LUDIC LOG

The first time around, they thought it would be unbeatable. "The Great War", we called it at the time -- we knew we had a hit on our hands even when we were cranking out last-minute revisions to the script at that little cafe in Sarajevo. And sure, it was great, but even as we were producing it, we thought, we could have made it greater. We could make the battles bigger, the stakes higher, the villains more villainous. Punch it up with a snappier soundtrack, bring in some really top-shelf special effects, pick up the pace a little, and end it with a bang. "The War to End All Wars" was what the press called it -- but they were wrong, as usual. The public demanded something bigger and better. So we gave it to them.

The second time, well, what can we say? You get this feeling when you've created a classic. Everything comes together just perfectly. Not to say that there were no surprises -- that's the thing about great art, is that you discover something new in it from unexpected directions every time. In the initial market research, we were about to tear our hair out over how poorly Mussolini tested; after all, we'd sunk a fortune into casting him. We knew Hitler was going to sell -- he was that good. But our costume designers, our screenwriter, our directors, they all thought we had a winner with Mussolini. He was supposed to be a foil for Hitler. So when he bottomed out, our hearts went with him -- but wouldn't you know it? Tojo, who was originally written as just a bit player, really struck a nerve with people. And from there it just mushroomed, no pun intended. The music, the style and the design, the characters, the setpieces, even the credits seemed to just hit every note right. "The Greatest Generation", that's what we came up with, and to be honest, I really fought against it -- it didn't seem to flow off the tongue -- but damned if it didn't catch on. We were all of us working at our absolute creative peak.

Which means, of course, that we were heading for a crash. That's the nature of the business. Our heads were so in the clouds about beating the sophomore slump and creating something for the ages that we never even considered what we could do for a follow-up. And, to be honest, success spoiled us a little. It's not like we didn't have any ideas -- we had deliberately played up Stalin in order to bring him back for a sequel. But, for some reason, the public didn't seem to have any kind of appetite for World War III. To this day, I don't think it's because they didn't want it. I mean, come on. All you have to do is look at the numbers we got for WWII to know that there was a demand. I think it was maybe in part the curse of rising expectations -- we had spoiled the audience so much with the second production that they were afraid that part 3 would inevitably be disappointing. As much as they loved to hate Stalin, and as much as we tried to prep them for the obligatory follow-up (Christ, our marketing department must have spent billions on PR for World War III even before we had a decent treatment), they just didn't seem to want to make the commitment.

Of course, you don't get very far in this business standing still. We had plenty of irons in the fire. We had the long-running Cold War series, which we didn't think would last after we lost Stalin, but by that time, people were tuning in just to see what would happen next; it ended up lasting a good fifty years, which is an eternity in the industry. And while I'll be the first to admit that Korea was a disaster -- which is too bad, because for a while, all the treatments we drew up for World War III involved the character of Mao Tse Tung pretty heavily -- we didn't let it get us down one bit. Now, I know there's lots of people who talk about Viet Nam like it was some kind of disaster, like it was Ishtar or Heaven's Gate or something. Well, let me tell you something: one lesson you learn in this game is that having a bunch of people hate your production is almost as good as having a bunch of people love it. After all, there's no such thing as bad publicity! And the fact that you're still talking about it almost 40 years later proves that it wasn't a total wash.

But no matter how solid a spin I try to put on it, the fact is, we were treading water. When the Cold War was cancelled, we all looked at each other and thought, well, maybe this is it. Maybe it's time to call it a day, pack it in, retire to the Hamptons and enjoy the fruits of our lifetime of hard work. We hadn't had a decent bad guy come out of the character development labs since Idi Amin (Castro had his partisans, but let's face facts -- he's strictly a guest-star type), and after all those years, we'd really never developed a good script for World War III. We didn't want it to be Godfather III all over again. It was late 2001 when we faced our real moment of decision: do we give it up and say 'it was good while it lasted', or do we risk it all on one last crapshoot, one last gamble that we can strike that chord with the public, that we can hit the nerve like we used to one more time?

That's when it hit me. Why bother trying to go forward when what we could do is take a step back? Why find a brand-new villain when there were plenty of bit players from the Cold War still hanging around, waiting for a bigger part with more speaking lines? As great as the previous blockbuster had been, it wasn't without its flaws: the bad guys were too much like us, we didn't really see anyone we cared about get hit, and (in a blunder I still regret today) the French were on our side. Besides, do you know how much money we make off the "Greatest Generation" nostalgia bullshit? I'm not one to put our fans down, God bless 'em, but some of those fuckers would give their right nut if you told them they could go have their faces blown off at Angio. They didn't want to move on with the story; they just wanted a new cast of characters that could be plugged into the old formula. They didn't want a new war -- they wanted a sequel to the old war.

All these years, we'd been trying to make World War III, when what we really needed to do was make World War II II.