but that partnership still holds good. Mike is ace high with me, and I guess it’s the other way around, too. That was six years ago; it only took me a year or so to discard some of the corners I used to cut.
Seven days after that, on a Tuesday, I was riding a bus to Grosse Pointe with a full briefcase. Two days after that I was riding back from Grosse Pointe in a shiny taxi, with an empty briefcase and a pocketful of folding money. It was easy.
“Mr. Jones—or Smith—or Brown—I’m with Aristocrat Studios, Personal and Candid Portraits. We thought you might like this picture of you and … no, this is just a test proof. The negative is in our files… Now, if you’re really interested, I’ll be back the day after tomorrow with our files… I’m sure you will, Mr. Jones. Thank you, Mr. Jones…”
Dirty? Sure. Blackmail is always dirty. But if I had a wife and family and a good reputation, I’d stick to the roast beef and forget the Roquefort. Very smelly Roquefort, at that. Mike liked it less than I did. It took some talking, and I had to drag out the old one about the ends justifying the means, and they could well afford it, anyway. Besides, if there was a squawk, they’d get the negative free. Some of them were pretty bad.
So we had the cash; not too much, but enough to start. Before we took the next step there was plenty to decide. There are a lot who earn a living by convincing millions that Sticko soap is better. We had a harder problem than that: we had, first, to make a salable and profitable product, and second, we had to convince many, many millions that our “Product” was absolutely honest and absolutely accurate. We all know that if you repeat something long enough and loud enough many—or most—will accept it as gospel truth. That called for publicity on an international scale. For the skeptics who know better than to accept advertising, no matter how blatant, we had to use another technique. And since we were going to get certainly only one chance, we had to be right the first time. Without Mike’s machine the job would have been impossible; without it the job would have been unnecessary.
A lot of sweat ran under the bridge before we found what we thought—and we still do!—the only workable scheme. We picked the only possible way to enter every mind in the world without a fight; the field of entertainment. Absolute secrecy was imperative, and it was only when we reached the last decimal point that we made a move. We started like this.
First we looked for a suitable building, or Mike did, while I flew east, to Rochester, for a month. The building he rented was an old bank. We had the windows sealed, a flossy office installed in the front —the bullet-proof glass was my idea—air conditioning, a portable bar, electrical wiring of whatever type Mike’s little heart desired, and a blond secretary who thought she was working for M-E Experimental Laboratories. When I got back from Rochester I took over the job of keeping happy the stone masons and electricians, while Mike fooled around in our suite in the Book where he could look out the window at his old store. The last I heard, they were selling snake oil there. When the Studio, as we came to call it, was finished, Mike moved in and the blonde settled down to a routine of reading love stories and saying no to all the salesmen that wandered by. I left for Hollywood.
I spent a week digging through the files of Central Casting before I was satisfied, but it took a month of snooping and some under-the-table cash to lease a camera that would handle Trucolor film. That took the biggest load from my mind. When I got back to Detroit the big view camera had arrived from Rochester, with a truckload of glass color plates. Ready to go.
We made quite a ceremony of it. We closed the Venetian blinds and I popped the cork on one of the bottles of champagne I’d bought. The blond secretary was impressed; all she’d been doing for her salary was to accept delivery of packages and crates and boxes. We had no wine glasses, but we made no fuss about it. Too nervous and excited to drink any more than one bottle, we gave the rest to the blonde and told her to take the rest of the afternoon off. After she left—and I think she was disappointed at breaking up what could have been a good party —we locked up after her, went into the studio itself, locked up again and went to work.
I’ve mentioned that the windows were sealed. All the inside wall had been painted dull black, and with the high ceiling that went with that old bank lobby, it was impressive. But not gloomy. Midway in the studio was planted the big Trucolor camera, loaded and ready. Not much could we see of Mike’s machine, but I knew it was off to the side, set to throw on the back wall. Not
“Well?” he said expectantly.
I felt pretty good just then, right down to my billfold.
