BACK IN HIS room, Lionel lit up one of the hashish cigarettes Max’s boy had delivered and inhaled deeply. He’d left Essanay in a rage after yet another argument with Spoor.

“What is this garbage, Mr. Gerring? Women buried alive, skeletons in tombs—” Spoor had tossed the pages of Lionel’s most recent photoplay back onto his desk.

“She gets saved,” Lionel protested. “It’d be perfect for Bushman.”

“Bushman would follow Chaplin to California if he ever got a whiff of this. Garbage,” he repeated in disgust.

“It’s from Edgar Allan Poe.”

“Dieter’s already working on Edgar Allan Poe. ‘The Raven,’ lots of spooky stuff. And where’s the love interest? That’s what the ladies want to see. Something funny and exciting. Brewster’s Millions, why didn’t you come up with that one before DeMille?”

“Because George Barr McCutcheon already did, years ago. In a book.”

“No one wants to watch a story about a murderer.”

“He gets captured! We see him brought to the gallows in chains!”

Spoor’s face crinkled in distaste. “No one wants to see that, either, Gerring.”

A week earlier he’d pitched a flicker inspired by The Tales of Hoffmann, which he’d seen before he fled New York. He’d been especially intrigued by the segment featuring a life-size toy, an automaton that could dance and sing. Lionel had typed up a photoplay, six scenes, all but the last set in a toy shop.

“You’ve got something here,” Spoor had said. “I like the toy shop, the dolls, too. But it’s too spooky. And kissing the doll, that just strikes me as peculiar. Maybe these…notions…are accepted back East, Mr. Gerring, but not here. I don’t want to see any more girls buried alive, or men fondling kids dressed like dolls. Spoiled my dinner, reading that. Made me think of my own little girls.”

Lionel didn’t bother pointing out that half the movies shot in Chicago and New York starred girls under sixteen, or women cast because they looked like children. Or that some of the most successful moving pictures of the last few years were what Spoor called garbage: The Body in the Trunk, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Skull.

Spoor handed the sheaf of typescript back to Lionel. “But it’s a funny idea. I mentioned it to Wally, it’s a good fit for him. Write it funny. Get it to me by Wednesday, we can begin shooting next week.”

That had been just over a week ago. Sweedie’s Tell-Tale Toys had already opened and was raking in the nickels. There’d been no point in arguing. Lionel got paid a hundred and fifty dollars for a Sweedie scenario…