to were men, or most of 'em, but why couldn't a woman be doing this? We've kicked around the possibility of someone involved in the business—" 

"Casting directors are busy people," I reminded him, "They have to look at a lot of people for a lot of roles … anyhow, women are more social, they need more interaction. Our UNSUB has to be a loner, probably a webhead whose social circle is movies—" 

"But my theory would explain the requests to reimburse the affected parties by video-rental and SAG-donation proxy … this person has ties right now to the industry. Probably rubs shoulders with some of the people he or she's been messing with digitally. And you gotta admit, our UNSUB is awfully verbose … here, gimmie the remote—" Quitting his chair and striding over to me in a couple of easy steps, Keith slid the remote out of my hand and fast-forwarded to the last couple of minutes of The Body, right when Spacey's Writer is looking at the words he's just typed into his computer, while his kid and the kid's buddy are talking about him. The part where the new adult Gordie stopped outside to play with the boys zipped past in a squiggle of sugary horizontal lines, until Keith found the end credits. Aside from the insert for Spacey (now dubbed "The Replacement Writer"), everything looked like the original's film credits, until just before the part where the copyright information should've appeared. 


This motion picture is not the original made in 1985 and released in 1986. You know and I know that it violates the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the fair use laws, general copyright law, and just about every other film-related law there is. So, what to do about it? The people who really acted in this and those who didn't do so originally don't normally do what they do for free. Normally these people get residuals for the repeat showings of their work on TV, and sometimes a cut of the rental fees, depending on their original contracts. So what can you do about it? Go out and rent the videos featuring these people. If any of them have a movie out now, go buy a ticket. Buy more Stephen King books and e-books, even if you have the whole library already. Buy/rent copies of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Sliders. Especially go rent/buy Richard Dreyfuss's work, since he was removed without his permission. Go make out a money order to the Screen Actor's Guild or the Director's Guild of America. The addresses are listed below. Just remember, what you've seen is not a licensed, legal movie. What you want to do next is your business. 
The Unabomber may have been more prolix, but he was never that direct and colloquial … I tried to imagine a woman saying those words to herself as she added them to the finished creation, and it didn't sound as strange as it should have. 

I suppose my constant contact with mostly male UNSUBs had tainted my perceptions after all … not that I'd let Keith know that. 

"The UNSUB could be a lawyer," I ventured, but Keith snorted in disagreement. 

"Uh-uh … oh, he or she knows the ins and outs of the law as it applies to the film industry, but this ain't no lawyer. Their syntax is worse than the Unabomber's, and they don't care if they're not making any sense. This person, this UNSUB does care, and wants to make sure the message is understood and acted upon. Been working so far … last I checked with the SAG folks, they've raked in over seventy-four K in small-denomination donations. Most of that's gone into the fund for retiring actors … the families of the deceased Ciné 'performers' wanted it that way. And rentals of movies featuring just about every actor in the CR remakes are way, way up. You can't say the same for all those Blair Witch and Star Wars parodies out there." 

"But it still doesn't answer the why question … I suppose you found time to ask Wheaton about that—" 

"Yes I did, and he had an answer … sort of. I could tell he was kind of freaked by The Body, so I didn't ask until he was done watching it—what he did see of it—and at first he didn't answer, changed the subject to the how of it all, but I asked him again, and he said whoever did this must have a specific agenda, something that has meaning to that person, or else we'd be seeing remakes of every film out there whose roles were known to be offered to someone else, or films where people had to turn down roles for some reason … you know, like Tom Selleck almost playing Indiana Jones. He thought that whoever did this had the time to do more movies, but didn't want to. I asked him if he knew what the word rimettato meant, and he admitted he didn't. Once I said it meant 'put right' he mulled it over, then said he thought this way beyond casting … more like creative intent." 

I nodded; we knew Wheaton had helped create a video editing system, one which Keith and I had decided quite a while back probably hadn't been used to create the Ciné Rimettato revamps. 

"—I think he meant a movie as a bigger picture. Total sum of all the parts. He seemed to be pretty affected by the movie, so he didn't want to discuss it beyond that." 

"Keith … where's the copy of the film you took with you?" I noticed for the first time that he hadn't been carrying the cassette case when he walked into the office. 

"Left it there … I thought he might want to watch it in private. And yes, I know it's government property, but hell, I'd wasted his lunch break already … it's not like he's going to toss it back on the Web with scene-by-scene commentary. Guy knows better than that—" 

"I wasn't thinking about that … it just struck me how we're doing what everyone else has been doing with these movies. Passing them on … funny, how I used to blame Ebert for that essay of his, when we're doing the same thing. I mean, how many copies of the films did we leave with the other animators we've talked to? One, two dozen? We're just as guilty as whoever did this in the first place … and besides, if someone was just browsing these on the Web, how can you take away the memory of what you've seen? That's something copyright laws can't control … trying to squash creative freedom to borrow from the culture is one thing, but how do you police the imagination?" 

There was a beat of silence between us before Keith exhaled loudly and said, "I dunno know about you, but I'm going start revising the profile based on what Wheaton had to say … personally, I think the most useful thing he said was how proud he was of the program he worked on, 'cause I can't see someone as verbal as this UNSUB staying wholly silent about it. A person would have to be proud … I don't care who he or she is, I don't think someone can keep a secret like that for this many years without blowing apart from the strain. No matter how much of a loner he/she is. Tellin' it to your teddy bear at night won't do it. As it is, I can't believe that the UNSUB never went back to check on the original sites—" 

Something Keith had said earlier, about dumping The Body back on the Web with behind-the-scenes commentary, niggled at the back of my mind. The UNSUB could've kept going back to that particular Body, just as some serial killers do … as long as no one knew that was the person who'd been responsible for the thing in the first place. … 

And as long as the UNSUB never altered what was there, visiting the site without downloading, s/he could've been lurking on the net like a serial strangler hiding behind a tree in the woods, watching his victim bloat and decompose. Hell, the UNSUB could've been checking to see how many individual users visited each site—we'd determined that the sites didn't leave any cookies, so we hadn't been able to track who'd visited them, or when. 

