War and Peace

by Stanley Schmidt (ed)

  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 8 x 10 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 comer, 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.”

  I told him that some day he would.

  “And I don’t mean someday, either; I mean right now. That bushwa about Europe might go once, but not twice. I know better, and so does everyone else. Now, what about it?”

  I told him I’d have to consult Mike and I did. We were up against it. We called a conference.

  “Kessler tells me he has troubles. I guess you all know what they are.” They all knew.

  Johnson spoke up. “He’s right, too. We know better. Where did you get it?”

  I turned to Mike. “Want to do the talking?”

  A shake of his head. “You’re doing all right.”

  “All right.” Kessler hunched a little forward and Marrs lit another cigarette. “We weren’t lying and we weren’t exaggerating when we said the actual photography was ours. Every frame of film was taken right here in this country, within the last few months. Just how—I won’t mention why or where—we can’t tell you just now.” Kessler snorted in disgust. “Let me finish.

  “We all know that we’re cashing in, hand over fist. And we’re going to cash in some more. We have, on our personal schedule, five more pictures. Three of that five we want you to handle as you did the others. The last two of the five will show you both the reason for all the childish secrecy, as Kessler calls it, and another motive that we have so far kept hidden. The last two pictures will show you both our motives and our methods; one is as important as the other. Now—is that enough? Can we go ahead on that basis?”

  It wasn’t enough for Kessler. “That doesn’t mean a thing to me. What are we, a bunch of hacks?”

  Johnson was thinking about his bank balance. “Five more. Two years, maybe four.”

  Marrs was skeptical. “Who do you think you’re going to kid that long? Where’s your studio? Where’s your talent? Where do you shoot your exteriors? Where do you get your costumes and your extras? In one single shot you’ve got forty thousand extras, if you’ve got one! Maybe you can shut me up, but who’s going to answer the questions that Metro and Fox and Paramount and RKO have been asking? Those boys aren’t fools, they know their business. How do you expect me to handle any publicity when I don’t know what the score is, myself?”

  Johnson told him to pipe down for a while and let him think. Mike and I didn’t like this one bit. But what could we do—tell the truth and end up in a strait-jacket?

  “Can we do it this way?” he finally asked. “Marrs: these boys have an in with the Soviet Government. They work in some place in Siberia, maybe. Nobody gets within miles of there. No one ever knows what the Russians are doing—”

  “Nope!” Marrs was definite. “Any hint that these came from Russia and we’d all be a bunch of Reds. Cut the gross in half.”

  Johnson began to pick up speed. “All right, not from Russia. From one of these little republics fringed around Siberia or Armenia or one of thos
e places. They’re not Russian-made films at all. In fact, they’ve been made by some of these Germans and Austrians the Russians took over and moved after the War. The war fever had died down enough for people to realize that the Germans knew their stuff occasionally. The old sympathy racket for these refugees struggling with faulty equipment, lousy climate, making super-spectacles and smuggling them out under the nose of the Gestapo or whatever they call it— That’s it!”

  Doubtfully, from Marrs: “And the Russians tell the world we’re nuts, that they haven’t got any loose Germans?”

  That, Johnson overrode. “Who reads the back pages? Who pays any attention to what the Russians say? Who cares? They might even think we’re telling the truth and start looking around their own backyard for something that isn’t there! All right with you?” to Mike and myself.

  I looked at Mike and he looked at me.

  “O.K. with us.”

  “O.K. with the rest of you? Kessler? Bernstein?”

  They weren’t too agreeable, and certainly not happy, but they agreed to play games until we gave the word.

  We were warm in our thanks. “You won’t regret it.”

  Kessler doubted that very much, but Johnson eased them all out, back to work. Another hurdle leaped, or sidestepped.

  “Rome” was released on schedule and drew the same friendly reviews. “Friendly” is the wrong word for reviews that stretched ticket line-ups blocks long. Marrs did a good job on the publicity. Even that chain of newspapers that afterward turned on us so viciously fell for Marrs’ word wizardry and ran full-page editorials urging the reader to see “Rome.”

  With our third picture, “Flame Over France,” we corrected a few misconceptions about the French Revolution, and began stepping on a few tender toes. Luckily, however, and not altogether by design, there happened to be in power in Paris a liberal government. They backed us to the hilt with the confirmation we needed. At our request they released a lot of documents that had hitherto conveniently been lost in the cavernous recesses of the Bibliotheque Nationale. I’ve forgotten the name of whoever happened to be the perennial pretender to the French throne. At, I’m sure, the subtle prodding of one of Marrs’s ubiquitous publicity men, the pretender sued us for our whole net, alleging the defamation of the good name of the Bourbons. A lawyer Johnson dug up for us sucked the poor chump into a courtroom and cut him to bits. Not even six cents’ damages did he get. Samuels, the lawyer, and Marrs drew a good-sized bonus, and the pretender moved to Honduras.

  Somewhere around this point, I believe, did the tone of the press begin to change. Up until then we’d been regarded as crosses between Shakespeare and Barnum. Since long-obscure facts had been dredged into the light, a few well-known pessimists began to wonder sotto voce if we weren’t just a pair of blasted pests. “Should leave well enough alone.” Only our huge advertising budget kept them from saying more.

