Remake: A Novel - Softcover

Willis, Connie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553374370 ISBN 13: 9780553374377

Publisher: Random House Worlds, 1995

Synopsis

Winner of more Hugo and Nebula Awards than any other science fiction author, Connie Willis is one of the most powerfully imaginative writers of our time. In Remake, she explores the timeless themes of emotion and technology, reality and illusion, and the bittersweet place where they intersect to make art.

It's the Hollywood of the future, where moviemaking's been computerized and live-action films are a thing of the past. It's a Hollywood where Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe are starring together in A Star Is Born, and if you don't like the ending, you can change it with the stroke of a key.

A Hollywood of warmbodies and sim-sex, of drugs and special effects, where anything is possible. Except for what one starry-eyed young woman wants to do: dance in the movies. It's an impossible dream, but Alis is not willing to give up. With a little magic and a lot of luck, she just might get her happy ending after all.

About this title

About the Author

Connie Willis is a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. She has received seven Nebula awards and eleven Hugo awards for her fiction; Blackout and All Clear—a novel in two parts—and Doomsday Book won both. Her other works include Passage, Lincoln’s Dreams, Bellwether, Impossible Things, Remake, Uncharted Territory, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Fire Watch, and Miracle and Other Christmas Stories. Connie Willis lives in Colorado with her family, where she deals with the delights (and the more maddening aspects) of our modern oh-so-connected world on a daily basis.

From the Back Cover

It's the Hollywood of the future, where moviemaking's been computerized and live-action films are a thing of the past. It's a Hollywood in which Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe are starring together in a remake of A Star Is Born, and if you don't like the ending, you can change it with the stroke of a key. A Hollywood of warmbodies and sim-sex, of drugs and special effects, where anything is possible. Except what Alis wants to do, which is dance in the movies. Tom offers to make her dream a reality: he'll digitize her face onto any actress's she likes - Ann Miller, Ruby Keeler, even Ginger Rogers. What Tom doesn't understand is that Alis doesn't want to look like she's dancing. She wants the real thing. And as Tom finds himself seduced by Alis's impossible dream, he begins to learn that even in a world of technological miracles, there are still some things that just can't be faked.

From the Inside Flap

re Hugo and Nebula Awards than any other science fiction author, Connie Willis is one of the most powerfully imaginative writers of our time. In Remake, she explores the timeless themes of emotion and technology, reality and illusion, and the bittersweet place where they intersect to make art.

Remake

It's the Hollywood of the future, where moviemaking's been computerized and live-action films are a thing of the past. It's a Hollywood where Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe are starring together in A Star Is Born, and if you don't like the ending, you can change it with the stroke of a key.

A Hollywood of warmbodies and sim-sex, of drugs and special effects, where anything is possible. Except for what one starry-eyed young woman wants to do: dance in the movies. It's an impossible dream, but Alis is not willing to give up. With a little magic and a lot of luck, she just might get her happy ending after all.


From the Paperback edition.<

Reviews

Willis (Doomsday Book), a fan of old movies, uses them cleverly and thoughtfully in Remake, her fourth solo novel. Roughly 20 years into the future, computer graphics have ended live production in Hollywood. Tom, the narrator, reluctantly pillages old films for remakes starring dead actors or alters them to suit the politico-social correctness of the moment. When he meets Alis, who has come to Hollywood burning to dance in movies no longer being made, he falls hard. As in Willis's Lincoln's Dreams, while boy is obsessed with girl, she is obsessed with her purpose. Boy loses girl, then sees her, impossibly, dancing in old musicals which couldn't have been altered. After several red herrings he finds both her and an explanation, but, given her higher passion, finders aren't necessarily keepers. Willis's writing, as usual, is transparently clean and deft. She has fun playing with old film references and with the levels of illusion in a Hollywood more irreal than ever, and is discerning both about the way movies inform our imaginations, giving us roles to play, and about desire, purpose and possibility. One flaw is a scene of requited love that neither the form nor tone of this bittersweet romance can support. But if the characters are mostly stock and the sentimentality easy, this is still popular fiction at a high level, entertaining, thoughtful and often touching.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The 21st century's film industry is as big as ever, but there are no live actors to speak of and no new movies, only remakes controlled by F/X wizards who rely on technological sleight-of-hand to simulate creativity. Against this backdrop of soulless glitz and surface glamour, Willis (The Doomsday Book, LJ 5/15/92) tells the story of Alis, a dancer who wants to be in the movies (as herself, not a "remake"), and Tom, an F/X technician who tries to make her dream come true although doing so will make his dream impossible. Willis has established a reputation as one of sf's most lucid writers, and her latest effort demonstrates a rare capacity for evoking both humor and regret. Most libraries should acquire this title.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

On her way to winning several Hugo and Nebula awards, Willis has exercised her uniquely witty imagination on subjects as diverse as time travel and Abraham Lincoln. Now Hollywood becomes fair game for her in a whimsical preview of a twenty-first-century Tinseltown obsessed with remakes. Exploiting his complete access to state-of-the-art video technology, Tom is a jaded film student moonlighting as a touch-up artist for a brownnosing junior studio exec. Between digitally deleting liquor bottles from Casablanca and then Notorious in order to appease a teetotaling producer, Tom meets Alis, a naive movie star wanna-be whose only dream is to dance in silver screen musicals. Alas for Alis, as Tom repeatedly emphasizes, musicals have been dead for decades and live performers displaced by digital ones. Yet, incredibly enough, and to Tom's inebriated befuddlement, Alis' face and physique begin materializing onscreen with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in licensed musical classics. Willis drolly combines current Hollywood stereotypes of couch-hopping, pill-popping studio patrons with a wry prediction of film technology's future. Ingenious fun from one of sf's preeminent wags. Carl Hays

