“Make? No. Show. You rent the stores at night-who was using them at night? — and you rent some chairs, you got a film from the exchange, and you were in business. Get a little ahead, you take over the store in the day, too. People came. Of course I’m not the only one seeing this. Then it’s theaters and it’s serious money. Banks. Fox, that prick, is squeezing right and left. Zukor. How do you compete with this? You don’t. I thought, I don’t want to be in the real estate business. They can gobble up everybody and then what? They still need something to show. So I sold the theaters and came out here to make pictures.”

Already “out here,” Ben noticed, still two thousand miles away.

“The right place,” Ben said.

“Well, not then. That all came later. There was nothing here then. Oranges. Goyim with asthma. Nothing. But every kind of country, sun every day. It was all outside then. You put up walls and hung cheesecloth over it. To cut the glare. Right out in the open. We used a ranch out in the Valley for Westerns. For years, the same ranch.”

“That’s how you started? With Westerns?”

“Everybody started with Westerns. What’s to know? A man rides into town. That’s it. Just go from there.”

Ben smiled. “But what happens?”

“What happens. Guns. Chase. Gets the girl. It’s a picture.”

He stopped, distracted for a moment, then picked up the thread again, enjoying himself, and Ben sat back, letting the words circle around him. The Lasner style, growls and purrs and easy intimacy under the sharp eye.

“The first place we had was on Gower. In the gulch, right across from where Cohn was. With all the fly-by-nights. They go out of business, we’d pick them up. Just kept moving down the street. Those days, it was hand-to-mouth. Sometimes not even.” He looked up at the ceiling, absentmindedly smoothing the blanket. “You know what you miss? That age? You never think about being sick. Dead, maybe, the idea of it, but not sick. Your body’s just something you carry around with you. Then one day you’re lying here with a bomb in your chest, waiting for it to go off. Just when things are going-since the war, everything’s doing business. Then something you never figured. I’m on two kinds of pills. And you know what Rosen says? Slow down. In pictures. You show weakness for five minutes and-”