Screen // Cinema — Barry N. Malzberg

SCREENMartin Miller works for the welfare department. But his attention to his job is wandering. He isn't sure he can work there anymore. What Martin really wants is to be in the movies. Not as an actor, not quite. He wants to be in the movies. He sits in the theater, and he becomes Marcello Mastriano to Sophia Loren. He becomes Roger Vadim to Brigitte Bardot. He has sex with these women, and knows that this world is better than real life. His boss, Mr. Poirier, warns him that he will very likely be fired. His girlfriend, Barbara, warns him that Hollywood isn't real. But Martin knows what he knows--that in a darkened theater, he can be whomever he wants when he enters the screen.CINEMA (THE MASOCHIST)Susan has had a full day in New York. She has participated in the making of a pornographic film, she has had intercourse with the agent of the film's producers, she has been offered a leading role in a forthcoming production by the same company, she has come to terms with herself in perhaps ways that she was not accustomed. At the end of all of this she stands in a hotel room fully dressed somewhere between retention and flight... She senses that if she were to tell the men in the street who stare at her what she had been doing that day, they would be amazed but, then, they might be perfectly matter of fact. People in New York accept all sorts of things as matter of fact.