Would-be movie producer Emily Bennett didn’t believe the legend of a lost movie, starring James Dean and John Wayne. But when she meets two uncannily talented celebrity impersonators—Jimmy Riley and Tom "Duke" Manfredo, and stumbles upon the elusive film editor who stole the master negative of Showdown, it dispels her doubts, fills her with a courage she didn’t know she had, and she sets out to complete the movie.
But as Emily and her stars prepare for day one of shooting, they find themselves entangled in a complex love triangle with Oedipal undertones, mirroring their own past lives and off-screen dynamics. As doubts about their ruthless director, Solange Borugian, surface, Jimmy’s and Duke’s friendship is turned upside down, while Emily and her brother Ben, struggle with their own unresolved issues and are forced to confront their dying father.
On location in Arizona, amidst Apache holy grounds and the magic of day-for-night shooting, the lines between past and present blur and the flawed characters' backstories intertwine into a tumultuous finale that exposes their hidden animosities, demons, and loves.
Would-be movie producer Emily Bennett didn’t believe the legend of a lost movie, starring James Dean and John Wayne. But when she meets two uncannily talented celebrity impersonators—Jimmy Riley and Tom "Duke" Manfredo, and stumbles upon the elusive film editor who stole the master negative of Showdown, it dispels her doubts, fills her with a courage she didn’t know she had, and she sets out to complete the movie.
But as Emily and her stars prepare for day one of shooting, they find themselves entangled in a complex love triangle with Oedipal undertones, mirroring their own past lives and off-screen dynamics. As doubts about their ruthless director, Solange Borugian, surface, Jimmy’s and Duke’s friendship is turned upside down, while Emily and her brother Ben, struggle with their own unresolved issues and are forced to confront their dying father.
On location in Arizona, amidst Apache holy grounds and the magic of day-for-night shooting, the lines between past and present blur and the flawed characters' backstories intertwine into a tumultuous finale that exposes their hidden animosities, demons, and loves.
1961-1973
“What is it?” Faye Bennett, wearing a plaid shirt and gab- ardine slacks, ran from her bedroom to the top of the stairs. “It sounds like someone shot you out of a cannon.” She stared
down at the foyer below.
“Mama!” Emily shouted for the seventh time, each time louder
than the one before. “You’ll never, never guess!” She went back and slammed the front door shut. “Never in a trillion years!” She swooped up her Pekinese, Suki, from the border of the tidy little rock garden that occupied a corner of the foyer.
From amidst a meadow of bone-white stones, Saint Francis, surrounded by plaster sparrows gathered at his feet, kept his focus on his birds and ignored Emily, who was furiously petting Suki. “You know that show we saw last night about the new vice presi- dent’s wife?”
“Yes?”
Emily squeezed her eyes shut, sucking in a fierce breath. “She’s my new teacher!”
“...Who is?”
“That woman. The one from last night. The lady who’s married to the vice president.” She glanced down at Saint Francis’s flock. “That Lady Bird.”
Her mother came down the stairs. “I don’t understand, dar- ling. Your new teacher is named Mrs. Johnson?”
“No! She’s named something else. Mrs. Nichols, I think. But she is that vice president’s wife from last night.” She set Suki back down next to St. Francis and the sparrows. “You know, Mrs. Lady Bird.”
3
Mit Out Sound
“You’re teacher is Lady Bird Johnson ... then who is Mrs. Nichols?”
“They’re the same,” said Emily, running to her mother. “They’re exactly the same.”
Faye Bennett sat on the third from bottom step and put her arms out to her daughter. “No, darling, they’re not.” She stroked her cheek and took hold of her shoulders, looking her in the eye. “Your new teacher is Mrs. Nichols. You learned her name today. Right? ... I’m right, yes?”
Emily looked down and in a small voice said, “Yeah.”
“Then she can’t be the vice president’s wife, can she?”
Emily collapsed into her mother, burying her head in her
stomach. “Why doesn’t anybody ever believe me?”
Faye stroked her hair, petting her. “Your father and I believe
you, honey. We just don’t know what to make of all these ... peo- ple you keep seeing.” She felt dampness through her blouse from Emily’s tears. “It’ll be okay, love. You’ll see. We’ll get everything straightened out.”