  I’m going to stop right here and say something about our personal life while all this was going on. Mike I’ve kept in the background pretty well, mostly because he wants it that way. He lets me do all the talking and stick my neck out while he sits in the most comfortable chair in sight. I yell and I argue and he just sits there; hardly ever a word coming out of that dark-brown pan, certainly never an indication showing that behind those polite eyebrows there’s a brain—and a sense of humor and wit—faster and as deadly as a bear trap. Oh, I know we’ve played around, sometimes with a loud bang, but we’ve been, ordinarily, too busy and too preoccupied with what we were doing to waste any time. Ruth, while she was with us, was a good dancing and drinking partner. She was young, she was almost what you’d call beautiful, and she seemed to like being with us. For a while I had a few ideas about her that might have developed into something serious. We both—I should say, all three of us—found out in time that we looked at a lot of things too differently. So we weren’t too disappointed when she signed with Metro. Her contract meant what she thought was all the fame and money and happiness in the world, plus the personal attention she was doubtless entitled to have. They put her in Class Bs and serials and she, financially, is better off than she ever expected to be. Emotionally, I don’t know. We heard from her some time ago, and I think she’s about due for another divorce. Maybe it’s just as well.

  But let’s get away from Ruth, I’m ahead of myself, anyway. All this time Mike and I had been working together, our approach to the final payoff had been divergent. Mike was hopped on the idea of making a better world, and doing that by making war impossible. “War,” he’s often said, “war of any kind is what has made man spend most of his history in merely staying alive. Now, with the atom to use, he has within himself the seed of self-extermination. So help me, Ed, I’m going to do my share of stopping that, or I don’t see any point in living. I mean it!”

  He did mean it. He told me that in almost the same words the first day we met. Then I tagged that idea as a pipe dream picked up on an empty stomach. I saw his machine only as a path to luxurious and personal Nirvana, and I thought he’d soon be going my way. I was wrong.

  You can’t live, or work, with a likable person without admiring some of the qualities that make that person likable. Another thing; it’s a lot easier to worry about the woes of the world when you haven’t any yourself. It’s a lot easier to have a conscience when you can afford it. When I donned the rose-colored glasses half my battle was won; when I realized how grand a world this could be, the battle was over. That was about the time of “Flame Over France,” I think. The actual time isn’t important. What is important is that, from that time on, we became the tightest team possible. Since then the only thing we’ve differed on would be the time to knock off for a sandwich. Most of our leisure time, what we had of it, has been spent in locking up for the night, rolling out the portable bar, opening just enough beer to feel good, and relaxing. Maybe, after one or two, we might diddle the dials of the machine, and go rambling.

  Together we’ve been everywhere and seen anything. It might be a good night to check up on Frangois Villon, the faker, or maybe we might chase around with Haroun-el-Rashid. (If there was ever a man born a few hundred years too soon, it was that careless caliph.) Or if we were in a bad or discouraged mood we might follow the Thirty Years’ War for a while, or if we were real raffish we might inspect the dressing rooms at Radio City. For Mike the crackup of Atlantis has always had an odd fascination, probably because he’s afraid that man will do it again, now that he’s rediscovered nuclear energy. And if I doze off he’s quite apt to go back to the very Beginning, back to the start of the world as we know it now. (It wouldn’t do any good to tell you what went before that.)

  When I stop to think, it’s probably just as well that neither of us married. We, of course, have hopes for the future, but at present we’re both tired of the whole human race; tired of greedy faces and hands. With a world that puts a premium on wealth and power and strength, it’s no wonder what decency there is stems from fear of what’s here now, or fear of what’s hereafter. We’ve seen so much of the hidden actions of the world—call it snooping, if you like—that we’ve learned to disregard the surface indications of kindness and good. Only once did Mike and I ever look into the private life of someone we knew and liked and respected. Once was enough. From that day on we made it a point to take people as they seemed. Let’s get away from that.

  The next two pictures we released in rapid succession; the first, “Freedom for Americans,” the American Revolution, and “The Brothers and the Guns,” the American Civil War. Bang! Every third politician, a lot of so-called “educators,” and all the professional patriots started after our scalps. Every single chapter of the DAR, the Sons of Union Veterans, and the Daughters of the Confederacy pounded their collective heads against the wall. The South went frantic; every state in the Deep South and one state on the border flatly banned both pictures, the second because it was truthful, and the first because censorship is a contagious disease. They stayed banned until the professional politician
s got wise. The bans were revoked, and the choke-collar and string-tie brigade pointed to both pictures as horrible examples of what some people actually believed and thought, and felt pleased that someone had given them an opportunity to roll out the barrel and beat the drums that sound sectional and racial hatred.

  New England was tempted to stand on its dignity, but couldn’t stand the strain. North of New York both pictures were banned. In New York State the rural representatives voted en bloc, and the ban was clamped on statewide. Special trains ran to Delaware, where the corporations were too busy to pass another law. Libel suits flew like spaghetti, and although the extras blared the filing of each new suit, very few knew that we lost not one. Although we had to appeal almost every suit to higher courts, and in some cases request a change of venue which was seldom granted, the documentary proof furnished by the record cleared us once we got to a judge, or series of judges, with no fences to mend.

  It was a mighty rasp we drew over wounded ancestral pride. We had shown that not all the mighty had haloes of purest gold, that not all the Redcoats were strutting bullies—nor angels, and the British Empire, except South Africa, refused entry to both pictures and made violent passes at the State Department. The spectacle of Southern and New England congressmen approving the efforts of a foreign ambassador to suppress free speech drew hilarious hosannas from certain quarters. H. L. Mencken gloated in the clover, doing loud nip-ups, and the newspapers hung on the triple-horned dilemma of anti-foreign, pro-patriotic, and quasi-logical criticism. In Detroit the Ku Klux Klan fired an anemic cross on our doorstep, and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, the NAACP, and the WCTU passed flattering resolutions. We forwarded the most vicious and obscene letters—together with a few names and addresses that hadn’t been originally signed—to our lawyers and the Post Office Department. There were no convictions south of Illinois.