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

House Lights Down
BEFORE TITLES
 
I saw her again tonight. I wasn’t looking for her. It was an early Spielberg liveaction, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a cross between a shoot-’em-up and a VR ride and the last place you’d expect tap shoes, and it was too late. The musical had kicked off, as Michael Caine so eloquently put it, in 1965.
 
This liveaction was made in ’84, at the very beginning of the computer graphics revolution, and it had a few CG sections: digitized Thugees being thrown off a cliff and a pathetically clunky morph of a heart being torn out. It also had a Ford Tri-Motor plane, which was what I was looking for when I found her.
 
I needed the Tri-Motor for the big good-bye scene at the airport, so I’d accessed Heada, who knows everything, and she’d said she thought there was one in one of the live-action Spielbergs, the second Indy maybe. “It’s close to the end.”
 
“How close?”
 
“Fifty frames. Or maybe it’s in the third one. No, that’s a dirigible. The second one. How’s the remake coming, Tom?”
 
Almost done, I thought. Three years off the AS’s and still sober.
 
“The remake’s stuck on the big farewell scene,” I said, “which is why I need the plane. So what do you know, Heada? What’s the latest gossip? Who’s ILMGM being taken over by this month?”
“Fox-Mitsubishi,” she said promptly. “Mayer’s frantic. And the word is Universal’s head exec is on the way out. Too many addictive substances.”
 
“How about you?” I said. “Are you still off the AS’s? Still assistant producer?”
 
“Still playing Melanie Griffith,” she said. “Does the plane have to be color?”
 
“No. I’ve got a colorization program. Why?”
 
“I think there’s one in Casablanca.”
 
“No, there’s not,” I said. “That’s a two-engine Lockheed.”
 
She said, “Tom, I talked to a set director last week who was on his way to China to do stock shots.”
 
I knew where this was leading. I said, “I’ll check the Spielberg. Thanks,” and signed off before she could say anything else.
 
The Ford Tri-Motor wasn’t at the end, or in the middle, which had one of the worst mattes I’d ever seen. I worked my way back through it at 48 per, thinking it would have been easier to do a scratch construct, and finally found the plane almost at the beginning. It was pretty good—there were close-ups of the door and the cockpit, and a nice medium shot of it taking off. I went back a few frames, trying to see if there was a close-up of the propellers, and then said, “Frame 1-001,” in case there was something at the very beginning.
 
Trademark Spielberg morph of the old Paramount Studios mountain into opening shot, this time of a man-sized silver gong. Cue music. Red smoke. Credits. And there she was, in a chorus line, wearing silver tap shoes and a silver-sequined leotard with tuxedo lapels. Her face was made up thirties style—red lips, Harlow eyebrows—and her hair was platinum blonde.
 
It caught me off guard. I’d already searched the eighties, looking in everything from Chorus Line to Footloose, and not found any sign of her.
 
I said, “Freeze!” and then “Enhance right half,” and leaned forward to look at the enlarged image to make sure, as if I hadn’t already been sure the instant I saw her.
 
“Full screen,” I said, “forward realtime,” and watched the rest of the number. It wasn’t much—four lines of blondes in sequined top hats and ribboned tap shoes doing a simple chorus routine that could have been lifted from 42nd Street, and was about as good. There must not have been any dancing teachers around in the eighties either.
 
The steps were simple, mostly trenches and traveling steps, and I thought it had probably been one of the very first ones Alis did. She had been this good when I saw her practicing in the film hist classroom. And it was too Berkeleyesque. Near the end of the number it went to angles and a pan shot of red scarves being pulled out of tuxedo pockets, and Alis disappeared. The Digimatte couldn’t have matched that many switching shots, and I doubted if Alis had even tried. She had never had any patience with Busby Berkeley.
 
“It isn’t dancing,” she’d said, watching the kaleidoscope scene in Dames that first night in my room.
 
“I thought he was famous for his choreography,” I’d said.
 
“He is, but he shouldn’t be. It’s all camera angles and stage sets. Fred Astaire always insisted his dances be shot full-length and one continuous take.”
 
“Frame ten,” I said so I wouldn’t have to put up with the mountain morph again, and started through the routine again. “Freeze.”
 
The screen froze her in midkick, her foot in the silver tap shoe extended the way Madame Dilyovska of Meadowville had taught her, her arms outstretched. She was supposed to be smiling, but she wasn’t. She had a look of intentness, of careful concentration under the scarlet lipstick, the penciled brows, the look she had worn that first night, watching Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire on the freescreen.
 
“Freeze,” I said again, even though the image hadn’t moved, and sat there for a long time, thinking about Fred Astaire and looking at her face, that face I had seen under endless wigs, in endless makeups, that face I would have known anywhere.
 

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Worlds
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0553374370
• ISBN 13: 9780553374377
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 172