Part I: The Uhler Motion Printer and Mobile Cinema Rooms
The narrative begins with an explanation of how movies are made in “these confusing days” using rooms that are cameras, contained within mobile buildings that roll on variable tracks. These camera-rooms travel in all directions—forwards, sideways, upside down—depending on their origin and destination. The journey can take various forms: through tunnels toward bridges, through harvest fields, or through endless winter where everyone is dead except for a flutter-winged flying humanoid searching on the other side of mountains.
The camera person, positioned safely in the caboose with a rational perspective, knows what's happening. However, there's constant danger that this person might fall off the train, leaving no one aboard. The narrative urgently describes a caboose with an open back door, a slowing train, and the opportunity to jump on and take the camera person's place in the swiveling office chair next to the ticket-burning stove.
Part II: The Uhler Motion Printer Technology
The most accepted use of the Uhler Motion Printer involves professionally printing polished, shiny-surfaced motion picture stories directly onto or into the expanding hollow and flattened space of the strange device itself. The printer features large black flat bubbles mounted at the ends of fingerless arms. These bubbles spin and expand into distortable, floppy shapes that, when inflated, become rooms that are cameras where movie stories take place.
These rooms are filled with bulky, inexpensive furniture that gets in the way. The narrator warns about knife tables while acknowledging the dark environment and rapid speech, promising that viewers will catch on soon. The setting is deliberately disorienting and dangerous, with the motion picture technology blending reality and fiction in unsettling ways.
Part III: The Manchu Edison Film Corporation
The narrative shifts to describe the Manchu Edison Film Corporation, now a “locally global local operation,” but things were different in the “bad old bold good old gold days.” Originally, it was much smaller, a handicraft producer of extremely small, single-print, short-duration silent sound films made by thinking and using gnarled, nearly immobile hands.
These tiny films would play in ordinary projectors until either the films or screens wore out—until sprockets burned, images shattered, and spaces between frames shrank. Patient, patent-pending “movietalkers” would pull out needles and threads from motion picture sewing kits during long pauses when films got stuck. The paying audience didn't care what happened and actually enjoyed when films got stuck and started burning, appreciating the blobs, pauses, stinky nitrate smells, and danger.
The movietalkers would quickly sew together sudden sub- and super-blob frames of unrepairable movies, continuing to project through repeated mechanical failures. Movies played out over long periods while audiences nodded off in their seats, hands grasping padded movie seatbelts as apnea kicked in. New edits, images, and plot reversals created emotions no one would understand if awake, featuring blinking blob imagery with no narrative or rotational continuity.
Copycat octopi, seeing the blobs from a distance, would fly quickly to join in, flexing their smooth muscular screen-skin while transmitting morse-code love-fest invitations. Audience members who survived these lateral morse code screen attacks noted that films were subtle, loving, covered with organic oil patch sheen, smooth, and confusing—like automobile tires made exclusively from tire patch kits. The experience became dangerous when movies started to look like the viewer, indicating they were getting too close to the octopus film print.
Part IV: The Eisenstein Adventure - Telepathic Imprisonment and Escape
A complex story unfolds involving MR AND MRS EISENSTEIN who become trapped in a Disney cel animation system. The narrative introduces Mary Craig, a telepath drawing pictures in the living room, unknowingly connected to proto-kanji characters appearing in a motion picture realm beyond a locked, soundproofed piano practice chamber.
MR AND MRS EISENSTEIN correctly guess that colliding proto-kanji are coming from Mary Craig's telepathic drawings. They leave the motion picture realm, enter the piano room, and begin playing a medley of all Mrs. Craig's pictures as seen in a floating book from the future called “A GUIDE TO REMEMBERING JAPANESE CHARACTERS.”
The many children of Mary Craig and Upton Sinclair—who are actually childless and don't know they have children—unlock the door to find MR AND MRS EISENSTEIN pounding piano keys, creating show tunes and shot-by-shot descriptions of politically motivated documentary action fiction films. The startled children run to tell the adults.
The family and guests, including Albert Einstein who was “always there on Sundays,” rush to the piano room. They find MR AND MRS EISENSTEIN lying on the floor like a tiger rug, laughing mischievously. In a single breath, they sing a never-ending microtonal song that includes accurate line-by-line analyses of Mary Craig's telepathic pictures, movie reviews for nonexistent films, and a forecast of that evening's dessert. They wink at Dr. Einstein as if to say “I KNOW THAT I AM NOT YOU BUT I DIDN'T KNOW YOU WOULD BE HERE THIS EVENING TOO!”
