The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

by Martin Greenberg

  A moan from Marrs. “I bet I get that job.”

  Johnson was snappish. “You do. What else?” to me.

  I didn’t know. “Except that we have no plans for distribution as yet. That will have to be worked out.”

  “Like falling off a log.” Johnson was happy about that. “One look at the rushes and United Artists would spit in Shakespeare’s eye.”

  Marrs came in. “What about the other shots? Got a writer lined up?”

  “We’ve got what will pass for the shooting script, or will have in a week or so. Want to go over it with us?”

  Marrs said he’d like that.

  “How much time have we got?” interposed Kessler. “This is going to be a job. When do we want it?” Already it was “we.”

  “Yesterday is when we want it,” snapped Johnson, and he rose. “Any ideas about music? No? We’ll try for Werner Janssen and his boys. Bernstein, you’re responsible for that print from now on. Kessler, get your crew in and have a look at it. Marrs, at their convenience, you’ll go with Mr. Lefko and Mr. Laviada through the files at Central Casting. Keep in touch with them at the Commodore. Now, if you’ll step into my office, we’ll discuss the financial arrangements—”

  It was as easy as that.

  Oh, I don’t say it was easy work, or anything. 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 (turned out to be a young Armenian who had given up hope of ever being called from the extras lists and had gone home to Santee), casting, rehearsing the rest of the actors, and swearing at the customers and the boys who built the sets, we were kept hopping. Even Ruth, who had reconciled her father with sorting letters, for once earned her salary. We took turns shooting dictation at her until we had a script that satisfied Mike, myself, and young Marrs, who turned out to be clever as a fox with dialogue.

  What I really mean to say 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 who knew the difference between glycerin tears and reality and didn’t care if it cost two dollars extra. They had us pegged as a couple of city slickers with plenty on the ball. I hope.

  Finally it was over with. We all sat in the projection room and watched the finished product. Mike and I, Marrs and Johnson, Kessler and Bernstein, and all the lesser technicians who split up the really enormous amount of work that had been done. 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 glamour seemed to flare out of the screen and sear the 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, 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 from under a mound of flies, isn’t much different whether he carries a sarissa or 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 off 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 in 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. 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 already talked about that. “As far as we’re concerned,” I said slowly, “do as you think best. Personal publicity, O.K. We won’t look at 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 non-existent 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, any 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 gripping 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 blond.”

  Johnson was right about the bidding for the release. We �
� or rather, Johnson – made a very profitable deal with United Amusement and its 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 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 for 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 asked him 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 were 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 eight-by-ten 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 of the interior of a trireme, but a line-of-battle quin-quereme. (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 Car-actacus 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.

  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 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. At our request, the old bank vault had never been removed, and it served well to store our equipment in 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 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 virtually 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 of His times. This footage we had to cut. The Board of Review, as you know, contains both Catholics and Protestants. They – the Board – were 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. 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 kicked high his heels. His men went right to work, and we handled the job as we had the first. One day Kessler, dead earnest, got me in a corner.

  “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 some day, 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 forward a little 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 past 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 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 awhile 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 straitjacket?

  “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 labeled a bunch of Reds. Cut the gross in half.”

  Johnson began to pick up speed. “All right, not from Russia. From one of those little republics on the fringe of Siberia or Armenia or some such place. They’re not Russian-made films at all. In fact, they’ve been made by some of the Germans and Austrians the Russians captured and moved after the war. The war fever has 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, Marrs said: “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?” he said to Mike and me.