The Dream Merchants

by Harold Robbins

  “Ain’t you comin’ over and kiss your Uncle Johnny?” I asked her.

  She got up from her chair and came over to me. I kissed her, and her lips were cold. Then she went over to Dulcie and took her hand. “I hope you’ll be very happy,” she said, kissing Dulcie’s cheek.

  I looked at them as they stood there. They were about the same age, but there were other things about them that suddenly struck me.

  Doris’s skin was pale and her hair was cut short. Standing next to Dulcie, she looked like a schoolgirl. Dulcie was studying her, too. I knew the look on her face already. To most people it seemed a fleeting glance, but I knew Dulcie well enough by then. She could tell more in a few seconds than most people in hours.

  Esther turned to me. “She’s lovely, Johnny. Where did you meet her?”

  “She’s an actress,” I had answered. “I met her backstage at a theater in New York.”

  Peter had turned to me. “Actress, did you say? Maybe we can find a part for her.”

  Dulcie smiled at him.

  “There’s time enough for that,” I had said. “We’ve got to settle down first.”

  Dulcie didn’t speak.

  When we had left, Dulcie said to me: “Johnny.”

  I was busy driving. “Yes, dear.”

  “You know she’s in love with you.”

  I took a quick look at her. She was watching me with an amused look in her tawny eyes. “You mean Doris?”

  “You know who I mean, Johnny,” she said.

  I laughed. “You’re wrong that time, honey,” I said uncomfortably, “I’m only Uncle Johnny to her.”

  She laughed too, a knowing laugh, full of amusement at male ignorance. “Uncle Johnny,” she said, and laughed again. “Did you ever read her book?”

  “No,” I answered, “I haven’t had time.”

  “You ought to read it, Uncle Johnny,” she said with a faint mockery in her voice. “You’re in it.”

  ***

  Doris began to speak again. Her voice was low. “I thought of calling the doctor for Mother before I showed her the telegram, and then I thought I’d tell Papa first. He was in the library. I went to the door and knocked. There was no answer, so I went in. He was seated at his desk there, the phone in front of him. He was looking at it. I often wondered why he didn’t have it taken out. You know the one I mean—the direct wire to the studio.”

  I knew the one she meant. Involuntarily I looked at it. It stood there on the desk with a lonely unused look about it. In the old days, when the receiver was picked up, a blue light would flash on the studio switchboard. It meant that the president was calling. The call took precedence over anything else on the board at the time.

  “He was looking at it, a vague longing in his eyes.

  “‘Papa,’ I said. My voice began to shake a little.

  “With an effort he brought his mind back to me. ‘What, liebchen?’ he said.

  “Suddenly I didn’t know what to say. Wordlessly I handed him the telegram. He read it slowly, his face turning white under his tan. He looked up at me unbelieving for a moment, his lips moving, then he read the telegram again. He got to his feet, his hand trembling.

  “‘I got to tell Mamma,’ he said, his voice dull. He took a few steps, and then he seemed to stumble a little. I caught his arm.

  “‘Papa,’ I said, ‘Papa!’ Suddenly I was crying.

  “He held on to me for a minute, his eyes searching mine. There were tears in his eyes too. Then he crumpled. It happened so quickly that he fell from my grasp. I tried to lift him, but I couldn’t. Then I ran to the door and called the butler. Together we placed him on the couch. I ran to the desk and picked up the telephone. By mistake I picked up the wrong one. I picked up the studio phone. The operator’s voice came on immediately. There was a question in her voice. ‘Magnum Pictures,’ she said. I hung up the phone with a feeling of shocked surprise. ‘Magnum Pictures,’ I was thinking. I began to hate the sound of those words. I had been hearing them all my life, it had turned all our lives inside out. Why did we ever have to go into the picture business?”

  She looked at me. Her eyes were wide and strange, filled with flickering lights. “Why couldn’t we have stayed in Rochester and missed all this? Mark dead and Papa lying on the floor with a broken heart. It’s your fault, Johnny, your fault. I heard Papa say many times he wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for you. He would never have come to Hollywood if it hadn’t been for you. If you hadn’t kept talking we could have spent our lives quietly and missed all this.”

  Suddenly she was crying again; then she came against me, her hands striking against my chest. “I hate you, Johnny, I hate you. Papa could have lived out his whole life and never missed the picture business. But you couldn’t. You were born for it. And you couldn’t do it alone, so you had to use Papa.”

  I tried to grab her hands but I couldn’t. They were moving too fast.

  “You’re Magnum Pictures, Johnny, you always were. But why couldn’t you stop when you got to New York? Why did you have to bring him out here and make him think he was so big that when the bubble burst, it took his heart with it?”

  I finally caught her hands and held her close to me. She was crying now. Hard, bitter tears came from her eyes. She had been hitting me for many more things than she realized. For all the years I had been so blind.

  At last she was quiet, her body still trembling slightly against mine, and when she spoke I could tell the effort she made to control her voice. It was low and husky, but it still shivered a little through the sheath of restraint. “I’m sorry, Johnny,” she whispered so low I could hardly hear her, “but why did we ever come to Hollywood?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to answer. I looked over her head toward the window. The faint gray streaks of day were already beginning to cut up the night. The clock on Peter’s desk read four thirty.