Part V: The Disney System and Mexican Escape Plan
MR AND MRS EISENSTEIN explain their captivity in the Disney cel animation void zone system, which captures friendly windblown souls and harnesses their footstep labor to power the perpetual scrolling of endless backgrounds behind their transparent selves. They describe their plan to use a “COUNTER ELECTRIC OR DIELECTRIC SONG”—a parodic, corporately parricidal revolutionary anti-Disney sing-along—to free themselves from the scrolling cel animation trap.
This escape plan requires getting money to reach Mexico (“QUE VIVA MEXICO” Eisenstein calls it). Mary Craig, moved by their plight and recognizing their telepathic abilities, provides the necessary funds in an envelope baked into the prophesied dessert—intact despite baking and portion division.
After dessert, MR AND MRS EISENSTEIN depart for the Mexican desert (not knowing the difference between dessert and desert, being new to the continent). They take a strange submarine directly from the lost Colonies of Vera Cruz to the Asian coast, get ejected through large torpedo tubes, and wander into Manchurian wastes. They legally divorce using mechanical instruments: Mrs. Eisenstein remains in Shinkyo while Mr. Eisenstein resurfaces in Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous region above the Amur River. Both eventually return to Moscow, where Eisenstein writes many books placed on bookshelves throughout the world “for the rest of time, or at least until the movie ended.”
Part VI: The Spiral Train and Human Reconstruction
The narrative introduces an extraordinary transportation system involving a train with perforated wheels. “Hapless helpless happy somewhat hairy easily pleased human volumes” pass from one side of the train through light-slicing perforations in one wheel, along the lateral axle, through to the other side via synchronized wheel perforations. This process involves the “coherent dissection and reconstruction of solid immaterial matter” back into “happy laughing spiral-stung human form.”
This becomes a real-life motion picture attraction where people line up to watch others flying in coherent spirals through the air under the train, emerging on the other side and floating upward like lost balloons or whirling umbrellas. The owners of these floating possessions have “somewhat less substantial temporal shadows than their accompanying flying umbrellas or balloons.”
Berlin residents near suburban steam electric train tracks can use this wheel-perforated Uhler Motion Picture Train to travel locally and immaterially at convenient prices, even without specific destinations. The perforated streetcar wheels and their cast shadows serve as advertisements for the machine's traveling function. Passengers traveling through the wheels and slicing spirals can observe fragments of their shadows, identifying their own through repetitive waving or morse code hat-tipping.
Both travelers and their dissected but sentient shadows learn to remain in sync, using shadow communication to signal each other. Eventually, everyone reassembles at their destination of origin, having passed through the spiral of the first wheel on the left side of the train to arrive through the reconstructing shadow on the right side, just in time for dinner and sleep.
Part VII: The New York Public Library and the Manhattan Projector
The final major narrative sequence takes place in the New York Public Library, located inside a DING DONG BELL SYSTEM phone booth on the northwestern corner of 40th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan. The library exists in an ambiguous state where phone booths have books and maybe are libraries, while libraries are phone booths where calls can be made.
Daily, a hyperactive radionic AM-FM-Shortwave and Emergency Band radio-blue ray erupts from the Manhattan Projector in the basement, roaring up from its watery atomic reservoir deep beneath the streets. This blue ray erases all books in the library, creating nightly rewrite work for librarians. De-paginated pages float like fireflies in autumn wind as the river bubbles beneath and foxes hunt in the dark.
The “docu-mentalists” speak from within and outside documentaries, floating above motes of dust that are documents derived from unpaginated books lost in the Manhattan Projector's light. They offer temporary answers to questions before questions are asked, in the form of factual science fiction derived from deep Wikipedia reading done by movie characters on cathode ray displays. This research transmits through Time Tunnels to the thundering documentalist in the telepathic cinema, patented by the Manchu Edison Film Corporation of Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Part VIII: Conclusion - The Infinite Phone Call
The text concludes with a phone book segment featuring “Manhattan, Call Alamogordo Collect,” describing a collect call from a telephone booth at the New York Public Library. The caller offers a 159-page compendium of actions related to dialing a lost telephone, using mirrors and hyperbolic cameras to count backwards through Alamogordo, New Mexico phone book pages compiled in 1982 and republished in 1990.
This circular structure returns to themes of communication, documentation, and the blending of technological and mystical elements that characterize the entire work. The stories in ScriptJ create a surreal, interconnected universe where motion picture technology, telepathy, transportation, and documentation systems merge into a complex narrative exploring the nature of reality, perception, and storytelling itself.
The overall work functions as a meta-commentary on cinema, consciousness, and the ways stories are transmitted across time and space, using deliberately confusing and overlapping narrative threads that mirror the disorienting experience of early cinema and the fragmented nature of modern media consumption.