Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra

Author:Anthony Marra [Marra, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

At first, it all seemed to go wrong exactly right. Shortly after the commencement of the long-delayed production was reported in the trades, the hate mail came in from the America First Committee membership. Three the first day. Eighty-seven the second. The conspiracies they laid out implied a pitiful hunger for explanation, no matter how malicious or unlikely. On the third day Artie gathered the letters in his metal wastebasket and invited Maria in to strike the match. This wasn’t their first rodeo. The ceremonial burning of hate mail was to a Mercury picture what the lighting of the torch was to the Olympic Games. But rather than drop the match, Maria said, “Why don’t we use these too?”

Artie began publishing them in weekly advertisements in The Hollywood Reporter to stoke interest among the critics and gossip columnists. He hired private investigators to perform background checks on all studio employees. After discovering that one of the janitors was a member of the Silver Shirts, he put it out to the papers that he foiled a German attempt to infiltrate his studio. That German agents likely had more urgent espionage than spying on Mercury Pictures International was a possibility the newspapermen happily ignored. He stationed armed guards outside his office, kept the shooting schedule under lock and key, and doled out aliases to all cast and crew. Naturally, he trumpeted these security protocols to reporters with all the restraint of a catchpenny boxing promoter.

Artie was so focused on publicity that he left the day-to-day oversight of production to Maria. She managed budgets, office politics, celebrity personalities, city permits, demands from the insurer, demands from the agents, demands from the lawyers, demands from the Production Code, demands from each of Mercury’s thirty-two departments, fire-code violations, contract disputes, above-the-line costs, below-the-line costs, payroll, script breakdowns, vendor invoices, memoranda, shooting schedules, production delays, daily logs, overages…in short, the invisible and unglamorous bureaucratic apparatus that made a picture possible.

All this Maria accomplished with minimal input from Artie, so when she saw him unveil the mockup poster the advertising department had sent over, she was furious. The poster had been inked by a freelancer in Long Beach whose principal trade was tattooing cheesecake pinups on sailorly biceps. Of late his most common commissions were the names, Social Security numbers, and blood types of Navy draftees. Maria wasn’t concerned with the poster itself, a mélange of expressionism and pulp as envisioned by an eye practiced in memorializing errors of judgment on skin. No, what bothered Maria were the credits. Everyone was listed as John Doe. Even her.

“It’s brilliant, isn’t it?” Artie said. “One of the actors asked to be credited as John Doe, over concerns that his involvement in this picture might imperil his folks back in Europe. It occurred to me that crediting everyone as John Doe could be a publicity coup.”

“Art, you gave me your word I’d receive the producer’s credit on this.”

“Anyone who matters will know who produced this,” Artie said, dismissing her concerns with a wave of his hand.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.