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“Sweet man, that Roy.” Maggie threaded new film into her Moviola. “Give me a brush, I’d shine his shoes. Now. Want to see the only existing intact copy of Broken Blossoms? The missing outtakes on The Circus? The censored reel from Harold Lloyd’s Welcome Danger? Hell, there’s lots more. I—”
Maggie Botwin stopped, drunk on her cinema past and my full attention.
“Yeah, I think you can be trusted.” And she stopped. “Here I am, rattling on. You didn’t come here to listen to an old hen lay forty-year-old eggs. How come you’re the only writer ever came up those stairs?”
Arbuthnot, Clarence, Roy, and the Beast, I thought, but could not say.
“Cat got your tongue? I’ll wait. Where was I? Oh!”
Maggie Botwin slid back a huge cupboard door. There were at least forty cans of film stashed in five shelves, with titles painted on the rims.
She shoved one tin into my hands. I looked at some huge lettering, which read: Crazy Youths.
“No, look at the small print typed on the tiny label on the flat side,” said Maggie.
“Intolerance!”
“My own, uncut version,” Maggie Botwin said, laughing. “I helped Griffith. Some great stuff was cut. Alone, I printed back what was missing. This is the only complete version of Intolerance extant! And here!”
Chortling like a girl at a birthday party, Maggie yanked down and laid out: Orphans of the Storm and London After Midnight.
“I assisted on these films, or was called for pickup work. Late nights I printed the outtakes just for me! Ready? Here!”
She thrust a tin marked Greed into my hands.
“Even Von Stroheim doesn’t own this twenty-hour version!”
“Why didn’t other editors think to do this?”
“Because they’re chickens and I’m cuckoo,” crowed Maggie Botwin. “Next year, I’ll ship these out to the museum, with a letter deeding them over. The studios will sue, sure. But the films will be safe forty years from now.”
I sat in the dark and was stunned as reel after reel shuttled by.
“God,” I kept saying, “how did you outwit all the sons of bitches?”
“Easy!” said Maggie, with the crisp honesty that was like a general leveling with his troops. “They screwed directors, writers, everyone. But they had to have one person with a pooper-scooper to clean up after they lifted their legs on prime stuff. So they never laid a glove on me while they junked everyone’s dreams. They just thought love was enough. And, God, they did love. Mayer, the Warners, Goldfish/Goldwyn ate and slept film. It wasn’t enough. I reasoned with them; argued, fought, slammed the door. They ran after, knowing I loved more than they could. I lost as many fights as I won, so I decided I’d win ’em all. One by one, I saved the lost scenes. Not everything. Most pictures should get catbox awards. But five or six times a year, a writer would write or a Lubitsch add his ‘touch,’ and I’d hide that. So, over the years I—”
“Saved masterpieces!”
Maggie laughed. “Cut the hyperbole. Just decent films, some funny, some tear jerkers. And they’re all here tonight. You’re surrounded by them,” Maggie said, quietly.
I let their presence soak in, felt their “ghosts” and swallowed hard.
“Run the Moviola,” I said. “I never want to go home.”
“Okay.” Maggie swept back more sliding doors above her head. “Hungry? Eat!”
I looked and saw:
The March of Time, June 21st, 1933.
The March of Time, June 20th, 1930.
The March of Time, July 4th, 1930.
“No,” I said.
Maggie stopped in mid-gesture.
