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.
“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 along 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 lines that were 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 wizardly and ran full-page editorials urging the reader to see Rome.