Emily had no idea what she meant. •••
It wasn’t until high school that she was given a brain scan. MRI technology was still in its infancy, its earliest use was primarily as a diagnostic technique. Earlier neuropsychological assessments had labeled her a victim of a form of prosopagnosia, a term derived from Classical Greek, literally meaning “face” and “non-knowl- edge.” In the late nineties it would come to be commonly known as “face blindness,” after sufferers’ inability to recognize the faces of familiar people.
The disorder is still little understood. No one knew the cause of Emily’s occurrence of it. There was no evidence it was genetic or that it had been trauma induced. A brain scan demonstrated there
4
Rick Lenz
was no sign of a lesion. It was something she would have to learn to live with. Many others had. Famous people who did or would later suffer from the syndrome included actor Brad Pitt, neuro- scientist/author Oliver Sacks, zoologist Jane Goodall, playwright Tom Stoppard, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and many more. The argument could be made that if the affliction didn’t halt the careers of these and other highly successful people, why should it hold Emily back?
Also, according to all of the diagnosticians she had been sent to, Emily’s case was “not seriously debilitating.”
Emily disagreed.
She had one atypical symptom: an inability to distinguish ordinary people from those in the public eye, primarily celebri- ties. The effect of this syndrome was to bring two images of a person together into one, as with the focusing mechanism of a camera. The new, combined picture was of someone she recog- nized from film or television or wherever, and could often think of by name.
Dr. Aaron Withers, a pricey psychoanalyst to whom she was sent by her father, decreed that Emily’s presentation of face blind- ness was likely aggravated by the fact that she lived in Beverly Hills, California, where the girl was raised and had spent most of her childhood.
If you spend any time in Beverly Hills, in the post office or the local markets, drug stores, parks, movie theatres, and so on, celebrity sightings are an almost daily occurrence. Emily had seen Jack Nicholson, Natalie Wood, Rock Hudson, Lucille Ball, and hundreds more, oftener than she could count, although in the end she wasn’t absolutely sure if she was seeing those celebrities, or if it was someone who looked—to her—like whichever celebrity it either was or was not. She saw roughly 2 percent of the people she took the time to focus on, wherever she went, as this or that
5
Mit Out Sound
well-known personality. Some of them, because of where she lived, actually were the celebrities she thought they were.
Most were not.
•••
Because her case seemed mild and not always an issue, Dr. With- ers showed her his most benevolent smile one day and called her celebrity-challenged. “Look at the happy side,” he said. “Most peo- ple with your ‘little problem’ feel constantly threatened. At least, you’re able to recognize some of the strangers you run into.”
In the back of her mind, she heard the words “little problem” almost every school day; her classmates could be unkind about it. The good news was that Dr. Withers turned out to be useful. She learned, when goaded, not to take the bait. With Dr. With- ers’ support, she devised an “off switch” for those confrontations with other kids and teachers that could easily turn into clashes. The danger usually passed.
Meantime, Dr. Withers helped Emily trace the beginnings of her condition back to childhood days when she was home from school, sick, looking at movies with her mother, her beloved Suki wedged between. They would get lost, watching Fred Astaire, Gin- ger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Bob Hope, and the rest. Emily found herself—in a game-playing way at first, she thought— imposing the people from her movie world onto the people in the real one. Mr. Lassiter, her history teacher, became Jimmy Stewart; Ms. Pesetsky, her home economics teacher, was magically trans- figured into feisty character actress Thelma Ritter; the mailman was James Cagney, and so on. From the beginning, her ailment had seemed to be incurable. It wasn’t with her all the time, but it was like a cunning leprechaun, often escaping from the nighttime of her unconscious into the glaring sunshine of her wakeful mind, gleefully wreaking its mischief.
6
Rick Lenz
It was not enough that the logical part of her knew that Lew Ayres, star of the original (1930) All Quiet on the Western Front, was too old to be her brother, that her mother had not really been Myrna Loy, matriarch of the family in the Academy Award classic, The Best Years of Our Lives, and that she had to have been halluci- nating that first day she’d stared at her own father’s profile and real- ized with dismay that she was seeing the usually benevolent, older, Academy Award-winning (Hud) actor Melvyn Douglas.
