Kubrick's Game Read online

  Scrambling, they wrote down each phrase on a blue note.

  Two blocks north – X – Find it – Blue is key – Car lot – Search high – Search low.

  Back in the car, Wilson sped north two blocks until they noticed a mysteriously empty car lot and pulled in. Sami pointed to a large X marked on the ground at the center of the lot. As they jumped out, another team arrived, and they each met at the X.

  The other team also consisted of two guys and a girl, and appeared college-age, wearing matching outfits of tan shorts and crimson USC Film School T-shirts.

  “Hey,” said the tallest USC player, noticing Wilson. “Aren’t you the holy cheesy peperoni kid?”

  “Sorry, no autographs,” said Wilson.

  “Like I’d want one!” the USC player yelled out as Wilson walked away in search of clues.

  Shawn inquired, “You guys go to USC Film School?”

  “Well done, Sherlock,” said the USC player with spiky red hair.

  “We’re UCLA Film School.”

  “Well then, this just got a lot more interesting, didn’t it?”

  The third USC-er, an African-American girl with dreadlocked hair, said, “No cheating off of us. You all better keep your distance.”

  “Over here!” Wilson called to his team. “I searched low and look what I found.”

  Wilson held up a sheet of transparent plastic with patterns of colorful dots on it. Several other sheets were tied to the ground using string through a hole-punch in front of the X.

  “It also says we have to search high,” said Shawn.

  They looked up—nothing but telephone wires.

  “Do you think we need to climb the telephone pole?” said Sami.

  “That seems a little dangerous for this game,” said Shawn. “I think everything can be accomplished from this X.”

  They held up the sheet of plastic to get a better look at the dots in the sunlight, hoping to find a pattern or some hidden code.

  As Wilson held it up against the blue sky, Sami noticed something. “Blue is the key,” she whispered.

  She grabbed the plastic out of Wilson’s hand and stood on the X. She framed it against the five telephone wires that stretched above them, then tried lining up the different-colored dots with the wires. “Yes! This is it!”

  She pulled them aside and whispered, “Remember the clue from before? Follow the blue notes. The blue dots on the sheet are meant to be musical notes. The five black telephone wires form a music staff. Align them with the wires and the blue dots become a melodic phrase.”

  “That’s amazing!” said Wilson. “How did you know that?”

  “Ten years of piano. And looking at where we’re standing, I bet I can guess what the phrase is.”

  She pointed to a sign hanging at the entrance to a nightclub, Rick’s Café Américain and Piano Bar. Standing next to the doorway was a security guard keeping watch over a piano.

  That’s when the team noticed that the USC players were gone.

  “Where did the USC team go?” asked Shawn.

  “I bet they’re already inside,” said Wilson. “Come on!”

  The three rushed to the entrance, but the guard stopped them at the door.

  “Sorry,” said the guard, “Bar’s closed.”

  The team exchanged confused looks.

  “Perhaps there’s another piano bar nearby?” Sami pondered as they walked back to the car.

  Wilson checked the photograph again.

  “Guys, stop!” Wilson held up the photo. “I can’t believe we almost fell for that.” Wilson pointed to the phrase under the photo. Don’t believe his lies.

  They hustled back to the piano next to the security guard.

  “You’re wasting your time,” the guard muttered.

  Sami turned to the guys. “I think I need to play the musical phrase. I’m a little rusty.” Sami played the notes on the piano. She made a few mistakes at first, but after a minute the notes formed themselves into the classic melody, “As Time Goes By,” from Casablanca.

  You must remember this... a kiss is just a kiss, Shawn heard in his head over the notes.

  “Please enter,” said the guard, opening the door for them.

  Inside the bar, the patrons and the staff all wore 1940s costumes. At the center of the room, a black piano player dressed in a tux played a ballad, but not “As Time Goes By.”

  “I think we need to talk to the piano player,” said Shawn.

  The USC students were talking to the bartender, who pointed to the piano player. Both teams sprinted toward the piano. The USC players arrived just ahead of them.