Monitoring each site's traffic would be as satisfying as reading newspaper accounts of victims found in a river; the effect may have been radically different, but the basic psychology of this criminal wasn't terribly far from that of all the shackled prisoners I'd talked to. There was even a signature—the inclusion of that admittedly cute kitten/cat in each movie, the sort of mental quirk common to serial killers whose urge to kill isn't totally satisfied by the act itself, or even the basic mechanics of the crime. Hence, the need to do something idiosyncratic, something meaningful only to the criminal, which is not an intrinsic part of the crime per se. Adding the cat was pure artistic embellishment to an already complete digital canvas. 

"Y'know, it might not be a bad idea to send out pictures of that cat … target the biggest cities, and the most expensive veterinarians. If the UNSUB wants the kitty in the picture, I'll bet he—or she—would want the best care for it—" 

"Which means I gotta do it, right?" Keith tried to affect a frown, but his eyes were twinkling. It may have been a remote lead, at best, but it beat the hell out of sitting in a cramped makeshift office, watching the same five CR remakes day after day. Although Keith had had his field trip.… 

"Want to flip for it?" 

"What's the loser get to do instead?" Keith dug around in his pants pocket for the same nickel we'd tossed that morning. 

"I've another idea … based on that whole being-proud thing. Where can a person brag without saying a word? Out loud, I mean? And without anyone knowing who you really are?" 

Keith pocketed the nickel, smiling down at me as he stood up. "If I sit behind a computer all day, dropping in on chat rooms, my ass'll meld with the chair cushion. I'm outta here, my man … have to make sure the boys in the lab pull a clear image off the films. Good luck with the surfers, Rune. Don't let the netcronyms make your eyes go crossed, ok?" 

The original Ciné Rimettato Web sites had long fallen prey to hordes of angry intellectual property attorneys and copyright holders, not to mention Ted Turner's lawyers, and were nothing more than a wistful, flickering memory of pixel dust, but there was no legal way to shut down sites devoted to their appreciation—especially if the webmasters were canny enough to forgo showing clips or stills from the banned releases. As it turned out, during the first hour of following the most obvious links (most, URLs containing the words ciné or cinema … like "Ciné Rinascimento.com" "La Cinema de Fantasia.com" or "Cinema Immaginazione.com"), I came across over twenty sites, some comprised completely of text (like the fellow who'd not only reprinted Ebert's essay, but almost every other review of the CR films from everyone else's Web sites), others a combination of commentary and message boards ("AFAIK, Kevin Spacey hasn't been approached to _do_ a Stephen King movie -- you're thinking of Tom Hanks." "YYSSW, but I still think he was up for the James Caan part in MISERY --" "Wasn't he doing Mel Profitt on WISEGUY then?"); but some offered genius chatrooms, where chatspeak sputtered across the monitor and everyone had an opinion about the Ciné … oeuvre: 


Shadow: UGTBK … you actually rented all the videos suggested after THE BODY? 
MassGuy: Every one. Including KRIPPENDORF'S TRIBE. Which is actually pretty good. Course I already had all the ST:TNGs on tape. 
Shadow: Bought or taped? 
MassGuy: Both. My local station stopped showing it midway thru season four. 
Akkadian: ICCL about renting/taping stuff -- what about THE BODY? What do u think of it? 
Shadow: DIKU? 
MassGuy: The same --? 
Akkadian: DTS, but again, what's your opinions? 
Shadow: Floored. I'd seen the original 5-6-7 times, but this one IS "The Body" I'd read. Too bad they didn't add the part where Gordie's story from his teenage years was excerpted from -- 
MassGuy: No, couldn't be done. CR films redo, they don't add. 
Shadow: Yeah, but it's a thought. Couldn't the real director do that later on? How old's the real Gordie going to be for the 30-year anniversary of the original? Do the words _Director's Cut_ mean anything? ;-S 
Akkadian: Q-1, Who Knows? Q-2, 44, and Q-3, They could mean More $$$ for all involved. 
Shadow: Didn't the director go to high school with Dreyfuss? 
MassGuy: Yeah. Hollywood High. But not in the same class. 
Akkadian: What about the other CR films? Seen all of them? 
MassGuy: BTDT -- I transferred mine to DVD. 
Shadow: Seen them all, wasn't too nuts about the GWTW one but THE CABLE GUY was awesome. A bit morbid if you think on it for too long, but the original was _so_ dark, and this was just funny. At least now there's three Farley-Spade films, so it's a real duo now -- 
MassGuy: What about CONEHEADS? 
Akkadian: They weren't in the same scenes except for one in that film. So it barely counted. Q?: was this CABLE GUY as good as TOMMY BOY or BLACK SHEEP? 
Shadow: As good. Not better, but as good. I missed the part from the original where Chip was singing the Jefferson Airplane song. What was put in there was from SNL I think, and not a whole song. But using a Meat Loaf song was ok, tho. 
Akkadian: I don't think CR films can redo songs like they can re-create dialogue. Spoken words are different from sung words. 
MassGuy: The scene in the jail, when Chip smashes his chest up against the glass barrier was wild. 
Akkadian: Thank SNL's Chippendales sketch for that one. 
Whoever Akkadian was, s/he was obviously older, and more thoughtful than Shadow and MassGuy—not too many of the other postings on the message boards or chatters brought up the SNL connection in regard to The Cable Guy … the hard-core SNL crowd tended to be older, and less likely to rely so heavily on e-mail argot. I'd printed out the conversation, and looking it over, noticed that this Akkadian had addressed one of the problems with the Ciné films, something quite a few CR fans seemed to miss … aside from the karaoke scene in The Cable Guy, the CR substitutions avoided singing. Duplicating an actor's spoken words via a synthesizer or sampler was difficult, especially when nuances and inflections were taken into account, but singing was staggeringly formidable. And another thing Akkadian said made so much of the CR process abruptly clear—that infamous "Chippendales" skit, with Farley and Patrick Swayze stripping down, brought me into the mind of the CR artiste … and solved the basic problem of getting around a wireframe for each digitized character. Apart from the people in the two earliest CR films, all the other actors used for substitutions had either done nearly-nude scenes, or partly disrobed at least one film or TV performance. Before anyone knew of a fifth Ciné Rimettato film, Keith and I had studiously watched every video of every movie the substitute actors and actresses had made … and I'd been struck by Light Sleeper, which featured a brief but uncannily gripping appearance by David Spade as a strung-out cokehead searching for God. He'd been sitting with Willem Dafoe's pusher, dressed in socks and briefs, and I remembered thinking at the time that Spade could've very well been a straight dramatic actor if he'd wanted to go that route—he was that convincing—but what he was wearing, or more rightly wasn't wearing, should've been more important to me. Thinking back on his filmography, I realized that he'd been a living wire-frame in just about everything, both in film and on TV—he was out of his clothes as often as he was in them. All the CR creator had to do was figure out his measurements as based on surrounding items, and there it was, a ready-to-use element, available to render into an existing movie. 

