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, you’ll go with Mr. Lefko and Mr. Laviada through the files at Central Casting at their convenience.
Keep in touch with them at the Commodore.
Now, if you’ll step into my office, we’ll discuss the financial arrangements—”
As easy as all that.
Oh, I don’t say that it was easy work or anything like that, 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, he turned out to be a young Armenian who had given up hope of ever being called from the extra lists and had gone home to Santee—casting and rehearsing the rest of the actors and swearing at the costumers and the boys who built the sets, we were kept hopping.
Even Ruth, who had reconciled her father with soothing letters, for once earned her salary.
We took turns shooting dictation at her until we had a script that satisfied Mike and myself and young Marrs, who turned out to be clever as a fox on dialogue.
What I really meant 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 that knew the difference between glycerin tears and reality and didn’t care if it cost two dollars extra.
They had us placed as a couple of city slickers with plenty on the ball. I hope.
Finally it was all over with.
We all sat in the projection room; Mike and I, Marrs and Johnson, Kessler and Bernstein, and all the lesser technicians that had split up the really enormous amount of work that had been done watched the finished product.
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 glamor seemed to flare right out of the screen and sear across your 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, really 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 under a mound of flies isn’t any different when he carries a sarissa instead of 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 out 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.”