  “Do you have a request?” said the piano player.

  “Yes!” blurted Shawn. “Play–”

  “I’m sorry,” interrupted the piano player. “But these patrons arrived first.”

  The spiky-haired USC player spoke up confidently, “Play it again, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.’”

  The piano player looked befuddled. “Sorry, sir, I don’t know that one.”

  “What?” The USC student looked shocked.

  “Do you have a request?” the piano player asked Shawn.

  Shawn had noticed the mistake. The USC student had misquoted the line. There was no “again,” as was commonly thought.

  Shawn said, “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.’”

  “As you wish, sir,” said the piano player, flashing a bright smile.

  As he started playing, all of the costumed patrons stood up and applauded. Rich and Luke popped up from behind the bar and shot confetti and champagne all over the winning players.

  At the closing ceremonies, held back at the Chinese Theatre that afternoon, Shawn, Sami, and Wilson each received first-place medals and a fifty-dollar Shell gasoline card to offset all the driving.

  All the racers were there to witness the festivities, except the USC team, who hadn’t bothered to show up to receive their silver medals.

  Sami stood between Shawn and Wilson as they bowed their heads and had the medals placed around their necks. She took Shawn’s hand in her left, smiling at him as she did. Then she took Wilson’s in her right.

  The hundreds of players roared in applause as Shawn’s team raised their hands in triumph.

  He felt like a conquering hero—a legend, a leader of men. Kind of like a certain character from an infamous Stanley Kubrick film.

  It was then that Shawn gasped and turned to his friends.

  “Guys,” he said, “I just realized what Q’s identity is.”

  After the ceremony, they raced back to Wilson’s apartment and downloaded an HD version of Kubrick’s Lolita.

  Shawn didn’t want to reveal Q’s identity until they had watched the scene he had in mind.

  “Hey, does anyone want a beer?” Wilson called out from the fridge.

  “I could use one,” said Sami.

  “Shawn?”

  “No, thank you. I’m not twenty-one yet. It would be illegal.”

  “Hold up. Are you saying you’ve never had a drink?” asked Wilson.

  “An alcoholic beverage? No. I don’t have anything against it. I just don’t like breaking the law. But you two are both well above age, so feel free to partake.”

  “Man, I can’t believe I didn’t know this. Just when I thought you couldn’t get any weirder.”

  “Okay.” Sami took a sip from a bottle of Stella Artois. “Where do you think Quilty reveals his identity?”

  “Watch,” said Shawn, cuing up the scene.

  All three eyed the screen as James Mason’s Humbert Humbert entered Quilty’s mansion, kicked broken glass and empty bottles along the floor, crept past the enormous Gainsborough portrait lying on its side, strummed a folk harp, and shouted, “Quilty? Quilty!”

  Peters Sellers, as Quilty, peered out from behind a white sheet draped over an antique chair, drunkenly slurring, “What? What? What’s that?”

  Humbert asks, “Are you Quilty?”

  Quilty replies, “No, I’m Spartacus.”<
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  Shawn paused the film and grinned at Sami and Wilson.

  “Wow,” said Sami. “That’s something.”

  “It fits perfectly!” Shawn exclaimed. “Quilty is literally questioned about his identity and answers, ‘I am Spartacus!’ Kubrick is pointing us to the next piece of his puzzle. It must be somewhere in Spartacus.”

  Sami seemed skeptical. “Maybe, but Kubrick often referenced his own films. That’s considered to be a joke he inserted for the audience to have a chuckle.”

  “I’ll admit, it is pretty funny,” said Shawn. “But it also answers the riddle. Any reason why it can’t be a joke as well as a vital piece of information? It would be just like Kubrick to hide something essential within something as trivial as a joke. It’s a classic chess strategy of lead-away and deception.”

  Wilson jumped in. “What are you suggesting, Shawn? That we watch all three-plus hours of Spartacus? I don’t know if I can handle that.”