And the other actors had done their share of undressed-scenes; it took the memory of that Chippendales sketch to bring it all back, but suddenly I could picture the UNSUB's hands, as s/he fed this data into the computers, and I could feel that sense of accomplishment which comes after approaching a seemingly unsolvable problem and coming up with an unexpectedly simple, accessible solution. Add in the existing movements of each person's mouth as s/he produced individual sounds and words, redub the synth-scrambled voices (sweetened or roughened as necessary), and there they were. Animations from real flesh, propelled by original skeletons, and not mere digital-wire armatures. Filling in old backgrounds, then covering them up again, was just computer busywork after that. 

By the time The Body was loaded onto the Web, the UNSUB had his/her act down patter than pat. Which accounted for why Spacey's narration was so exquisitely on target, each line reading as succinct and as deeply felt as Dreyfuss's original … albeit much darker. And the limited amount of time his character was on camera made for a more perfect "performance" … so perfect that the UNSUB couldn't resist adding touches to the later scenes, blending in the oncoming cowcatcher of the steam engine between the running legs of the two kids on the track, or overlaying bruises on their shoulders during the leech scene. Even if someone wanted to remove the new narration and Spacey's two scenes from this CR remake, what was left would still be more fine-tuned than the original … although as Shadow had pointed out in his/her roundabout way, the best Writer possible was shooting another historical drama for Ted Turner just a few miles away from where I was now sitting. 

But Wheaton wasn't in his forties yet—he was barely into his thirties. Half a lifetime away from his childhood performance, but still another eleven-twelve years from being the right age to play The Writer. Just as Spacey (who'd actually been born in 1959, the same year the film took place) was then too young to play The Writer, but was now currently a couple of years too old— 

Which was the basic trouble with finding the ideal cast to populate any movie—what you might want wasn't necessarily what you'd need at that time in order to make such a film. Even if Rob Reiner and Richard Dreyfuss went to school together, if Reiner had had someone like Spacey available, and if Spacey had been fortysomething at that time, there was a strong chance he might've been cast as The Writer. That later King film, Dolores Claiborne, featured two actresses who looked astonishingly alike playing a young and an older Selena … even Keith, who hadn't been to a theater since Clint Eastwood stopped making Dirty Harry pictures, was impressed by how much the two girls looked alike. Said it made the movie all the better for him. 

Leaning away from the keyboard, I muttered into my cupped palms, "I'm missing something here … are you a perfectionist, a die-hard movie buff, or … what? You aren't in it for the money, you don't want the fame … if you love movies so much, why love just five films?" 

Thinking (maybe the Ebert article scared him/her off … maybe the torrent of hits on The Body sites was too intimidating), I began rereading the chatroom conversation … and noticed that despite Akkadian's keen interest in what others thought of the CR films, s/he didn't offer any opinion on them … something the other two chatters didn't notice. After all, they didn't know this person, if "DIKU" meant "Do I know you" … which meant that Akkadian was someone new to CR chatrooms. 

Which in turn brought up that whole pride thing again— 

Exiting the room (where Akkadian had left a "POOF" shortly after I'd looked away from the screen, according to my print-out) I backed up to the Yahoo! portal and checked for links to an Akkadian Web page.… 

All I got was the Web site for some small press magazine. I was about to check out the remainder of the Ciné-related sites when I found myself typing in "Birkita Saleen Newman" and clicked "search" with my mouse. 

I'd never thought to see if she had any Web sites, be they fan-made or official; this Ciné case had been so time-consuming, I was lucky to have caught the late-night airings of her films on the Independent Film Channel. But no matter how culturally pervasive the CR films had become, other movies continued to be made, with real people telling new stories … and as the URLs for five Birkita Web sites appeared on my screen, I told myself, so I am not the only person who'd discovered her, though the slightest twinge of apprehension plucked my nerves. Hoping that none of the sites were anti-fan postings, I tried the first one, hoping that the simple "www.birkita.com" indicated that it was her official site. 

