Like me, they found themselves drawn to the place after activities had ceased for the night, when only the romantically inclined and the sinister remained in the darkness under the scaffoldings of the rides. Black shadows stained our faces.

There, one night, they came across an attraction who seemed to be performing whether the fair was open or not—a man under a sign in huge letters that read MAN OR MACHINE? who, with dead eyes, in a seeming stupor, was tearing links off a chain and bending metal bars, while his “handler,” or hypnotist, looked on as if the show were just for him. Then and there, according to Mayer, the story of Caligari and Cesare was conceived.

They both write very imagistically. Mayer calls it “brain-photography.”

How good were Erich Pommer’s instincts? Janowitz and Mayer read him the entire weird and unprecedented script at four in the afternoon, and he’d paid for it by eight that same evening. That night the two writers dined in solitary splendor in the vast and empty dining room of the Hotel Hessler. Many courses, and an old Burgundy. The next morning they retrieved their most important valuables from the local pawnbrokers. And Pommer had in his hands the blueprint for the biggest international hit this industry has ever produced.

Despite knowing just about everyone on-screen, we were completely taken in, watching the thing. The usual world of smirking dolls with bared teeth and oxlike eyes was gone. With Caligari, the artist had slipped into that crude phantasmagoria and had begun to create. Space had been given a voice.

For Mayer and Janowitz, the script had to be a straitjacket for the director, tight, precise, and balanced, with strong belts and fasteners, so that nothing could escape from their instructions. Mayer still writes that way. Each change I consider causes other parts of the structure to unexpectedly totter.

While I’m still waiting for Mayer, I’m summoned by telephone to the great hall to adjudicate a dispute between Freund and the set designers, Herlth and Röhrig. Eight in the morning and they’re already an hour into their argument.

The four main city sets are already half finished. The hall is a tangle of scaffold towers and cranes, shouts and hammering. On one set the model skyscrapers that the doorman will view from his post are over seventeen meters high. I gape at them like a tourist. Behind them we’ve built a large asphalt expanse of cars and street signs, life-sized in the foreground and smaller as they recede, so that by the last row they’re only a foot tall. From the front there’s the undeniable impression of being in a plaza of great dimensions.