  “I’ll watch it by myself if I have to, but don’t you want to help search for the solution?”

  “Look,” said Wilson, “before we get all A Beautiful Mind about this, shouldn’t we at least consider the possibility that this is a hoax? What if this was Kubrick’s idea of some hilarious joke to lead obsessed fans like you on a wild goose chase to prove a point that scrutinizing every tiny detail of his films is pointless?”

  Shawn considered Wilson’s words in silence for a few moments. Then, as if an intricate math equation had been computed, he lifted his head and declared, “That’s highly unlikely. Kubrick was considered to be many things—a perfectionist, an eccentric, a taskmaster—but one thing he was never known to be was a prankster. If this were George Clooney or Andy Kaufman, then you’d probably be right, but Kubrick was a gamesman. If this puzzle is the elaborate game that it appears to be, he would want it to be taken seriously and with the full effort and thought that he demanded of all his collaborators. The one thing I’ve learned about Kubrick is that nothing he did was ever meaningless.”

  Shawn sat on Wilson’s couch and started Spartacus. Sami and Wilson watched with him for the first half, but dozed off by intermission. Shawn made sure to watch the director’s cut, which included the infamous “snails and oysters” scene between Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis—truly one of the best-written scenes of all time, and understandably one of Kubrick’s favorites. Crassus implies his bisexual proclivity using the crustaceans as a metaphor, which was extraordinarily scandalous when it was released in 1960.

  When the studio deleted the scene, Kubrick was furious. It was a major reason why he later disowned the film.

  The movie ended and Shawn sat flummoxed. There didn’t seem to be any marker or connection to the puzzle.

  So, Shawn started the movie from the beginning and watched it again, pausing the picture every thirty seconds to search the frames for a clue.

  Not one promising lead.

  I must have missed something, but what? Everything fit perfectly until now.

  On day one of shooting The Confession, Shawn had only gotten three hours of sleep, not ideal for a twelve-hour shoot that day.

  When Shawn and Sami showed up at the supply room in the morning to pick up the camera and lighting equipment, there had been a clerical mix-up and all of their lights had been given to another student. All that was left was a single Lowell 1K.

  “One light?” Sami yelled at the clerk. “This is my graduate thesis! How am I supposed to light an entire scene with one measly light?”

  The clerk shrugged. “You could shoot exteriors today and use natural light. We should have more lights back tomorrow.”

  “It’s an interrogation scene in a police station!”

  “Maybe they go outside because it’s a nice day?”

  “Tell me you didn’t just suggest that.”

  Shawn pulled her aside. “Sami, don’t worry. It’s an interrogation. We can make this work. We can sacrifice the fill lighting and give it more of a noir feel.”

  Sami’s expression shifted as Shawn’s vision for the scene seemed to play in her mind, and she smiled.

  The set was hot by late morning with shooting ready to commence.

  Raul Santos, a UCLA Theater student who had acted for Sami in her previous films, played the innocent man accused of murder. He sat nervously in character at the oak wood table.

  Wilson, playing Detective Monroe, paced back and forth, pumping his arms and growling to summon his inner ferocity.

  Shawn went to work lighting the scene with the 1K clamped to a c-stand. He positioned the light above and aimed the beam onto the table.

  The effect was magical. The light caught Raul’s face, illuminating just enough detail to reveal his fear and anger, but was still soft enough to not be distracting.

  Shawn got behind the camera, attached to a monopod, which he preferred to a traditional tripod because it produced a slightly shaky documentary feel that added dynamic tension. Plus, the monopod was easy to maneuver, quickly height-adjustable, and made for a poor man’s Steadicam should the need arise.

  Using the one light and monopod also turned out to be a huge time-saving advantage. The shoot wrapped early at 7:00 p.m.

  With the rest of the night open, Shawn asked Sami if he could keep the camera for the night and shoot B-roll footage. He’d noticed the full moon tonight and wanted to test out the Black Magic camera’s exposure limits, maybe record a time lapse of the clouds passing across the moon. It could be used as a transition shot in the film, and if not, they’d have ideal footage if they ever decided to shoot a werewolf movie.