  She was eleven years old and Peter was thirty-five and I was twenty-one when we came here. And none of us wanted to, we had to. There was nothing we could do about it.

  THIRTY YEARS

  1911

  1

  Everybody was happy but Johnny. Borden was happy because he collected the money Peter owed him; Joe because, for the first time, he could make any picture he wanted without someone telling him what to do or what not to do. Peter was happy because the business had turned out even better than he had thought. He had paid all his debts, put eight thousand dollars in the bank, moved into a new apartment on Riverside Drive, and was getting a maid in to help Esther with the children. Esther was happy because Peter was happy.

  But Johnny wasn’t. He was content, in many ways satisfied, but still something was missing. The excitement, the feeling he had at first that big things were going to happen, were still deep within him, but covered by the commonplace layer of day-to-day activities.

  If it were not for the Motion Picture Combine, Johnny might have been happy. But he had a carnival man’s instinctive dislike and contempt for being forced into a pattern of routine not of his own choosing. And that was just what the combine was doing to the motion-picture industry.

  The independent producers among whom Kessler and Borden had found themselves were dependent on the combine for the privilege of staying in business. The combine controlled the raw stock from which the film was made, the processes that made the film, the patents of the motion-picture camera, and even the patents covering subsidiary equipment without which a picture could not be filmed, such as the mercury vapor lamps and light synchronizers.

  By the virtue of these basic controls it was able to bend the independent producer to its will, since each independent operated under a cross-licensing agreement issued by the combine. Thus the combine was able to tell the producer what type of pictures he could make and how much he could sell them for. The rules were strict and all covered by the agreement. No feature was to be more than two reels in length. The exhibitor, in order to retain his motion-picture projector, must use a set quota
of combine-produced film, over and above which he could use independently produced film if he desired. And the quota set was sufficiently great to limit the playing time available to the films made by the independents.

  Johnny chafed under these restraints; inside him were the unformed visions of what motion pictures were to become. In vain he would rail against the combine for retarding the progress of the screen. Deep inside him he knew that he was shouting at the moon, because no independent producer, no matter how great his complaint, would dare to challenge the supremacy of the combine. The combine was king. It was the patronizing overlord of an infant industry that tolerated the independent producers as an indulgent father would eye the escapades of his children. The lines were carefully drawn and the independent had to toe the mark. If he did not, his license would be immediately withdrawn; his notes and debts were quickly bought up by the combine, and his sources of business were rapidly closed to him. If he obeyed the rules, the combine magnanimously allowed him to remain in business and collected from him a royalty on every foot of film he bought or sold.

  Johnny had learned a great deal about motion pictures in the past three years and the conviction grew in him that something was missing from them. What it was he did not know; he only knew that the combine-enforced pattern of short features did not allow the producer to tell his story properly.

  With interest he watched the development of the serial pictures that some producer had developed to get around the combine’s regulations. But these were still shown at the rate of two reels a week, or one chapter, as they were called in order to conform with the combine’s rules. These pictures were followed avidly by the movie-goers from week to week, but for Johnny there was still something missing.

  That was the intangible in the back of Johnny’s mind, always annoying him. It was like trying to remember a tune he had once heard. He could hear the melody, envision the music, but when he tried to bring it to his lips the melody would not come forth. It would linger at the back of his mind and tantalize him with its sound. So it was with motion pictures.

  In his mind he could see the kind of motion picture that should be made. He knew its size, its shape, its form. He knew how long it should run, he even knew how the audience would react to it. But when he tried to bring it forth, he could not. It would dance in front of his eyes in a slow wraithlike form and then disappear into the bright realities of the day around him. Thus, with a constantly growing sense of excitement to come, the successes of the present day were as nothing to him.

  Then one day the idea began to take shape. It was late in December of 1910 and he was standing in the lobby of Pappas’ new theater in Rochester, talking to George, when a man and a woman had come out.

  The man had stopped near them to light a cigar, and the woman spoke. “I wish they had the other episodes of that serial to show here tonight. Just for once I would like to see a whole picture instead of part of one.”

  Her voice cut into Johnny’s mind and involuntarily he stopped talking to George and listened to what they were saying.

  The man had laughed. “That’s how they get you to come back every week,” he said. “They only show you a part of the picture at a time. If they showed you the whole thing like a play, you wouldn’t have anything to come back for next time.”

  “I don’t know about that,” the woman replied as the two walked away. “It seems to me that I would be more willing to come back every week if I knew I was going to see a whole show and get my money’s worth.”

  Johnny couldn’t hear the man’s reply as they had already gone out of earshot, but his mind was tingling with the glimmer of excitement that he came to recognize when he thought about what was going to come in motion pictures. He turned to George. “Did you hear that?”

  George nodded his head.

  “What do you think?” Johnny asked.

  “Lots poopuls feel that way,” George answered simply.

  “How do you feel about it?” Johnny persisted.

