The Good Inn Read online

  Dedication

  Black Francis dedicates this book to:

  Joey Santiago, David Lovering, and Kim Deal

  Josh Frank dedicates this book to:

  Jessica Frank

  In memory of

  Joe, Abe, Irwin, and Moe

  Epigraph

  Aux armes, citoyens . . .

  To arms, citizens . . .

  Nous entrerons dans la carrière

  We shall enter the (military) career

  Quand nos aînés n’y seront plus,

  When our elders are no longer there,

  Nous y trouverons leur poussière

  There we shall find their dust

  Et la trace de leurs vertus (bis)

  And the trace of their virtues (repeat)

  (Children’s Verse)

  Bien moins jaloux de leur survivre

  Much less wanting to survive them

  Que de partager leur cercueil,

  Than to share their coffins,

  Nous aurons le sublime orgueil

  We shall have the sublime pride

  De les venger ou de les suivre

  Of avenging or of following them

  —“WAR SONG FOR THE ARMY OF THE RHINE”

  The cinema is an invention without any future . . .

  —AUGUSTE AND LOUIS LUMIÈRE

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: Waiting for Guncotton

  Prologue

  ACT I: Guncotton

  Chapter 1: The Guncotton Investigation

  Chapter 2: Wandering

  ACT II: The Good Inn

  Chapter 3: Under the Golden Shield at the Good Inn

  Chapter 4: The Blue Movie

  Inter-Mission: Meanwhile . . .

  ACT III: The City of Light

  Chapter 5: The Mouth of the Rhône

  Chapter 6: In the Pigalle

  Chapter 7: La Maison Rouge du Film Bleu

  (The Red House of the Blue Movie)

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Waiting for Guncotton (or)

  A few years ago, my friend Charles Thompson (a.k.a. Frank Black, a.k.a. Black Francis, front man and founder of the band the Pixies) sat down with me at a little French café on the East Side of Austin, Texas. He was right in the middle of his Pixies Doolittle twenty-year anniversary tour. I’d brought him here because the man loves all things French. This was the same guy who named his fourth Pixies album Trompe Le Monde, after all, and who would find any excuse to get to Paris. So being the Texas barbecue-bred boy that I was, I had to do some research in order to find a passable French experience in a city that celebrated smoked brisket and ribs. As we took in the aroma of our espressos in the warm and inviting bistro vibe of the Blue Dahlia, I asked him what he wanted to do next. Charles always has exciting new projects in mind and I am always amenable to the cause. Charles and I had become friends over the years, as my first two books concerned topics of interest to him. The first was a book about the Pixies and the second a book about a man named Peter Ivers, who wrote the title song for David Lynch’s Eraserhead.

  Aside from an affinity for France and making music, Charles has always loved the cinema. Sitting at the café, he began to tell me about how he had been struggling to find the right way to bring new Pixies material into the world after it had been absent for so long. He wanted to create something musically that was completely different and new. He felt that if a filmmaker would come along and ask his band to do a soundtrack for a cool movie, that might be the answer. I had just finished telling him about my latest writing project: a puppet rock-musical movie about a world where people live symbiotic relationships with puppets by sharing their subconscious minds through a device called a “Flip-Chip,” invented by a master puppeteer in a world that now hated puppets. He was fascinated by the completely made-up original world and all its possibilities.

  As the conversation progressed, he divulged that he actually had an idea for a film. It was the story of the first pornographic movie ever to include a narrative.

  He was inspired by a film he’d heard about called La bonne auberge (The Good Inn). Set in 1907, it had the meagerest of plots: a soldier goes to an inn and meets the daughter of the innkeeper and they have a lot of sex. Charles had become fascinated by the idea of filling in the blanks to the soldier’s backstory, and in an early attempt to find new Pixie-ish inspiration he had even recorded a few demos for songs pertaining to the story, describing it as sort of a soundtrack “song cycle” about a character named simply Soldier Boy. It was at this point that I interrupted him and said, “Wait a minute, you mean you’ve already started writing the soundtrack to this movie?”

  From there, everything fell into place.

  “Charles, why not write the soundtrack to the movie first? Who says you can’t write the music before there’s an actual movie to score? If you want to make a movie, you should start with what you know how to do best: the music.”

  There was a moment of silence while Charles mulled this over. Then he asked me to help him write it. “Write what?” I asked.

  “Our movie,” he responded.

  Now we both took a moment of silence to contemplate the exchange that had just occurred and he asked me what else I had been up to. I told him that I had recently by chance invented and opened the world’s first mini urban drive-in movie theater, which I’d built in a back alley way on the East Side of Austin. We projected on the wall of a church, led by a mariachi band. Charles lit up like the sun: “Wait, you have your own movie theater?” In the purest form, this is Charles, getting excited about a little oddball thing and then being fascinated to the point where he would request that I take him to see it after his show.

