Seidel, Kathleen Gilles Read Free Page A

everyone were out in the Valley the first time, they were doing things that the studio had no idea they were doing."
    That did not seem remarkable. Jill had been on a number of movie sets where the actors and crew were doing all manner of things that the studio or production company had no idea they were doing—usually cocaine.
    But she didn't suppose that was what Doug was talking about. "Such as?"
    "Such as filming a different script."
    "What?" Jill sat up, caution gone. Filming a different script? She couldn't have heard him right. "That's not possible."
    "Is it really? That's what I'm trying to find out, if this is possible."
    "If what's possible?" She stared at him. "The cast and crew filming one script while the studio thought they were doing another?" That was too strange to be true. She leaned back against the mounds of tropical-colored pillows, almost laughing, relieved that this was so ridiculous, that this wasn't anything she would have to deal with. "What script would they have been filming? King Lear?"
    "No, it was a script that Bix had written, but that the studio had turned down... or was sure to turn down. It was work that he really believed in, that he was determined to see filmed. So he decided—"
    "Wait a minute," she interrupted. "You're serious, aren't you? You believe this."
    Doug nodded.
    "Then start at the beginning."
    The beginning, he told her, was in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Bix had been captured at Kasserine Pass, and during this confinement his thoughts had turned homeward, to Virginia.
    "Bix was born in 1920," Doug said. "The Civil War still felt very close; he would have grown up on Civil War stories. People of his generation were always surprised when they found out that their parents weren't born until long after the war was over."
    So it was inevitable that his mind should turn to that war, and he endured captivity by creating characters and planning a story set in Civil-War Virginia.
    He escaped from the camp. An injury to his hand kept him from returning to combat. He was instead assigned to Army Signal Corps where he did chores for Frank Capra, who was making the Why We Fight series. This introduced him to the world of movies, and after the war he took a job as a writer at one of the studios.
    "He was first assigned to a number of low-budget horror films and then polished up the men's dialogue on bigger pictures," Doug said, "but nights and weekends he was always working on what really mattered to him, this Civil War story."
    When he finished the screenplay, he started showing it to friends. Apparently everyone who read it loved it, but nobody thought that the studio would touch it. It wasn't commercial enough.
    "You have to understand Bix. He escaped from the Germans because he was smart. He was crafty, that's probably a better word for it. He was Tom Sawyer. When he wanted something done, he got it done even if he had to go in through the back door, though a cellar window. He had a scheme for everything."
    The scheme he crafted for Weary Hearts was his most ambitious ever. He set aside his first script and wrote a second one, the treatment for which was later found in Cass's files. It was every war-movie cliché strung together, but it could be made cheaply—Bix had learned a lot from his work on the horror films—and so the studio decided to do it.
    "Now, I don't know the logistics of this," Doug said, "who he told and who he didn't. But some little group of them all agreed that they would actually film the first script, his 'secret' script. Apparently it was magnificent; everyone involved really believed in it. Bix had made sure that the characters' names and the settings were the same in both scripts so they could do it without the studio knowing."
    Jill could feel her head shaking, her long blond hair brushing her shoulder blades. This was not possible. Having the characters' names and the settings the same would hardly have been enough. In those days the studios exercised