Her father was far too mean to be Melvyn Douglas.
•••
An additional wrinkle to Emily’s problem was that, having lived in the world’s major geographical concentration of actual celebrities for most of her life, she developed an all-consuming desire to make it in film.
Despite the supporting roles of the music and television busi- nesses in Tinseltown, the movie industry was still the reason Hollywood was Hollywood. If you wanted to truly be somebody amongst that gathering of pixies, you did it via the movie industry.
From the beginning, she knew that was not as easy as a lot of old films make it out to be. She couldn’t compose music scores, sing, dance, choreograph, write, or design scenery. She had little knowledge of cinematography or film editing. She’d had some suc- cess, acting in school and community theatre plays—one local reviewer even called her “radiant”—but she never forgot her high school drama teacher calling her “perky.” It was a strong enough message to start her thinking about more commonsense roles in the movie business.
But nothing small. She didn’t mind not being in the spotlight— as long as she was able to believe that someday, the world would recognize that she was special and, by the final reel, understand that in fact it loved and cherished her. She realized that along the
7
Mit Out Sound
way some people might misinterpret her ambitions as delusions of grandeur, and that anyone aware of her “little problem” might look at those ambitions as a desperate attempt to escape it, but she wouldn’t let herself worry about what those people thought.
•••
For a short time, she worked in a studio mailroom, then, for an even briefer period, in the menial, thankless job of on-set Direc- tors Guild of America trainee. She soon dismissed any directorial ambitions, deciding that profession was unsuited to her periodi- cally timid nature, not to mention her face blindness—although, by the time she reached young womanhood, she had begun to develop some limited skill at disguising her condition.
She decided to be a producer.
That wasn’t so easy either. She didn’t know anybody in the busi- ness to teach her the ropes or open important doors.
In the beginning, in 1971, after she’d graduated from UCLA (the College of Fine Arts), she found herself a job as a personal assistant to a TV series star of the time, a gorgeous young man who had been an overnight sensation and whose name, by the follow- ing season, nobody knew. Emily’s star was cancelled along with the beauty’s series.
She tried nonunion extra work, bit parts, and even a stint as an assistant casting director. She wanted to become familiar with the film business from as many points of view as possible and, at the same time, demonstrate that she was sure of herself—sure enough, at least, to be a movie producer.
As is often the paradoxical case with people who go into show business, she longed for certainty.
If at a quick glance, you are curious enough to read it with a little skepticism, it is more than entertaining - brilliant with timeless relevance!
The theme of impersonators as actors and their characters, and the complex interplay between them is an imaginative journey through the human psyche as well as Hollywood. Idealism as portrayed by the entertainment world for those with aspirations is often fraught with battles this book outlines between authenticity, commitment, and building the connections with the audience and the characters. The battle between self-confidence and what he details as the number one killers of actors - those with self-consciousness, inflexibility, and obstinance is profound.
There is poetic, descriptive, and beautiful imagery throughout the book as well as sharp wit and cynicism reflective of the culture. The mood of the Blue Martini lounge in LA, a toggle between tragic childhoods that plague many of the characters’ present adult lives, and the problems with separation and reintegration between where it is they come from and the mysterious and covert world of the cinema - all challenging topics. The dialogue regarding the adolescent stage of the actors and business is raw, poignant, dagger-sharp, and cuts through superficiality with a machete. Some pivotal moments are when there is speculation over their significance and role as creators of history in coincidental timing of world events in contrast with commenting on one of John Wayne's prior roles as "petty, neurotic, an opportunist without grace" and "half lit by his own lantern." However, it transitions to the sentiment of the piece of Emily's ongoing conviction to have something completed that has the propensity for not only 'good, but great' and sheds light that there is 'spirit without end'. The notion of 'important not phony', a 'mechanical smile' and sarcastic reflection of a Mother who seeks 'everything she says - a precious gem' denotes a sense in longing for authenticity and realness.
This timeless quest to use theater as both catharsis and allowing people to be who they really are (or an expanded and creative version) is something highly relatable - a subject I have also written on. Many accolades on reviving something from the archives that offers today’s audiences some relevant prophecy as well as entertainment.