Apparently, her domain had been co-opted early in her career; fortunately, though, the person who'd created this page loved her work as much—or maybe even more—than I did. Good-quality stills taken from press kits, short downloadable clips from her early films (Custom Kind, Rhymes With Thyme, and the one that won the award at Sundance, G2G), including that memorable sequence from Rhymes when she's walking away from her boyfriend, out into rush hour traffic, only to have each car stop precisely a finger's width before her, as she seemingly meanders through the slow-moving cars—until the camera does this amazing crane-pan of the street below, to reveal the open spaces between the stopped cars, as they form a lopsided heart. 

But mostly, there were pictures of her, especially those eyes … that between-shades mix of tan around the pupil and bluish-aqua beyond, which some people called hazel, while others found themselves unable to describe them as anything but beautiful. Slightly cat's-eyes, with subtly upturned outer corners and one pupil that veered off by half a degree or so … so no matter where she directed her gaze in any of her films, she could almost be looking your way as you sat there in the darkness below her flickering image. 

Oh, the rest of the pictures were of her, too, but they were full-body shots that diminished her remarkable, wistfully ageless eyes. True, seeing her entire body may've been enticing for a lot of other men out there (especially in the low-cut waitress uniform she wore at the beginning of G2G, before the diner was bombed), especially men sick and tired of stick-figure fashion slaves with T-square collarbones and sunken abdomens, but I kept moving my mouse up to the head shots, to enlarge them … 

After a few minutes of this, my conscience (and the realization that my bosses might be monitoring what I was doing) warned me that I wasn't likely to find any links to the CR UNSUB in some young indy-film queen's retinas, so I reluctantly left the site—even as I tried the following URL, www.G2GBirkita.com, with my next heartbeat. 

An official site, apparently one to which she contributed original material, judging by the photos of her pre-film stage work, back when she was in her teens or early twenties (I'd never learned exactly how old she really was; apart from having been dipped in the waters of the Dick Clark gene pool, even her voice was ageless—girlishly light, with a smoky, burr-like undertone that echoed like a distant purr). All the productions were period pieces, and she herself was so unchanged (apart from her now-blonde hair being a shade closer to honey-tan), that I couldn't even begin to tell when she'd appeared in those plays … Helena in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," a rather chesty Laura from "The Glass Menagerie," Mrs. Zero in the 1920s play "The Adding Machine," a makeup-aged Mrs. Antrobus to a black Mr. Antrobus in Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth," and, in the only modern-dress role shown, the teen seductress Patsy June Johnson from Lanford Wilson's "The Rimers of Eldritch." But even there, her outfit was timeless … a flared pink skirt and what had to have been a knit bodysuit, grey with a deep V-neck. By enlarging the photo, I did notice that she seemed to be wearing those god-awful Earth shoes from the late 1970s, the ones with the backwards-sloping heels, but that could've been a strange whim of whoever costumed the play.… 

I'd saved and printed out the enlargement without realizing until the freshly printed page rolled out of the printer. 

The guys upstairs would love to know why I did that, I found myself thinking as I quickly plucked it from the printer and tossed it into a drawer. Deciding that the folks who hit the CR sites had to have felt the same compulsion to download what they saw, I told myself that the FBI may pay my rent, that finding criminals was my vocation, but there was no damn way anyone was going to put handcuffs on my needs. 

The rest of the site was as photo-oriented as the fan site; interspersed with stills and downloadable clips were statements from Birkita: 


"Acting hasn't been a passion for me—it's Passion, period." 
"When other actors were kids, they pretended they were accepting their Oscars while holding a hairbrush in front of the bathroom mirror … for me, my rattle was my 'Oscar' when I was still in my crib." 

"My only regret about doing pictures back to back is missing out on the face-to-face with my fans …" 

The only biographical material on the site mentioned that she'd been born in Chicago, was "still" single, and adored cats. 

She'd contributed pictures of her "boys," Baby Brutis, Quinn-Quinn (apparently she'd seen Sliders, and was aware of the whole "two Quinns" subplot in the last season of the show), and Woody, "a.k.a Woody-Wumpus." 

"Baby" Brutis had long ago outgrown his name—he was a huge black mitted cat with a swollen, strangely serene face, while Quinn-Quinn was a semi-harlequin white cat with splotchy black markings. And then there was Woody— 

I don't know how long I sat there, staring at the image. I do recall thinking that I really ought to call the lab, and tell Keith to take a look … until I told myself, cats like that are as common as dander. You don't know how many people out there own cats exactly like him. 

True, the pose was different, but Woody looked so much like the cat in the CR remakes he could've been that phantom feline's littermate. The same creamy white rings around the eyes, the same canted oval green eyes, the same eager expression … 

Without bothering to print out Woody's image, I clicked out of the site. Cats are the most common house pet in the country, and every year some cat food company puts out a calendar of famous people and their felines, plus the other pet food giant has one with cats owned by everyday people … many of whom are interchangable with those belonging to the celebrities. 

Reflexively, I typed in the commands for another search of CR-related sites, and within minutes I was watching a chat about the altered Terminator: 


SueB: Has anyone considered that all the person who made this did with the final skeletal Terminator was squeeze the image, so that it looked thinner? Too bad they couldn't have done that in the first place, so Henricksen could've really played the Terminator. 
Wiley: But Cameron couldn't have sold the picture if Arnold S. was only playing one of the cops who gets killed midway thru. 
Jean-P: The irony is, Arnold is so funny playing the cop -- when he drops that cigarette into the black cop's coffee -- 
Wiley: Reminded me of what he did in KINDERGARTEN COP. But the switch between the actors was cool. 
SueB: I'm surprised Harlan Ellison hasn't claimed this CR version was his idea, too. 
Jean-P: The whole Terminator plotline is straight from 20 MASTERPLOTS. I can download the pages to prove it - 
Sensing that this conversation was about to go off on a more literary than visual tangent, I exited, and was about to click onto another when the phone rang. 

