The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (61 page)

As easy as all that.

Oh, I don't say that it was easy work or anything like that,
because in the next few months we were playing Busy Bee. What with running down
the only one registered at Central Casting who looked like Alexander himself,
he turned out to be a young Armenian who had given up hope of ever being called
from the extra lists and had gone home to Santee—casting and rehearsing the rest
of the actors and swearing at the costumers and the boys who built the sets, we
were kept hopping. Even Ruth, who had reconciled her father with soothing
letters, for once earned her salary. We took turns shooting dictation at her
until we had a script that satisfied Mike and myself and young Marrs, who
turned out to be clever as a fox on dialogue.

What I really meant is that it was easy, and immensely
gratifying, to crack the shell of the tough boys who had seen epics and turkeys
come and go. They were really impressed by what we had done. Kessler was
disappointed when we refused to be bothered with photographing the rest of the
film. We just batted our eyes and said that we were too busy, that we were
perfectly confident that he would do as well as we could. He outdid himself,
and us. I don't know what we would have done if he had asked us for any
concrete advice. I suppose, when I think it all over, that the boys we met and
worked with were so tired of working with the usual mine-run Grade B's, that they
were glad to meet someone that knew the difference between glycerin tears and
reality and didn't care if it cost two dollars extra. They had us placed as a
couple of city slickers with plenty on the ball. I hope.

Finally it was all over with. We all sat in the projection
room; Mike and I, Marrs and Johnson, Kessler and Bernstein, and all the lesser
technicians that had split up the really enormous amount of work that had been
done watched the finished product. It was terrific. Everyone had done his work well.
When Alexander came on the screen, he
was
Alexander the Great. (The
Armenian kid got a good bonus for that.) All that blazing color, all that
wealth and magnificence and glamor seemed to flare right out of the screen and
sear across your mind. Even Mike and I, who had seen the original, were on the
edge of our seats.

The sheer realism and magnitude of the battle scenes, I
think, really made the picture. Gore, of course, is glorious when it's all
make-believe and the dead get up to go to lunch. But when Bill Mauldin sees a
picture and sells a breathless article on the similarity of infantrymen of all
ages—well, Mauldin knows what war is like. So did the infantrymen throughout
the world who wrote letters comparing Alexander's Arbela to Anzio and the Argonne.
The weary peasant, not stolid at all, trudging and trudging into mile after
mile of those dust-laden plains and ending as a stinking, naked, ripped corpse
peeping under a mound of flies isn't any different when he carries a sarissa
instead of a rifle. That we'd tried to make obvious, and we succeeded.

When the lights came up in the projection room we knew we
had a winner. Individually we shook hands all around, proud as a bunch of
penguins, and with chests out as far. The rest of the men filed out and we
retired to Johnson's office. He poured a drink all around and got down to
business.

"How about releases?"

I asked him what he thought.

"Write your own ticket," he shrugged. "I
don't know whether or not you know it, but the word has already gone around that
you've got something."

I told him we'd had calls at the hotel from various sources,
and named them.

"See what I mean? I know those babies. Kiss them out if
you want to keep your shirt. And while I'm at it, you owe us quite a bit. I
suppose you've got it."

"We've got it."

"I was afraid you would. If you didn't, I'd be the one
that would have your shirt." He grinned, but we all knew he meant it.
"All right, that's settled. Let's talk about release.

"There are two or three outfits around town that will
want a crack at it. My boys will have the word spread around in no time;
there's no point in trying to keep them quiet any longer. I know—they'll have
sense enough not to talk about the things you want off the record. I'll see to
that. But you're top dog right now. You got loose cash, you've got the biggest
potential gross I've ever seen, and you don't have to take the first offer.
That's important, in this game."

"How would you like to handle it yourself?"

"I'd like to try. The outfit I'm thinking of needs a feature
right now, and they don't know I know it. They'll pay and pay. What's in it for
me?"

"That," I said, "we can talk about later. And
I think I know just what you're thinking. We'll take the usual terms and we
don't care if you hold up whoever you deal with. What we don't know won't hurt
us." That's what he was thinking, all right. That's a cutthroat game out
there.

"Good. Kessler, get your setup ready for
duplication."

"Always ready."

"Marrs, start the ball rolling on publicity . . . what
do you want to do about that?" to us.

Mike and I had talked about that before. "As far as
we're concerned," I said slowly, "do as you think best. Personal
publicity, O.K. We won't look for it, but we won't dodge it. As far as that
goes, we're the local yokels making good. Soft pedal any questions about where
the picture was made, without being too obvious. You're going to have trouble
when you talk about the nonexistent actors, but you ought to be able to figure
out something."

Marrs groaned and Johnson grinned. "He'll figure out
something."

"As far as technical credit goes, we'll be glad to see
you get all you can, because you've done a swell job." Kessler took that
as a personal compliment, and it was. "You might as well know now, before
we go any further, that some of the work came right from Detroit." They
all sat up at that.

"Mike and I have a new process of model and trick
work." Kessler opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it.
"We're not going to say what was done, or how much was done in the laboratory,
but you'll admit that it defies detection."

About that they were fervent. "I'll say it defies
detection. In the game this long and process work gets by me . . . where—"

"I'm not going to tell you that. What we've got isn't
patented and won't be, as long as we can hold it up." There wasn't any
griping there. These men knew process work when they saw it. If they didn't see
it, it was good. They could understand why we'd want to keep a process that
good a secret.

"We can practically guarantee there'll be more work for
you to do later on." Their interest was plain. "We're not going to
predict when, or make any definite arrangement, but we still have a trick or
two in the deck. We like the way we've been getting along, and we want to stay
that way. Now, if you'll excuse us, we have a date with a blonde."

