*Imagining Howard Hughes* -- 9 Dec 2000


   So long ago
   Was it in a dream? Was it just a dream?
   I know, yes I know
   It seemed so very real, it seemed so real to me


   Saturday, 9 December 2000, 0015 hrs,

   Drm:  (vivid and real-seeming) Watching the first flight of a 
wooden airplane.  Designed under Hughes’ management and technical 
leadership, the aircraft has a body and wings made out of medium-
beige wood, is powered by two engines, and seems sleek and 
technically advanced.  The impression is that its purpose is to be 
for “fast personal transport” missions.  Supposedly I’m seeing a 
documentary film, in beige-and-black-and-white, but the effect is 
as if I’m seeing it for real.  Howard Hughes is flying the 
aircraft alone.  He is responsible, directionally and financially, 
for the making of this documentary film -- an extravagant, and 
totally affordable, record of his accomplishment, and not at all 
unusual knowing the pride he takes in his work.  This aircraft is 
a creation brought from his mere thought to reality, designed by 
him, and -- because he has the money -- made by him.  It’s all 
Howard Hughes.

   The day is overcast gray, looking like fall over mostly-flat 
beige prairie land.  In what must be filmed in a mounted tracked 
shot the plane flies seeming to be low, but still the effect is 
that this demonstration is a total success, with an element of 
personal vindication perhaps.

   (Throughout, the part of Howard Hughes is played by Clark 
Gable, though in the dream-consciousness he *is* Hughes.  The 
temporal style of the scene is either seeing as real the film as 
it is being filmed, or seeing the film as real later, but 
experiencing it as if it were happening now.  I can’t resolve it.)

   (scene-shift)
   Now, as if in a steady-cam shot, from down on the ground-level 
of the prairie.  Howard Hughes is being marched to the American 
Indians’ tribal encampment.  Within the camera view -- the shot 
following alongside from 30 meters away -- the group is tromping 
along the prairie to scene-right, something like ten braves and 
these led by at least one chief, maybe more.
   Hughes is in a quite roomy long-sleeve shirt of white-cotton 
and khakis, roomy in the thigh and tucked neatly into the black 
lace-up boots.  He doesn’t seem mopey, more like: (sigh) what now.
   The Indians are in dark cotton shirts and maybe buckskin pants, 
escorting near behind and alongside Hughes with rifles held aimed 
from along their waists.  Hughes having had to land there on the 
prairie in mid-demonstration, *not* according to plan and due to 
some problem with the plane, has been taken by the Indians who are 
taking him back to camp to kill him -- for all the “wrong” he has 
done them, somehow.  Hughes’ misfortune is to have landed in this 
region in which the Indians are in control.
   The prairie grass is the light-beige sort that grows in dense 
stalk-like clumps separated by gray clay-seeming dirt, hinting, 
without making a dream-conscious point of it, to the prairie of 
south-western Nebraska.  (But that’s just where it is.)
   (scene change)
   Now in color and as if real, no longer the documentary film:  A 
close up on the face of one of the Indians -- a chief, by 
appearance in his 40’s, and by expression seeming to brood 
resentment, a red-tanned face with wide, very-down-turned mouth.
   (scene change)
   What was the prairie is now the beige field-grass in an expanse 
going out of sight to the left of view in the way from where we 
came.  This is what could be the edge of a sports practice field, 
near to where the street goes by.  Now we are in a civilized sort 
of future.  The visual depth-of-field is shallow.  It seems that 
we’re parked on the grass up to and inside of the sidewalk, beyond 
which is several meters of more beige grass and then the street, 
and maybe houses beyond.
   It is evident from the cars between which we’re standing, 
gathered, in a space of 4 meters, that it’s the late 1940’s.  The 
cars are new models, the one directly in view is smoke-gray and 
shiny.  This is more like a meeting.  Howard Hughes has some of 
his men with him who are in business attire, and the Indians -- 
the several that are still there -- know, this reality having 
materialized, now they can’t just kill Hughes and get away with 
it.  This therefore has a tempering effect on their motivation. 
   Hughes makes a conciliatory statement to his momentary captors 
(which I heard and understood, but can’t exactly remember), 
seeming naive on its face, something to the effect that, see, when 
we agree on some things we can accomplish good for all of us.  But 
they’re just pretty much put out by the way it turned out. [end, 
awake -- realizing it wasn’t Hughes at all, but Gable]


   It was like,

      Howard, what year do you think that was?

         It was 1947, in the future.

      No, 1947 was the past.


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