Scary & Freaky stories: The Paranormal World

A Shadowland Afflicted

But now it was all 'after': long after the fall of Hollywood itself, with only remnants of that ancient flower in showbiz glamour left behind to be fondly remembered and faintly admired, even as it moldered in the dusty annals of history. No, thought Blewey to himself, it had all come to a sudden fade out much too fast.

He had started working as a projectionist's assistant at the tender age of fifteen in 1929, just as sound was coming into its own. He could still remember those first curious pops and crackles coming off the large synchronized wax record dizzily spinning next to the film reel, and Al Jolson's thinly effeminate voice declaring for all to hear, "Wait a minute! You ain't heard nothin' yet!"

Jolson had been quite right. For in the many years that had followed, Blewey Huett had chased one magic shadow after the next up there on that expansive blank screen. Each time the giant canisters containing the newest feature arrived from Hollywood, he raced them up to the top of the stairs, gingerly unpacking their oversized spools as though he were coddling a small child.

In many ways, the history of the Loew's Grand belonged to them both, though not exclusively. Blewey had met David O. Selznick here for the first and only time back in 1939, shaking the old time producer's meaty hand a mere four hours before the world premiere of Gone With The Wind, and savouring the absolute hysteria that was going on just outside the theatre. After that thunderous open night applause, Blewey's proposal to Caroleen Jenkins, a girl he had known for only five months, seemed almost apropos. Carl Jenkins did not approve of Blewey Huett. He was a high school dropout with no future ahead of him. But to Blewey's everlasting amazement, Caroleen Jenkins had defied her father's request and said 'yes'. It was the start of a very good life together.

Even so, Blewey now saw the whole thing in reverse, flickering at twenty-four frames per second before his eyes. Fade up on 'A' reel of their sparkling courtship; that awkward first meeting at the reunion dance. Blewey could almost feel the crinkle of his starched white collar constricting around his neck. He relived each stolen kiss against the moonlit arbour behind Caroleen's parent's house. More intense pleasures were to follow in the backseat of his older brother Chuck's borrowed car.

But like the greatest of love stories, theirs had come with more than a hint of melodrama along the way. Blewey fought the Nazis in Oran, North Africa, but saw Michael Curtiz's Casablanca millions of miles away from his beloved Loew's, huddled in an army tent not far from the reality of that city. How different he found it in life; dull and frankly, uninspired, without the colourful refugees, moody Max Steiner score or even a hint of evocative moonlight filtering through the Venetian blinds of that upstairs apartment he briefly shared with a nameless woman who ran the small concession for soldiers just below.

As the armistice neared, the Allies sent Chuck's body back to De Brook to be buried near his broken hearted fiancée, Mildred's home. He had fallen at the Battle of Triest, and for a while thereafter every war picture that Blewey Huett ran at the Loew's Grand left a distinct lump in his throat. But nothing could discourage his passion for the movies. And it was a passion - perhaps even an obsession - the greatest in his life. For, it nourished his heart, his mind and even his soul where reality frequently disappointed and even threatened to crush his dreams underfoot.

On the home front, Blewey settled into the best years of their lives. He went back to projecting movies, raised a pair of keen and handsome children with his wife - Mark and Sarah - and moved his growing brood to a small suburban home on a quiet, heavily treed street that vividly reminded him of the fictional town of Carvel that MGM had lovingly recreated in all those Andy Hardy films. After so many years of uncertainty, of struggling to make ends meet and going off to war, a new and most gratifying cadence came into all their lives.

In his head Blewey perennially prepared a vacation for his family to Hollywood. But then, almost as quickly, he would change their destination to someplace closer to home, perhaps fearful that the one dimensional back lot magic coming out of his projector would somehow evaporate as easily as the stardust, once seen from the graceless vantage of a three dimensional world. It was better not to know for sure.