Zukor talked. He steepled his fingers, tapping them against one another when making an especially important point. He explained that, though the negative had been gratis, the cost of producing positives, coupled with trade-press advertising, could not be separated from the normal business of running Paramount. When 70 percent of the drying racks were running, say, the latest Arbuckle, and the other 30 percent reels of America’s Answer, they could not ask their technicians to forgo 30 percent of their pay. There were volatile chemicals whose price had risen, not that Zukor was complaining about such a thing, since the start of the war. The cost of a foot of orthochromatic negative film was now a halfpenny more. The electricity that spun the drums did not differentiate between commercial and patriotic pursuits. There were loans against perceived box-office profits, which were used to pay salaries, which were up.

“Then there’s distribution,” he sighed, as if it were an impolite cousin who he wished would cease coming to dinner. “Say I have the wagon taking two reels of the new Arbuckle, two of the Geraldine Farrar—we distribute her, even though we don’t produce her, so that’s an entirely different system of accounting—and also one reel of Pershing’s Crusaders across town.” And from there he was off on incidental and incremental costs, recoverable expenditures, single and multiple outlays, technological development monies, splendid schedules that made accounting of the distance between “net” and “gross” rather an all-night party with silly hats on.

It is safe to say that Zukor’s explanation was accurate, but not quite complete. Instead, as he spoke, he was constructing dreams from the ground up—the way workers in Hancock Park were erecting ersatz Xanadus—capped with a giant question mark: “Will the government actually let me get away with this?”

Miss Chambers returned, pushing a library cart heaped with leather-jacketed accounting ledgers. She rolled it across the fifty-five feet of rug, cart wheels squeaking like, McAdoo observed, a rat.

Zukor, meanwhile, felt expansive. “I do know why the films failed,” he said.

“Oh, do you?”

“Honestly, yes. They had no hero.”

“What! The United States is the hero.”

“That’s abstract. The audience wants an adventure.”

“Adventure?” McAdoo blinked. “The largest war in human history strikes me as adventurous, Mr. Zukor.”

“It’s abstract. Does the boy get the girl?”

“What boy?”

“The boy. Does he get the girl? Do they get married?”

McAdoo looked at him blankly.

“Does the wayward son succeed? Are mother and child reunited? Does the snob get his comeuppance?”

“That’s not what these films were ever about, not when you agreed to distribute them, and not now.”

“Does the princess get rescued?” The hoods of Zukor’s gin-colored eyes lowered. “Is evil punished?”

“Of course evil is punished!”

“I’ll grant you that. But it’s not on the screen yet, and you can’t see it, so no one cares.”