  So it was eleven thirty P.M. on a Thursday night and I picked Charles up in the back of the theater where he was performing Doolittle in Austin, with a two-hour window before his bus left for the next stop on the tour. We drove across town and pulled up into the alley of the Blue Starlite, my twenty-car drive-in movie theater. I flipped the power switch and the lights illuminated around the little back-alley drive-in, turning the dark East Side lot into the tiny cinematic wonderland I had described to him. Charles was thrilled. I switched on the projector and the vintage drive-in movie ads started playing on the wall that I had painted with a fairly authentic-looking drive-in movie screen. We just sat there until he had to leave, talking about movies and how he’d always dreamed of having his own movie theater. In retrospect, it really was the perfect start to this project. I discovered later during my research for the book that Georges Méliès had one of the first outdoor movie theater spaces in Paris, back before the great movie palaces sprang up and left him and his work in their shadows.

  Charles loves movies, movie theaters, and music, and man, does he love France. So in many ways The Good Inn is the ultimate love letter to all of the things that fascinate him.

  So how did it become a book? Following a few of our “brainstorming sessions,” I called up Steven Appleby, who did the very cool rocket drawings for the cover of the Pixies’ fifth album, and I asked him if he would do some illustrations to help us with our movie pitch. How cool would it be, I thought, to have the illustrator for Trompe Le Monde storyboard our movie! Appleby jumped on board and began drawing away, and Charles loved every panel he created. That’s when the idea of an illustrated novel based on our screenplay idea came about. And thus, the book you hold in your hands came to be.

  Over the next year, we delved deeper into the history books to find out anything and everything we could about The Good Inn and the men who firs
t got their hands on a moving-picture camera. We wanted to know how these very early “blue movies” were made. As you can imagine, they were not considered national treasures or important French history. Many of them, including The Good Inn, were lost in time except for a few film frames.

  One thing that seemed to happen frequently was that popular early pornographic films were remade and then renamed, to the point where it was nearly impossible to track down their origins. There are actually a few versions of The Good Inn that are described on the web, but the only moving images we uncovered were from a remake. This is available to watch online. The one still image that we were able to find depicted what we believe was the style and feel of the original film. As Charles describes this image, “It is strangely innocent, the actors don’t seem self-assured in the least, they almost look like deer in headlights, they are not acting, it’s almost as if it is real.” The remake depicts a “musketeer” and is full of lighthearted sexual innuendos. This is more in line with later pornographic films, which would have been far more assured of themselves than, say, the first narrative pornographic film ever shot. This was an exciting discovery, but also frustrating, as we were hoping to see the original film that we were creating an entire world around. So I switched gears to try to find as many books about the first pornographic filmmakers as I could. I quickly discovered that there were none. Another setback for sure, so I decided to concentrate on learning everything I could about the “legitimate” filmmakers of this time (1882–1915) and to see whether within their stories there were any hints or clues about the peers who might have made The Good Inn and other movies like it. And that’s exactly where I found them, hidden in the paragraphs of other people’s stories. So I told Charles my discovery, and soon he was sending me articles and biographies of French actors, artists, terrorists, politicians, producers, and directors that at some point or another had crossed paths with the same strange lost (or buried) names who in part created the first blue movies.

  As a result of all of this detective work, many of the events that take place in The Good Inn are culled from real events in history. A number of actual people were also used as templates for characters, such as our antagonist Léar, whose history in film and on the planet is fairly well documented up until the early 1900s, when all mentions of him mysteriously come to a halt, as if he just vanished, or was erased, in time. Based on historical research, we interpolated to the best of our ability the most likely scenarios for what we felt would or could have happened.

  Similarly, while many of the linking narrative elements are clearly inventions of creative interpretation and made up to tell the story that we wanted to tell, they are based on actual historical truths, such as our female protagonist Nickie Willy, who is in part based on Louise Willy, a performer in the peep show Le coucher de la mariée, as well as Louise Weber, a cancan dancer at the Moulin Rouge and a muse of the affichistes of Paris. As well, we made occasional historical guesses and mixed science fact with a shot or two of science fiction, and after two years, we had completed the narrative. When people asked me what it was like, I described it as the Gone with the Wind of French cinema’s blue movie history if it was written by the Pixies and directed by David Lynch and Terry Gilliam.

  Above all else, Charles is a storyteller. Not just a storyteller but a collector of stories, a real honest-to-goodness modern-day troubadour, wandering through this dimension collecting the oddest oddball stories and turning them into rock ’n’ roll. I grew up listening to his two-to-three-minute musical tales, surrounded tightly by clustered atoms of quiet cool to loud choruses, of entire worlds that left my friends’ imaginations, as well as my own, spinning with images of aliens on lonely highways. There were proud Spanish dancers in seedy bars, monkeys going to the eternal kingdom, and biblical bloodbaths that somehow seemed sexy.

  I always wondered what this man would do if he had more than three minutes to tell a story, and through our collaboration, now I know.

  Charles did end up writing amazing new Pixies material. Released in parts over 2013 and 2014, a few of the songs’ hooks were actually repurposed from instrumentals from the original recording sessions for the Good Inn demo that Charles, Joey, and David created together. Seven of the Good Inn Demo Songs lyrics were used as inspiration for this book and are “musical scene centerpieces” in the narrative.

  What follows is an illustrated novel, based on an in-the-works soundtrack, for a feature-length film that has yet to be made, about the first narrative pornographic movie ever made.