"Rune, you ain't gonna believe this—" 

" 'Aren't,' and you know better, Keith—" 

"Aren't-smaren't. This man's gone got himself a lead." 

His voice cut through the monitor haze in my brain, and made me aware that not only was my butt sore but I was also hungry and thirsty—a sensation undercut with dismay when I glanced at my watch and realized I'd been surfing the net for over seven hours. 

"The photos of the cat?" I heard myself whispering, as the need to empty my bladder insinuated itself in my consciousness. 

"I'm gonna send that actor an application for the Bureau—you won't believe it. The eleventh vet we tried. In Oakland. Not only did the vet recognize the cat, but he faxed us back that the owner works in the computer field—housebound on top of that. And rich as all get-out—brings in the cat so damn often, the vet bought himself a second X-ray machine from the profits." 

"Is the cat named Woody?" I asked. 

"You psychic, man? Yeah, he named the cat after a damn cartoon character of all things—" 

The sound of that one gender pronoun almost made me relieve myself behind my desk; crossing my legs, I asked, "Does this person have other cats?" 

"Uhm … lemme see … no, just this one. Guy brings it in every month, for a tune-up. Check for worms—" 

"I'll take your word for it," I smiled into the receiver, before picking up a pen and asking, "Ok, what's the name—and no damn coin toss this time, I'm due for a break from this playpen of ours …" 




· · · · ·  


According to the fax, our suspect's name was Michael Tillich. Keith and I cross-checked for priors—not so much as a parking ticket. Which was in keeping with our profile. California driver's license showed us that he was white, and looked like an extra from that old TNT movie about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. A Silicon Valley boy, with a cat named after one of the characters in a Disney movie. Thirty-seven, single, just a profiler's dream. He'd been a software designer for almost half his life. He even belonged to those vintage-TV video clubs, buying mostly science fiction and fantasy shows. Man had the whole Xena: Warrior Princess collection. 
He didn't have any overt connection to the movie industry, a factoid I found troubling, but Keith thought the purchase of old episodes of The Twilight Zone and Kolchak: The Night Stalker indicated at least an oblique interest in Tinseltown. 

It wasn't until I was putting in a requisition for a round-trip ticket to California (coach, alas) and Keith was arranging for an agent from the local field office to accompany me that we came upon the major discrepancy between Tillich's driver's license and the stuff the veterinarian sent us—either Tillich needed a whole lot of room to house his multiple computers/processors plus his collection of vintage TV shows, as in two houses' worth, or he was a closet polygamist whose wives loathed each other. One address (next to his laminated photo) was in Oakland proper, the other in a suburb a few miles outside the city limits. Both were single-unit dwellings, which—based on what information we could glean from the realtors who'd handled both properties—fit our profile precisely (large rooms, huge basements, close to a major T-1 line). And Tillich owned both of them. 

Not that a good software designer couldn't earn enough to afford two houses, but— 

"Ok, so which house do I visit first?" 

Keith spoke without hesitation. "The one where the cat lives. He'd need to have it close while he works. I'll bet the other one's full of damn Xena tapes …" 




· · · · ·  


I'd brought my laptop to Oakland; it sure beat the hell out of the Adam Sandler film they were showing on the flight. I'd downloaded the entire Ciné Rimettato file (minus the actual movies) and all of the notes Keith and I had made … but it was going to be a long, long flight, and the download from Birkita's personal Web site fit nicely on my hard drive. I'd even included the clips … 



· · · · ·  


Between bites of my dinner (which bore a dismaying resemblance to the fare Steve Martin ended up with in Planes, Trains and Automobiles), I pulled up the file photos of Woody the cat—both of them—from Birkita's site and the CR remakes. The two could've been related; picked up from the same shelter, perhaps. The name was easier to explain; Keith told me he'd found thirty-eight Woodys and eighteen Buzzes or Buzz Lightyears in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas alone—at the first ten vets. Not all of them were cats, but for some reason the names were popular. 
Next, I lined up Tillich's photo next to that of his cat … but somehow the connection, my first real look at the person behind the whole mess, continued to elude me. No matter how bland-looking the average serial killer, or bomber, or kidnapper, typically there's … something, in the eyes, or in the demeanor, or in the person's soul, that tells me, Yes, this is the man. 

True, Tillich actually wasn't in front of me, but the eyes in the photograph just didn't grab me. I suppose it's a residual effect from my days as a cop, the gut feeling that simply tells you things without the need for words, or even concrete thought. 

Driver's license pictures are always bad, I soothed myself as I sipped my coffee … half the time they don't resemble the subject. But something I'd thought I'd trained myself to supress in the name of psychology and criminal theory, told me that no picture is ever that bad … 

The special agent who was supposed to accompany me to Tillich's suburban address was out sick; one of those Asian flu bugs making the rounds on the West Coast. I was offered another agent, but demurred—the field office was half-staffed, and I needed the time alone in the rental car to collect my thoughts. No matter what I found or didn't find that day, I was merely going to pay Mr. Tillich a neutral visit—a routine background check, concerning one of his software-design buyers. 