“It’s all yours, Mike,” and a switch ticked over. There he was. There was a youngster, dead twenty-five hundred years, real enough, almost, to touch. Alexander. Alexander of Macedon.
Let’s take that first picture in detail. I don’t think I can ever forget what happened in the next year or so. First we followed Alexander through his life, from beginning to end. We skipped, of course, the little things he did, jumping ahead days and weeks and years at a time. Then we’d miss him, or find that he’d moved in space. That would mean we’d have to jump back and forth, like the artillery firing bracket or ranging shots, until we found him again. Helped only occasionally by his published lives, we were astounded to realize how much distortion has crept into his life. I often wonder why legends arise about the famous. Certainly their lives are as startling or appalling as fiction. And unfortunately we had to hold closely to the accepted histories. If we hadn’t, every professor would have gone into his corner for a hearty sneer. We couldn’t take that chance. Not at first.
After we knew approximately what had happened and where, we used our notes to go back to what had seemed a particularly photogenic section and work on that awhile. Eventually we had a fair idea of what we were actually going to film. Then we sat down and wrote an actual script to follow, making allowance for whatever shots we’d have to double in later. Mike used his machine as the projector, and I operated the Trucolor camera at a fixed focus, like taking moving pictures of a movie. As fast as we finished a reel it would go to Rochester for processing, instead of one of the Hollywood outfits that might have done it cheaper. Rochester is so used to horrible amateur stuff that I doubt if anyone ever looks at anything. When the reel was returned we’d run it ourselves to check our choice of scenes and color sense and so on.
For example, we had to show the traditional quarrels with his father, Philip. Most of that we figured on doing with doubles, later. Olympias, his mother, and the fangless snakes she affected, didn’t need any doubling, as we used an angle and amount of distance that didn’t call for actual conversation. The scene where Alexander rode the bucking horse no one else could ride came out of some biographer’s head, but we thought it was so famous we couldn’t leave it. We dubbed the closeups later, and the actual horseman was a young Scythian that hung around the royal stables for his keep. Roxanne was real enough, like the rest of the Persians’ wives that Alexander took over. Luckily most of them had enough poundage to look luscious. Philip and Parmenio and the rest of the characters were heavily bearded, which made easy the necessary doubling and dubbing-in the necessary speech. (If you ever saw them shave in those days, you’d know why whiskers were popular.)
The most trouble we had with the interior shots. Smoky wicks in a bowl of lard, no matter how plentiful, are too dim even for fast film. Mike got around that by running the Trucolor camera at a single frame a second, with his machine paced accordingly. That accounts for the startling clarity and depth of focus we got from a lens well stopped down. We had all the time in the world to choose the best possible scenes and camera angles; the best actors in the world, expensive camera booms, or repeated retakes under the most exacting director can’t compete with us. We had a lifetime from which to choose.
Eventually we had on film about eighty per cent of what you saw in the finished picture. Roughly we spliced the reels together and sat there entranced at what we had actually done. Even more exciting, even more spectacular than we’d dared to hope, the lack of continuity and sound didn’t stop us from realizing that we’d done a beautiful job. We’d done all we could, and the worst was yet to come. So we sent for more champagne and told the blonde we had cause for celebration. She giggled.
“What are you doing in there, anyway?” she asked. “Every salesman who comes to the door wants to know what you’re making.”
I opened the first bottle. “Just tell them you don’t know.”
“That’s just what I’ve been telling them. They think I’m awfully dumb.” We all laughed at the salesmen.
Mike was thoughtful. “If we’re going to do this sort of thing very often, we ought to have some of these fancy hollow-stemmed glasses.”
The blonde was pleased with that. “And we could keep them in my bottom drawer.” Her nose wrinkled prettily. “These bubbles— You know, this is the only time I’ve ever had champagne, except at a wedding, and then it was only one glass.”
“Pour her another,” Mike suggested. “Mine’s empty too.” I did. “What did you do with those bottles you took