  George thought a few seconds before he answered. “I don’t know,” he replied at last. “Could be good, could be bad. Depends on picture. I got to see one, then I know.”

  On the train, all the way back to New York, the idea kept turning over and over in Johnny’s mind. “A whole picture,” the woman had said. What did it mean? He was puzzled, and his brows knit together as he thought about it. Was it a serial that could be shown all at once? Unconsciously he shook his head. That wasn’t the answer. It would take half a day to run a picture that long. A serial was twenty reels long. Maybe the answer lay in cutting the serials down to smaller size, but what size? He had to know the answer.

  It was late when he walked into the office, but the sense of excitement hadn’t left him. He told Peter and Joe what he had heard and what he thought.

  Joe seemed interested, but Peter was not. After listening to him Peter replied: “That’s only one person talking. Most people are satisfied with the way things are. I wouldn’t go out of my way to look for trouble.”

  But Johnny wasn’t satisfied. He felt that the chance remark he had overheard held the key to the question in his mind. And the events of the ensuing days and weeks seemed to bear out his contention.

  More now, so it seemed to Johnny, the exhibitors that he called on would ask him: “Haven’t you got anything different? My customers are getting tired of the same old thing every time.”

  And Johnny knew that they were right. He knew that it didn’t make any difference to the exhibitor whose pictures he played; all the producers made the same sort of picture.

  He decided to get a complete serial, condense it into one picture, and see if that was the answer. But another problem then presented itself. Magnum did not produce serials and he would have to obtain one from another company. Yet what company would give him a print of a serial and let him tamper with it? And if they would, he would have to tell them what he wanted to do and he didn’t want any of them to know it.

  He solved this problem by asking George to get him a print of one of Borden’s serials. George told Borden he liked it so much that he wanted to have a print of it for himself. Bill Borden felt so good about it that he insisted upon making George a gift of the print. If Borden had known what was to be done with his picture, he would have committed mayhem, but he didn’t know and George turned the print over to Johnny.

  Johnny took the print back to New York and he and Joe sat down to edit the ten chapters into one complete unit. They worked for five weeks on it before they felt they had a picture worth showing. They had a picture that ran six reels and took a little over an hour to show.

  Until they had finished their work they had not told Peter about it. Now they called him in, told him the whole story, and asked him to view the finished product. He agreed to look at it and they set a showing for the next evening.

  Johnny sent George a wire asking him to come down and see the picture. The next evening they all gathered in the little projection room at the Magnum Studios. Peter, Esther, George, Joe, and Johnny were the only people there. The regular projectionist had been sent home, and Johnny worked the projector.

  They were quiet while the picture was on, but the minute it was over they all began to talk at once.

  “It’s too long,” Peter said. “I don’t like it. Nobody can sit so long and still enjoy a movie.”

  “Why not?” Johnny asked. “You sat through it without any trouble.”

  “It hurts your eyes looking at the screen so long,” Peter replied. “It makes you uncomfortable.”

  “People sit in the movies that long now and it doesn’t hurt their eyes,” Johnny said heatedly. He was getting a little angry at Peter’s continued stubbornness. “What’s the difference if they look at one big picture or four little ones?”

  Joe grinned. “Maybe you need glasses, Peter.”

  Peter exploded. His eyes had been bothering him, but he refused to wear glasses. “My eyes got nothing to do with it. The picture is too long!”

&n
bsp; Johnny turned to George; his voice was challenging. “Well?”

  George looked at him sympathetically for a moment before he answered. “I like it,” he answered quietly, “but I would like to see it in a theater before I would say more.”

  Johnny smiled at him. “I would too, but we can’t do it.”

  It reminded for Esther to put her finger on the weakness of the picture. “It was interesting,” she said, “but it wasn’t complete. Something was missing. In a serial it is all right to have excitement in every chapter; when it’s condensed into one picture it’s too much. It’s all excitement, and then it’s too much to seem possible. After a while it seems like a joke.”

  When Johnny thought it over he realized that she was right. The answer was not in cutting serials down to another size but in developing a new-size picture. He had viewed the condensed version of the serial several times and he had come to the conclusion that while the running time of the picture was not too long, the picture lacked other elements of appeal that were necessary to round it out. A story would have to be developed that would fit the size of the picture.

  They left the projection room in a group, still talking about the picture. Only Johnny was silent. He slouched along, his hands in his pockets, his face glum.

  Peter slapped him on the shoulder. “Snap out of it. We’re doing all right as it is, so why worry?”

  Johnny didn’t answer.

  Peter took out his watch and looked at it. “Tell you what,” he said, trying to cheer Johnny up. “It’s early yet. Supposin’ we all have dinner and then go to a show?”

  2

  “No!” Peter shouted. “Positively no! I ain’t gonna do it!” He strode angrily past Joe and up to Johnny. He stood in front of him and waved an excited forefinger in Johnny’s face. “I should have to be crazy to do what you want! For almost two years now, we struggle and slave day and night to get on our feet and now that we’re making a dollar you want to throw the whole damn thing away for another idea. I’m not crazy altogether yet. I won’t do it!”