Johnson was right about the bidding for the release. We—or
rather Johnson—made a very profitable deal with United Amusement and the
affiliated theaters. Johnson, the bandit, got his percentage from us and likely
did better with United. Kessler and Johnson's boys took huge ads in the trade
journals to boast about their connections with the Academy Award Winner. Not
only the Academy, but every award that ever went to any picture. Even the
Europeans went overboard. They're the ones that make a fetish of realism. They
knew the real thing when they saw it, and so did everyone else.

Our success went to Ruth's head. In no time she wanted a
secretary. At that, she needed one to fend off the screwballs that popped out
of the woodwork. So we let her hire a girl to help out. She picked a good
typist, about fifty. Ruth is a smart girl, in a lot of ways. Her father showed
signs of wanting to see the Pacific, so we raised her salary on condition he'd
stay away. The three of us were having too much fun.

The picture opened at the same time in both New York and
Hollywood. We went to the premiere in great style with Ruth between us, swollen
like a trio of bullfrogs. It's a great feeling to sit on the floor, early in
the morning, and read reviews that make you feel like floating. It's a better
feeling to have a mintful of money. Johnson and his men were right along with
us. I don't think he could have been too flush in the beginning, and we all got
a kick out of riding the crest.

It was a good-sized wave, too. We had all the personal
publicity we wanted, and more. Somehow the word was out that we had a new
gadget for process photography, and every big studio in town was after what
they thought would be a mighty economical thing to have around. The studios
that didn't have a spectacle scheduled looked at the receipts of
"Alexander" and promptly scheduled a spectacle. We drew some very
good offers, Johnson said, but we made a series of long faces and broke the
news that we were leaving for Detroit the next day, and to hold the fort
awhile. I don't think he thought we actually meant it, but we did. We left the
next day.

Back in Detroit we went right to work, helped by the
knowledge that we were on the right track. Ruth was kept busy turning away the
countless would-be visitors. We admitted no reporters, no salesmen, no one. We
had no time. We were using the view camera. Plate after plate we sent to
Rochester for developing. A print of each was returned to us and the plate was
held in Rochester for our disposal. We sent to New York for a representative of
one of the biggest publishers in the country. We made a deal.

Your main library has a set of the books we published, if
you're interested. Huge heavy volumes, hundreds of them, each page a
razor-sharp blowup from an 8x10 negative. A set of those books went to every
major library and university in the world. Mike and I got a real kick out of
solving some of the problems that have had savants guessing for years. In the
Roman volume, for example, we solved the trireme problem with a series of
pictures, not only the interior of a trireme, but a line-of-battle quinquereme.
(Naturally, the professors and amateur yachtsmen weren't convinced at all.) We
had a series of aerial shots of the City of Rome taken a hundred years apart,
over a millennium. Aerial views of Ravenna and Londinium, Palmyra and Pompeii,
of Eboracum and Byzantium. Oh, we had the time of our lives! We had a volume
for Greece and for Rome, for Persia and for Crete, for Egypt and for the
Eastern Empire. We had pictures of the Parthenon and the Pharos, pictures of
Hannibal and Caractacus and Vercingetorix, pictures of the Walls of Babylon and
the building of the pyramids and the palace of Sargon, pages from the Lost
Books of Livy and the plays of Euripides. Things like that.

Terrifically expensive, a second printing sold at cost to a
surprising number of private individuals. If the cost had been less, historical
interest would have become even more the fad of the moment.

When the flurry had almost died down, some Italian digging
in the hitherto-unexcavated section of ash-buried Pompeii, dug right into a
tiny buried temple right where our aerial shot had showed it to be. His budget
was expanded and he found more ash-covered ruins that agreed with our aerial
layout, ruins that hadn't seen the light of day for almost two thousand years.
Everyone promptly wailed that we were the luckiest guessers in captivity; the
head of some California cult suspected aloud that we were the reincarnations of
two gladiators named Joe.

To get some peace and quiet Mike and I moved into our
studio, lock, stock, and underwear. The old bank vault had never been removed,
at our request, and it served well to store our equipment when we weren't
around. All the mail Ruth couldn't handle we disposed of, unread; the old bank
building began to look like a well-patronized soup kitchen. We hired burly
private detectives to handle the more obnoxious visitors and subscribed to a
telegraphic protective service. We had another job to do, another full-length
feature.

We still stuck to the old historical theme. This time we
tried to do what Gibbon did in
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
And,
I think, we were rather successful, at that. In four hours you can't completely
cover two thousand years, but you can, as we did, show the cracking up of a
great civilization, and how painful the process can be. The criticism we drew
for almost ignoring Christ and Christianity was unjust, we think, and unfair.
Very few knew then, or know now, that we had included, as a kind of trial
balloon, some footage of Christ Himself, and His times. This footage we had to
cut. The Board of Review, as you know, is both Catholic and Protestant.
They—the Board—went right up in arms. We didn't protest very hard when they
claimed our "treatment" was irreverent, indecent, and biased and
inaccurate "by any Christian standard." "Why," they wailed,
"it doesn't even look like Him," and they were right; it didn't. Not
any picture
they
ever saw. Right then and there we decided that it
didn't pay to tamper with anyone's religious beliefs. That's why you've never
seen anything emanating from us that conflicted even remotely with the accepted
historical, sociological, or religious features of Someone Who Knew Better.
That Roman picture, by the way—but not accidentally—deviated so little from the
textbooks you conned in school that only a few enthusiastic specialists called
our attention to what they insisted were errors. We were still in no position
to do any mass rewriting of history, because we were unable to reveal just
where we got our information.

Johnson, when he saw the Roman epic, mentally clicked high
his heels. His men went right to work, and we handled the job as we had the
first. One day Kessler got me in a corner, dead earnest.

"Ed," he said, "I'm going to find out where
you got that footage if it's the last thing I ever do."