“No, the other.” McAdoo, curious as ever, asked what film was actually made out of (guncotton, it turned out), and why it glowed the way it did (silver nitrate), and how long it took to develop (the projectionist didn’t know), and what all those processes cost (again, he didn’t know).

“Oh, shoot,” said the projectionist, which made McAdoo like him. He was homely, balding, with tufts of hair that stood like juniper bushes. “It’s all tore up. I have to splice it.”

“Take your time. Oh, and what’s ‘splicing,’ anyway?”

As the projectionist explained what he was doing, McAdoo thought about the phrase “the world stage.” If the world was a stage and America newly in the business of making pictures, then imagine the concept of the stand-in writ by lightning: America turning the future into its own motion picture. The country was now powerful enough to structure the peace that would surely arise after the war ended. And that, Münsterberg would have said, meant imposing narrative upon what was essentially chaos.

4…
3…
2…

Back to My Official Wife. The tenement. The immigrants. Then, outside—the anarchists!

“Can we hold the image still?” McAdoo asked.

“It’s a risk. The film might catch fire.”

“Oh dear. Well, let’s not do that.” McAdoo stood, walked toward the screen, and looked at the anarchist carefully. “Are we sure it’s him?”

The director of My Official Wife, Mack Sennett, was never much of a stickler for realism. But he announced to his competitors that, by an awesome stroke of luck, he had combed the Brooklyn neighborhoods around the Vitagraph Studios during the ten-week period when a certain anarchist was in exile in New York. And eager for five dollars’ salary. The logs for the players at Vitagraph were clear: that man on screen had signed in, or someone signed for him, “Bronstein, L.” In Cyrillic.

“Mr. McAdoo, the stock is flammable. I should—” Suddenly a sound like a whip, a screen gone white.

“Broke again?”

The projectionist worked with a razor and film cement, and then he had the reel back on the projector. “They just standardized this,” the projectionist said. “It’s three perforations per— Oh, shoot.”

“That’s all right.”

“To get it out, I have to go forward. Sometimes there’s a problem and you can’t back up. Sorry.”

The cut was rough; the perforations missed the uptake tracks before lining up, and then the image was clear: the anarchist. He was on his milk crate, earning his five dollars, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, now known as Leon Trotsky. When the war was over and the peace began, there were many annoyances that needed to be dealt with, and the man onscreen was one of them. McAdoo had been as curious as anyone to see footage of his face, since he tended to avoid newsreel photographers as if they were snipers.