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The Silver Screen

(The curtain rises)
A porch, and the middle-aged man
gaze lost, brown study
his past he still cannot fathom
(Scene fades to memory)
The man, much younger
Don’t make me do it
he growls, pistol in the face of a thug
We know you stole from the Rococos
(Cut to thug stealing from Rococos)
(Then back)
Please don’t shoot me, Gully
pleads the thug, I’ll do anything
(Close-up of Gully’s handsome smile)
Tell us where you hid the diamonds
and everything going to be just fine
(Curtain falls)

Commentary by Tark Mackintosh

‘The Silver Screen’ Los Decepcionados had been blown away by the first motion pictures to arrive at the Teatro Macedonio de Alcalá in Oaxaca City, and it was not long before they had cleared space in a barn, set up chairs, and hung a bedsheet for their own cinema theatre at Láatsi, and begun screening weekly shows on a reel-to-reel somehow obtained by Swanson Henson, and to dream of someday being themselves immortalized on the silver screen. It must not have seemed too far-fetched a dream, considering the resolve of the young resistance fighter-poets, and the glory of their cause.

middle-aged 31 years old in 1921. The poem depicts the opening scene of GSG’s lost screenplay The Man from Cincinnati, a script he spent decades trying to get produced in Hollywood. ‘He wrote us hundreds of letters,’ RCA executive Garfield Elliot Goldfink said in 1943, ‘and he had our ear, but it just wasn’t a workable script. The dialogue was maudlin, the characters were flat, some of them clearly were just his friends from Mexico, and he had this bizarre idea that we could just cast him in the lead role. Maybe he was a great poet, I don’t know, but we had to bury the treatment.’

Fortunately ‘The Silver Screen’ gives us a substantial glimpse into the tone and content of the lost screenplay.

(The curtain…) Swanson Henson also fitted Los Decepcionados’ moving picture theater with a sturdy red velvet curtain that supposedly fell off a literal truck, as real theaters would have. ‘It’s what they got in Cleveland,’ was his retort when asked. ‘It fell off a truck.’

Nor was the weekly entertainment ever limited to film prints. The crew would also stage plays, hold talent contests, and give lengthy poetry recitals, decked in crowns of cactus thorns.

brown study Lost in thought somewhere in Florida, the middle-aged man ponders the life he had led in Cincinnati as a young mafioso.

thug / you stole from the Rococos Not a good idea, young thug.

don’t shoot me GSG had a number of promotional stills taken of himself for distribution with his screenplay in which he appears dressed as a hardboiled gumshoe, pistol in hand or else jutting suggestively from the front pocket of his overcoat.

Assuming that was a gun.

the diamonds In a bizarrely anachronistic parallel to this scene from GSG’s screenplay, which was probably written ca. 1921-22, GSG found himself accused of larceny by Tiffany Rococo following the 1937 Riverview Mansion Séance, at which GSG tried to get the mob family to back The Man From Cincinnati, claiming in desperation that he could play the role of Swanson Henson or even Rusty Bell if they preferred another actor for the lead. ‘Tonight, while we were seeking closure with the spirits of my deceased father and aunt, someone ripped off my ten-thousand-dollar blue diamond necklace,’ Tiffany told police and reporters outside the residence that night, ‘and I am not saying it was anyone in particular, just that there was one nosebleed who slipped out of the drawing room midway through the gathering.’

(Curtain falls) It will certainly be curtains for Gully if he can’t explain the missing diamonds to the Rococos. ‘The final scene was my favorite,’ GSG wrote in his autobiography (Chapter XL: Cincinnati Man). ‘Cincinnati turns under his hat in the rain, sucks once on a French cigarette, and says, ‘It’s all mine, now, baby. It’s all mine.”