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.