The house was unchanged from the photos the realtor in Oakland had faxed us, save for one detail—a redwood ramp leading from the three-car garage to the single-story-dwelling's double-wide front doors. The realtor had sold Tillich the house in the past four years, but the ramp was weathered to the silvery-grey shade of his cat Woody's fur— 

I'd looked at his license so many times in the past two and a half weeks that I could recite all of Tillich's personal data by rote: DOB 2-25-68, Ht: 5' 10", Wt: 152, Hair: Brown, Eyes: Blue. And he needed corrective lenses in order to drive. But he wasn't handicapped—no indication that he'd need a ramp— 

Telling myself that he might've had two warring wives—one in a chair—after all, I walked up to the door and thumbed the bell, listening to the muted chiming tones behind the Spanish-style oak doors. 

I hadn't noticed the speaker grill beside the door until the voice crackled close to my left ear: "Yes, may I help you?" 

A female voice, distorted like an answering machine left unchanged for too long. 

"Hello, I'm looking for a Mr. Michael Tillich … I'm Special Agent Rune Volney with the FBI. … Could you please tell me if he's in?" Speaking to blank, faux-carved wood was unnerving. 

I couldn't tell if there was a security camera hidden by the stuccoed door-surround, but I suspected I was being watched. 

"Could you please hold up your badge and ID to the right-hand door? Middle of the panel?" 

The voice was as glitchy and as scratchy as before, but it obviously wasn't a recording. Obediently, I opened my badge holder before the door panel—where I finally made out a small convex lens, hidden among the bold Spanish-style carvings—and continued to wait in the wan, watery sunlight. The neighborhood beyond me was quiet, but I could make out a distinct humming noise to my left, close to where a marionette's worth of long wires snaked down from a power pole to somewhere off to the side of the house. It was quiet enough for me to hear a car revving up, but no sound came from the attached garage. 

The sonofabitch is checking out my badge number, I realized, as the wait continued … then, that static-spiked voice again: 

"Please, come in, Agent Volney—" 

The doors slid aside—I hadn't realized they were pocket doors before—and a granular wedge of blackness yawned before me. As if realizing that I couldn't see, remote-controlled ambient lights winked into a trail of brightness, like the rows of lights in some old movie theaters— 

The connection, that sense of knowing I was close to my prey, came on me in a knee-melting rush. Tillich had to know what those lights looked like— 

Once my eyes adjusted, I saw that I was in your basic California ranch-style house: wide open doorways, low ceilings, tile floors … and not much in the way of furnishings, save for a massive HD-TV and banks of top-of-the-line stereo equipment. And movie posters on the walls … framed in matte chrome, covered with nonreflective glass. Real poster-posters, not the ones video rental guys put in a barrel and either sell for a buck a pop or give away with a rental. 

I found myself in what passed for the living room, although there was little of a lived-in look about the space. Not even a place to sit down— 

There were three doorways leading to other rooms, all of them darkened … until I heard that voice again, still marred with hissing pops and electronic burrs, coming from behind me: 

"I'm sorry to have kept you waiting outside, Agent Volney—I assume you've guessed that I was looking up your badge number. … I trust you're here on official business, no? Although I thought they only sent out profilers in Thomas Harris novels—" 

Although it had only been a movie, I suddenly knew exactly how Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling had felt when she'd realized that she was standing in the same room with Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs—strange, how the lexicon of cultural references tends to be so closely linked with the cinematic after all. And I wasn't even a fan of Foster or the movie itself. I liked Ted Levine's Jamie Gumb, but the whole film was simply too pat and coincidental for my tastes— 

But all I could think of was being small and fragile and alone with a killer who skinned women—even though I myself was six-one, hefty, and presumably alone with a software programmer who didn't look strong enough to depress his keypad— 

Only, the voice wasn't male, and I hadn't heard any footsteps. 

"You can turn around—I couldn't shoot you if I wanted to …" 

Another drinker from the creative well; the tacit reference to the basement shoot-out at the end of the movie made me smile despite my unease. And I made sure the smile stayed on my face as I turned around, for realization was sinking in as to the reason for that rasp on the speaker, and lest I display that most politically-incorrect reaction of all toward an ostensible cripple— 

Michael Tillich hadn't spoken those words. He may have owned the house, probably by proxy, but it was with a great inner gasp of relief that I realized that he wasn't the Ciné Rimettato creator— 

—even as another part of me, a more primitive, feeling part, died a slow, sad, withering death. 

She was already assuming the near-fetal position of the advanced stages of what appeared to be either ALS or MS; her hands were supported by leather- and shoelace-like bound braces, although she clearly had movement in her fingers. The twin trays of keyboards jutting out like folded-in wings before her were level with her hands. Her legs were thin, the calves under the straight-leg jeans were broom-handle straight beneath the webbing which helped to hold her onto her chair. There was a microphone device held over her larynx with pink-edged surgical tape, half-hidden by her hair. Which was back to its original honey-tan shade … 

Of course, her eyes were the same; only they'd glittered with tears on screen … 




· · · · ·  


"Come, there's a chair in the back room," she finally said, with that metallic simplicity, and with a trembling pass of her left hand over the keyboard below, she was off, moving silently in her chair. I followed in her wake of soft-rushing air, down a sloping hallway which led to the rear of the house, into what I now realized was a basement converted for wheelchair access. The sensation was like being in a movie theater; while the air was filtered clean, I could almost imagine a whiff of popcorn. 
As promised, there were chairs—director's chairs, one even bearing her name stencilled across the back—downstairs. And, as Keith and I had surmised, there were hundreds of monitor-free computers, Macs by the look of them (not those candy-colored Ju-Ju-Be home units but serious workhorse models) sitting on banks of wire shelving, much like the workings of a cable TV system, only with JAZ drives added. Power cables shone like so much licorice, black, red, and even yellow, thick candy-like ropes squiggling across the tile floor and up along the rows of utilitarian racks. There was a humming sound in the room, far more intense than the minimal noise her electric chair made. 

