It was Reel No. 2 of Mack Sennett’s comedy My Official Wife, which had played in theaters about four years before. McAdoo watched as immigrants from a Lower East Side tenement concocted a scheme to bring their sweethearts into the country so they could marry them. At least, that could have been the plot. Mostly, it involved a tub of water in the living area into which people stepped, fell, dropped pets, pretended to swim, chopped vegetables, and dumped upon passing policemen. The action shifted outside, and one of the men from the War Department—McAdoo didn’t know his name—called: “This is it. This right here. Good.” There were anarchists on the screen now. You could tell they were anarchists because they had peaked caps, crazed eyes, and triangular beards with points that could stab through a bird’s-eye maple plank.

One of them was standing on a milk crate outside the tenement, bewitching a streetside audience. He wore small round glasses, and as he spoke, he rubbed his hands like a rodent washing food.

When he was gone, a vigorous pie fight began.

“Was that it?” asked McAdoo.

“That was it,” answered the man from the War Department. “Later, he comes back with pie on his face.”

“Umm-hmm—a stand-in, maybe?” McAdoo nodded.

The War Department man hesitated. “What’s a stand-in?”

“Apparently, when you can’t see an actor’s face—say he’s doing a stunt—” McAdoo was impatient. “Forget it. Let’s watch the war films now. Show me what else you have there.”

The reels of film were being changed with a clatter. Someone made a joke about having four minutes free, in case anyone wanted to say anything. McAdoo didn’t laugh. For the first time, the United States government was making moving pictures.

Not until Germany protested the footage shot of their invasion of Belgium had it occurred to the Allies that the picture-show newsreels were less an intrusion than a way to shed light on the battlefield. Thanks to the serendipitous rise of motion pictures, this war was the first one civilians had ever seen. And then, because of the war, portable cameras were invented, with better mounts and pans. Before the war, the picture show had been for the working classes, but newsreels made it seem as if attending the theaters was a civic duty. As the educated showed up, dramatic features became more complex, though McAdoo would need serious integers to understand the chicken-and-egg of that phenomenon.

Zukor and Goldwyn and Fox and First National wanted fresh war footage every week, and since the footage could increase patriotism, of course the military was willing to provide it.

But where might it come from? Photographers were like masterless samurai, with fuzzy allegiances, drinking problems, and psychological disorders that allowed them to toss their tripods on their shoulders and chase battling units through exploded submarine terminals. They were not to be trusted.