The Velvet Dream

We were Landsers fighting our way across the steppe through Bolshevik hordes. In our spare time we shot independent films on handheld home-movie cameras. Our films paid tribute to those whose vision nurtured ours: John Waters, Russ Meyer, and Richard Roundtree, among others.

We had the props for action sequences -- guns, bombs, flares, even tanks and artillery. Who knew a chase scene between Kettenraeder could catch the breathless intensity that is the poetry of being? But we soon saw through these flashy vanities. We instead strove for a cinema of the heart and soul. We shot mostly interior scenes. Within sheltering walls -- that's where everyday life gets its texture and nuance! Besides, who wanted to shoot outside with the increased activity of partisan snipers and Red Army aviation? Art tempts death with life, but it's not a suicide pact.

We had a number of crew and extras, including the boys in the SS regiment (14 or 15 years old, if a day), and, of course, our lovely Slav girlfriends. I smile remembering them, strutting in their rouge and lipstick and feather boas, lounging on the old divans lodged in our cramped bunkers. They gave their boyfriends serious, sultry looks in take after take of our cinema verite love stories, and, in unguarded moments, reached into their clothes to scratch at lice. They were the most incredible sweethearts an Aryan boy could get through the classified ads in Stalin-era samizdat swinger magazines.

As the Red Army recovered from the reverses of Barbarossa and Blau, Minsk and Kiev, our art became more desperate. We needed a place less subject to their harassment. The commisars had already infiltrated our sets. At first they just wanted to hang around the studio, so we used them as production assistants. But then they began to insert themselves into production meetings and the screening of dailies. They claimed they had great patriotic and revolutionary duties to protect the workers in our productions. Yes, they claimed this even as they liquidated the shop stewards in the make up and wardrobe departments! Really, they only wanted to exercise artistic veto so they could get laid, the casting couch ensnared in a totalitarian tentacle!

We found ourselves in a Kessel, cut off from the rest of the Wehrmacht by a sea of Soviet motorized rifle divisions newly arrived from the Ural military district. We had to break out. Not just militarily, but artistically. We felt the bourgeoise tastes of our audiences constraining our impulses to pursue our wildest imaginations. We wanted epics of purest shape and light -- symphonies for the eyes! They wanted scene after scene of fat women eating potatoes slathered in butter.

We could have easily broken out to the west, but the Reds would only follow us, all the way back to Berlin, where, in any event, the Reich arts commissioners would likely order an audit of our grants. So instead, we broke out to the east. There, safely behind enemy lines near Collective Farm 17, we found an old drive-in theater, which we quickly occupied ahead of the coming winter.

Once we had established our defensive perimeter and stocked our dugouts with canned goods and cured hams requisitioned at gunpoint from the local peasants, we took a moment to remember our comrades in the boys' SS regiment, still fighting a hopeless rearguard action in the Kessel to provide the distraction we needed to get our girlfriends out. The writers penned the most polished funeral oration they could, despite having to do a final rewrite of the script. We had to cut our mourning short -- principal photography would begin in less than a week.