  Shawn scouted the deserted campus, pleased that it was a Sunday night so he could pull off a little guerilla shooting. He decided the best view of the moon would be from the mammoth Bruin bear statue near the campus entrance, once the largest bear sculpture in the country.

  Shawn climbed onto the bronze bear and lay stomach-down across its back, resting the base of the monopod on the bear’s head. His plan had been to shoot the moon and stars for at least an hour, but after five minutes his arm started to shake.

  By the time he realized his error, it was too late. The monopod slipped from his sweaty palm and the fifteen-thousand-dollar camera smashed onto the bear’s nose before falling onto the concrete, snapping off the view screen, cracking the lens, and causing irreparable internal damage.

  In a futile attempt to save the camera, Shawn had fallen off as well, landing directly on the phone in his pocket, shattering the screen. He tried to turn it on, but it was dead.

  He looked up and saw that the nose of Joe Bruin had broken off, leaving it a sad, Sphinx-like spectacle.

  Panic surged through his veins. “Oh no, oh no, oh no.” He rushed to examine the damaged camera, then spotted two campus security officers looming above him.

  Shawn spent a long night in custody at the UCPD headquarters. The only silver lining was that he had managed to save the SD card and none of the footage appeared to be lost.

  The CSOs led him to the Dean of Student’s office first thing the next morning.

  Dean Laurie Welks looked him up and down, not pleased one bit. This was clearly the last thing she wanted to be dealing with on a Monday morning.

  Her coral pantsuit looked to Shawn to be uncomfortably tight, which couldn’t be helping her mood.

  “So I get to meet the infamous Shawn Hagan after all. You know, I recommended that you be put on probation after that film class outburst, and wouldn’t you know, you’re out causing more trouble.”

  “Ms. Welks,” Shawn said, slouching in his seat in front of her, “I didn’t mean to. I was just trying to shoot a film project.”

  “You know what? I’m tired of you film students treating this campus like it’s your personal soundstage. Did you have a permit to be shooting on campus?”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “In my defense, I wasn’t shooting the campus. I was shooting the night sky.”

  “If only that
were your biggest problem. You also managed to break the nose off of a two-ton statue that’s the symbol of the entire school. Are you aware of the lengths to which we go to protect Joe Bruin from vandalism?”

  “Yes, I am aware,” said Shawn. “I’m one of the students who guards the bear during Beat SC week.”

  “Well, that makes this even more disappointing. I’ve spoken with a sculptor and it is going to cost ten thousand dollars to have the nose repaired. Can you guess who’s going to pay for that?”

  “By your tone, I’m guessing me.”

  “You catch on fast.”

  “That will be fine,” said a voice from behind Shawn. “I’ll cover the expenses.”

  Shawn turned to see Mascaro.

  “Professor Mascaro,” said the dean. “I hope you’ve changed your mind about filing a disciplinary complaint so we can expel this kid.”

  “This kid,” said Mascaro, “is one of the brightest stars at the film school. I take personal responsibility for him from this point forward.”

  Dean Welks glared at Mascaro for a moment, then nodded.

  “You’re a very lucky man, Mr. Hagan, but this is still going on your record, and you are officially on probation. That means one more hint of trouble, and you’re gone.”

  “Grazie, Senora. I’m sure Mr. Hagan will be a model student. Come now, I believe we have an appointment.”

  Mascaro led Shawn out of the dean’s office without another word.

  They walked silently across campus, and as they approached Mascaro’s office, Shawn stopped at the door. “Professor, I don’t know what to say. I’m grateful that you would help me out, but I’m in deeper trouble than you think. I broke the school’s new Black Magic camera. It’s worth over fifteen thousand.”

  “Shawn, you need not worry. I will take care of everything... as long as you give me what I want. We are a team, yes?”

  Shawn hesitated. “Yes, professor.”

  “Then tell me what you have discovered about Q’s identity.”