And there were monitors near the chairs … one showing her earliest movie, Los Gatos Express from 1989. The one I'd kept missing, save for the last few minutes caught periodically on IFC. 

"It's on video," she said suddenly, as if gleaning my thought. "I've a copy somewhere upstairs. Not DVD, though, But that one is me." 

" 'Is' as in … you were in it." 

Up close, I realized that Birkita Saleen Newman may very well have been wearing her own Earth shoes in that long-ago college production of "The Rimers of Eldritch"—her skin was supple, slightly oily even, but the fine wrinkles on her forehead and around her eyes were enough to tell me she was pushing fifty, or damn close to it. 

For two years, I'd been pouring over those five remakes she'd made, trying to figure out the why behind them, trying to get into the UNSUB's head … when it was the body that was the motive all along. 

I had to smile as I thought of the films she'd chosen to spring on an unsuspecting, unprepared, but ultimately delighted (save for the legal types) world—all of them connected with bodies, in one way or another. Scarlett O'Hara, the character whose body was part and parcel of who she was. Divine in Casablanca, a man who used a faux woman's body to achieve fame … a smaller, leaner, unobtrusive Terminator in exchange for a hugely muscled, obtrusive killing machine … and the changes in body sizes and types in The Cable Guy were beyond obvious. Which left The Body … 

Where the young, would-be-some-day Writer could visually "grow": into a more visually-matched adult Writer. Without making the viewer wonder what the teenage Gordie might've done to himself in the wild 1960s to make his brown eyes blue … 

And I remembered what she'd said to me just now, "But that one is me" … which meant— 

She must've seen the spark of recognition, of connection, in my eyes, for she said, "Yes, the Ciné Rimettato films were practice. I had to know if what I was planning to do, once I found out what was going to happen to me physically, would actually work. I'd switched gears in my early thirties, given acting a try and got a role after my first audition. Made me realize that I'd lost a lifetime of opportunity working behind one of those—" she jerked her head in the direction of the computers racked for parallel processing "—tap-tapping away half my life … but my mid-life crisis wasn't precipitated by poor job performance. I designed a lot of software, probably some of it used by your employers. I managed to make a great deal of money … and I invested it. And I was lucky with those investments. So … when I decided to go to one of those open indy auditions, and got the part … I thought I was set. I found out just before that picture wrapped that I'd soon be like this. Once I got over my anger, I remembered an old movie, that one Michael Crichton did in the '70s, Looker … all about these evil corporate types who digitally scanned beautiful women in order to create their commercials. Or something like that. The plot wasn't important, but the idea … came back to me, pulled me out of my self-pity." 

(Mentally, I kicked myself for overlooking that movie—it might've helped us create a better profile much sooner. …) 

"And I could still move well enough for motion capture, so I had myself digitally mapped. Recorded my voice, enough for a hundred films' worth of sampling. Just like in The Stepford Wives." She smiled at me. "But that wasn't enough … I knew money would buy me screen time in virtually any newbie director's indy film, that enough money up front to make extra prints and buy real advertising time would guarantee me a role in any movie I wanted 'in' on … but I didn't know for sure if I could take out some other actress, and put me in . So … I practiced with previously made films. To see if the finished product would look right—I had to make sure a replacement actor would look really real, using sampled images and voices. After the first four films I redid, I was satisfied that my idea was sound, and I got my software past the beta stage— 

"Oh, please don't look so pained about me replacing someone else—it happens more than you'd want to know about. And I made sure that every woman I ended up replacing was well paid, and that they got roles in the next film 'I' starred in … I don't think I've permanently damaged anyone's career." 

"But … don't people talk?" 

"In Hollywood? Or outside it, on the fringes? Not if you want to work again … no need to frown, only the surface of this business is beautiful. But I don't kill careers. Only … delay them, one picture at a time. Disappointment is a fixture of the profession … but being paid to be let down is rare. Only a handful of people know-know what I've done … but they don't know about Ciné. I did that by myself, although I had some friends make out the money orders. Like Mike … he's getting this house in my will. He's earned it. Woody's going to live with him, eventually. Like Brutis and Quinn-Quinn will stay with the people who take them to the vet for me. … I'm dying," she added without rancor. "I've been this way for some time now, and the doctors say I'm very lucky to be able to still breathe on my own, and talk after a fashion. I still have my vocal cords. That Hawking fellow didn't, after a time." 

I could tell that her voice was failing, from fatigue. Just as I knew there was no way, no way at all, no matter how many lawyers and television station moguls and people back at the Bureau and the DoJ were tugging at me, that I'd be able to let anyone string her up from the nearest movie marquee and leave her to dangle in the wind. Even if a judge and jury convicted her, how long might she live once she was incarcerated? Fining her would amount to a death sentence—she needed the money to maintain herself, even on a most basic, no-frills level. And to merely expose her to the world would've been the cruelest punishment of all— 

She lifted both arms at the elbow, shaking hands held out with their palms parallel, and said, "Don't make the cuffs too tight, ok?" 

I had to laugh. "You've pissed off a lot of people, you do realize that? But … you haven't killed any careers, let alone any people, which as far as I'm concerned would be my only motivation to turn you in—" 

"I'm still very much a threat … I've read about me in the papers, seen the articles on the Web. I'm a danger to Copyright Land—" 

I thought about the nearly $75K sitting in the SAG retirement accounts, and all those videos that had been sold or rented, and all the money those actors and actresses she'd chosen to digitally manipulate had earned … not fortunes, but money nonetheless paid for their "work." 

