Now the two men are chasing two mythical figures, Arbuthnot and the Beast. Roy gets an invite like the narrator's: go to the Brown Derby and the Beast will appear. Frightened, he visits Roy, who sets out with him to chase down the now missing body meanwhile, they must dream up the Beast. Arbuthnot, the former head of Maximus Films, who had had one of the great Hollywood funerals. What should he find there but the long-dead body of J.C.
On Halloween, the narrator receives a mysterious invitation to go to the graveyard across from the studio. The narrator, a fantasy writer with a hundred sales to Weird Stories, has been brought to Hollywood by Maximus Pictures and soon finds himself scripting a monster picture for which his great childhood friend, Roy Holdstrom (read Ray Harryhausen), has been hired to build a model set and animate a clay figure for the most horrible Beast ever seen on film.
The tone: gasping tenderness, an orgasm of epic nostalgia for lost Hollywood charms, sung over a studio landscape modeled from egg-white and whipped cream. Hyperrhapsodic Hollywood fantasia borne on a soft-rubber mystery plot, or Moby Dick blown up on a trout's spine.
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