  And now, without further ado, let’s dim the lights in the theater. We are very proud to present to you our film, The Good Inn.

  An old navy training film scratches its way to life in black and white. A gruff, middle-aged OFFICER appears, his thinning hairline and tight face positioned directly toward the camera as he commences his lecture.

  OFFICER: We are now going to demonstrate the safe use and storage of nitrocellulose, also known as guncotton. This compound is extremely volatile, which is why it is primarily used as an explosive material in weaponry. Notably, it is also used as a film base for the new moving picture industry. Be aware that this type of material should ALWAYS be stored with extreme care as it is highly flammable and can cause severe bodily harm.

  To prove his point the officer strikes a long match to light the film reel on fire and drops it into a large transparent container. The reel flares up and explodes with a white-hot flash as the chemicals in the emulsion feed off the air and flame. It continues to emit noxious flames and smoke as he continues . . .

  OFFICER: This chemical reaction also produces deadly fumes that will kill you. If you find yourself in close proximity to nitrocellulose-based materials and intense heat or flames, we can only recommend that you . . .

  RUN LIKE HELL!

  The reel ends, blasting the screen an unearthly white as the film flap-flap-flaps lazily against the back of a humming projector.

  INTERIOR/PROJECTOR BOOTH/NIGHT (in black and white)

  The ancient film projector sits in a graying projection booth that has clearly seen better days. Tattered movie posters are clinging desperately to the walls and stacks of old film reels balance on top of one another. An old man’s shaky hands extract the navy training film from the dusty sprockets of the projection wheel and he flips the off switch as his young projectionist protégé watches.

  OLD PROJECTIONIST: It is a lonely dead man’s profession with an uncertain future. If I were you, I’d join the navy. At least it has a slightly better death rate than sitting in this perch.

  The old man hobbles away, shutting the door and causing the thin walls to rattle. The young man’s face follows a dusty reel as it falls off and makes its way toward the ground from the now-broken shelf on the wall. He picks it up and studies it. Across the cover, in faded script, the label reads, “WARNING! Nitrate Film: Highly Combustible.” The boy opens the canister, threads the film into the projector, and proceeds to flip the switch.

  Click, click, click. The projection lights burst bright with a blinding white explosion and . . .

  (Angelic otherworldly voice singing over the white):

  A bird, he sang a little song, I sang along.

  It’s from a film about an inn, that she was in,

  And as with life there was a plot, but

  not a lot.

  Get to the chorus, she’s waiting there for us,

  This is just the chorus, and we’re just the

  choral ode.

  EXTERIOR/PARIS/DAY (in color)

  Across the dark, quiet countryside and over a sloping hill, thousands of twinkling lights blanket the horizon, causing the city to glow as though it is slowly being engulfed by low, warm flames. A newly built magnificent metal tower attempts to touch the sky, rising from the furnace below, dwarfing the cobbled streets and outdoor cafés. This is Eiffel’s tower. This is

  Paris . . .

  SOLDIER BOY (voice over image): When I was young, I was told my mother was very pretty
and my father was very slow. I was born on May 10, 1889 at the Exposition Universelle.

  EXTERIOR/WORLD’S FAIR/NIGHT (in color)

  Chaos is unfolding right below the Eiffel Tower’s giant iron legs. Dozens of onlookers gather around a woman, who is moments away from giving birth. Her blond hair splays out around her fragile, contorted face. A small, thin man hyperventilates as he looks down at his wife, her legs spread, screaming at him to do something, anything.

  SOLDIER BOY (voice over image): There wasn’t enough time to fetch a doctor, so a medicine man from Buffalo Bill’s Western Show stepped in.

  A statuesque man in a cowboy hat, with pistols at his hips, pushes the husband aside to assess the situation. Buffalo Bill’s long white whiskers are perfectly greased into two symmetrical curls. He grunts and briefly steps away, returning with an old Native American in an authentic feathered headdress who begins the work of delivering the baby.

  The healer’s glassy black eyes focus, in concentration, as he hums a deep, resonant song to bring the baby into this world. The husband watches fretfully, his sweating face inching closer and closer. CHEERS! A scream! MORE CHEERS!

  The medicine man’s forehead creases in concern as he cradles the wet newborn in his hands. He whispers a multitude of unintelligible words to the crying infant before presenting it to the crowd, which erupts into cheers. All of the women gasp in adoration as the mother extends her wiry arms out for her child.

  The shocked husband smiles a lopsided smile in relief. Buffalo Bill reaches into his pocket to reveal a finely rolled cigar, which he sticks in between the husband’s small, thin lips and lights. Buffalo Bill gives him a congratulatory slap on the back so hard the cigar is propelled onto the street in front of him.

  SOLDIER BOY (voice over image): So many promises were made on the day of my birth, from flying cars to houses on wheels. A young man from the States named Edison made sound come out of a spinning cylinder, promising everyone present, including my parents, that he would soon make sound come out of pictures. On the same night, Edison would stand on the top of Eiffel’s tower and shake hands for the first time with Monsieur Emile Reynaud.