And I also thought about the sheer creativity of her efforts, and how she'd made my partner back at the PBAU laugh at The Cable Guy—Keith, who never watched comedies. And all those people in the chat rooms, actually thinking about what they'd seen both in her versions and in the original films she'd altered for such an overtly mundane purpose— 

"Why not replace actresses with your image … why did you pick those other people—" 

"For the software, actually … to make it applicable for anyone, not just my image. And because there were people who didn't make movies they should have, or who passed them up for one reason or another … I didn't want to grow bored working with my own image too quickly. And I suppose my intellectual curiosity needed to be sated—" 

"How long did it take you to do them? The first remakes, I mean—" 

"Depended … some took nearly a year, others six months. I write good software," she added simply. "But The Body only took three months. And I did that one long after I'd put myself into my own pictures. And most of that time was spent fixing the glitches they couldn't do back then." 

"So … why do that one at all? You knew how to dub in dialogue, you could manipulate images—I can see putting the casting right in the other movies, but that one … I mean, everyone knows that Tom Cruise was supposed to star in The Shawshank Redemption, Brad Pitt too—and that River Phoenix died before he could appear in Interview With the Vampire—" 

For the first time, I saw a spark of anger in those bicolored eyes. When she spoke, her voice quavered with distortion: 

"Don't mention people who squander their lives in mid-project. Phoenix was working on some other film before Vampire, some small movie. And he partied too hard right in the middle of shooting, when he was still obligated to the people he was working for. I can understand Farley—he admitted his problems, tacitly. And he wasn't making a film when he died. But even if I could've finished the thing Phoenix was working on, or replaced him in Vampire—and I could've written the software to do either film, as long as the other actors resumed their roles … I knew how to do it then— I wouldn't do it after such a display of irresponsible rudeness. Understand?" Her eyes softened, as she continued, "As for Shawshank, it's all but achieved religious significance with the public. I wouldn't have dared touch it. Not that I couldn't have done it. But The Body … I just wanted to see what it would've looked like. With two actors who matched physically … I made another version of it, one I never put up—I paid for some domains but never used them. I made it, I watched it, and then I erased it. Because I didn't want it to surface, and prevent it from possibly being made for real someday. I don't take away roles from people who might age into them, should someone get the idea to do an ultimate anniversary edition—" 

Knowing that I had linked up with my UNSUB's motivations, without realizing it, made me smile again, despite the moist tightness I felt behind my soft palate and nose. 

"Too bad you destroyed it … I would've liked to have seen it. Although maybe I will see it, eventually. I don't think that particular actor is going to quit the business anytime soon—" 

"Or OD," Birkita added with a ringing metallic finality, followed by a smile which looked almost as beautiful as the ones she'd worn in all those photos I'd downloaded. 

Sensing that her strength was ebbing, I knelt down close to her chair, and said, "I trust that no more of these … put-rights of yours will be appearing anytime soon. No one cares—no one minds about your films, but the others—" 

"I've made what I wanted made … and what I wanted people to see. Apart from the one film I did purely for myself, I just couldn't bear for the others not to be seen … and people do enjoy them, don't they?" 

"As long as they're the only ones like that, they will. The FBI doesn't have the manpower to seek and destroy every last copy … even if we say we do. I guess we're like Hollywood in that regard—" 

"I guess you are," she agreed. "I promise, I won't make any more." 

Realizing that our time was limited, I did ask quietly, "I need to know—why add in your cat? My partner, he's stumped—" 

"I wanted to. Sly Stallone put in his dog, once he got the Rocky films … Woody is just too cute. And he'd sit on my monitor while I was working … so one of my helpers filmed him with the digital camera one day … nothing more than that. He was there, and then he was in the films. He's my favorite cat, and … what else can I say?" 

"I can't think of anything," I said, patting her hands, and wanting more than anything to be able to ask her for an autograph, or something. … 




· · · · ·  


Keith and the others believed me when I said that Michael Tillich was a dead end; the cat was the same, but nothing else checked out. Just a home entertainment junkie with too much stuff for one house. 
Once new "product" stopped showing up on the Web, and the people who'd downloaded what they wanted finally talked themselves dry about it, the matter died away … until about a year later, when the codes for Birkita's software showed up on several Web sites. No explanation, just a lot of code … which someone eventually turned into a CR program. Then told his friends, who e-mailed their friends, who … 

Keith actually thinks that our old UNSUB is back at it; what with that version of Titanic "starring" Gwyneth Paltrow and Billy Crudup, all three Star Wars movies featuring a young Christopher Walken as Han Solo, and even the inevitable Tom Cruise version of Andy Dufrane in Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (which lit up the Web like the proverbial Christmas tree, inspiring Web pages and protests alike) all floating around on the Internet, I can't blame his assumption, and I haven't done anything to hinder his continued efforts to profile the CR UNSUB. The software is available, after all, shared freely on the net, so anyone with a yen to put some real or self-ascribed "wrong" casting "right" is now free to do so—and just as free to become a target of the combined strength of the Feds, the legal suits, and whoever else might decide to come between creativity and copyright … 

I could tell Keith, I suppose, but the point is moot. She is dead, after all. I saw the notice about it scrolled across the bottom of the screen during CNN's ShowBiz Today, under a clip from one of her latest films. E! likewise devoted only a few seconds to her demise. Ostensibly from a "sudden illness"—both channels claimed she was in her thirties. But she happened to die on a big news day; not only were there SAG nominations to report, but there was major opening on Broadway. Wil Wheaton and Kevin Spacey were starring as Biff and Willie Loman in yet another revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. 

There was already Tony buzz about the production. 

I suppose Birkita was lucky to get her ten seconds' worth of air time that day. 


THE END 




· · · · ·  


Special thanks to Jayge Carr for her help in researching this novelette. 
Italian translations were provided by John S. Postovit. 

Thanks also to the filmmakers and actors mentioned in this novelette.