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 Caractacus 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.
Things like that.
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 right 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.
The old bank vault had never been removed, at our request, and it served well to store our equipment 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 still 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 almost 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 His times.
This footage we had to cut.
The Board of Review, as you know, is both Catholic and Protestant.
They—the Board—went right 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.
Right 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 clicked high his heels.
His men went right to work, and we handled the job as we had the first.
One day Kessler got me in a corner, dead earnest. “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 a little forward and Marrs lit another cigarette.