Sheldrake: That'll be all Miss Kramer... Schaefer.Betty Schaefer: Goodbye, Mr. Gillis.Joe Gillis: Next time I'll write you "The Naked and the Dead".
It was a great big white elephant of a place. The kind crazy movie people built in the crazy 20s. A neglected house gets an unhappy look. This one had it in spades. It was like that old woman in "Great Expectations". That Miss Havisham in her rotting wedding dress and her torn veil, taking it out on the world, because she'd been given the go-by.
Well, this is where you came in, back at that pool again, the one I always wanted. It's dawn now and they must have photographed me a thousand times. Then they got a couple of pruning hooks from the garden and fished me out... ever so gently. Funny, how gentle people get with you once you're dead.
The whole place seemed to have been stricken with a kind of creeping paralysis - out of beat with the rest of the world, crumbling apart in slow motion.