Part 15 (1/2)

One of the offices became mine and another Sidell's. Since Calloway was so well known, we were trying to keep his involvement a secret.

At that point, Sidell asked if it would be okay to bring in his wife, Andi, to act as production secretary. I told him yes, but that they couldn't tell anybody about what they were doing, not even their kids.

Later that night, Sidell asked his wife to take a walk with him outside their house and filled her in on what we had been doing. He told me later how she'd gone almost comatose just taking it all in. And as if that wasn't shocking enough for her, he told her, ”Oh, and by the way, congratulations-you now have a new job. You're going to be the production secretary. You start work on Monday.”

On Sunday, we reconvened back at Calloway's house. Now that we had our production company up and running, we needed a script. We began by asking ourselves what kind of production would travel to Iran. Because Star Wars had recently been such a huge success (and was filmed in Tunisia), we immediately thought the genre would be perfect for us. Scifi stories often incorporated mythological elements and it would be a bonus if we could find something with a Middle Eastern flavor to it. It was then that Calloway told me about a script he'd been pitched several months back. Based on Roger Zelazny's science fiction novel Lord of Light, the project had eventually fallen through when a member of the production team was arrested for embezzlement, but not before initial preproduction had begun. Even better, the producers had hired Jack Kirby, a famous comic book artist, to do concept drawings. At some point, the producer had envisioned a theme park connected to the project called Science Fiction Land, complete with a ”Thunder Chariot-Launching Complex,” ”Jet Tube Transporter,” even a three-hundred-foot-tall Ferris wheel, all of it set against the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

Calloway still had the script and the concept drawings, so he went to get them.

”Brahma's Pavilions of Joy,” I read as I examined an artist's sketch of a road flanked by thousand-foot statues. In another sketch, a man wore robotic-looking ”electronic battle armor” and a ma.s.sive helmet with six horns. ”What's it about?” I asked.

”Who knows!” he said. ”Some s.p.a.ce opera set on a colonized planet where men become Hindu G.o.ds or something like that.”

I flipped open the script and read at random: ”...Vishnu the Preserver and Yama-Dharma, Lord of Death, have covered the whole of Heaven...with what is said to be an impenetrable dome.”

”This is perfect,” I said. ”The Iranians won't be able to understand this stuff.” I was thinking that, for operational purposes, the more confusing the better. If someone were to stop us, then it would be easy for us to overwhelm them with confusing conceptual jargon. In addition, I could add the sketches along with the script to the portfolio, which would give our production another layer of authenticity.

Tehran had a famous underground bazaar that even matched one of the locations in the script, which would give us something to pitch to Iran's Ministry of National Guidance, if it ever came to that.

”What are we going to call it?” I asked. We all agreed that we needed something catchy from Eastern culture or mythology. After several tries, we hit on it.

”Let's call it Argo,” Calloway said with a wry smile. He then went on to explain how ”Argo” also had major mythological connotations. ”It's the name of the s.h.i.+p that Jason and the Argonauts sailed in to rescue the Golden Fleece.”

”That sounds just like our operation,” I said.

At that point I grabbed a yellow legal pad and sketched out a logo for our film. Sidell and Calloway recommended that we place an ad in the trades. Since Hollywood is an industry that thrives on image, it would be a good idea, they said, to toot our own horn to create a bit of recognition for the project. If the industry knew it was going to happen, then that meant it was going to happen. Calloway had some of the trades lying around, so I quickly flipped through a few of them to see the kinds of ads they ran. The more dramatic and eye-catching, I realized, the better. In the end I settled on a full black page to signify the blackness of outer s.p.a.ce, in the center of which a planet was exploding as a group of asteroids, shaped in the letters ARGO, were hurtling toward it. In thinking about a way we could pump up our film even more, I came up with the tagline ”A Cosmic Conflagration,” which had a kind of genteel shabbiness to it. When I was finished, the ad read

ROBERT SIDELL AND a.s.sOCIATES

PRESENT

A STUDIO SIX PRODUCTION

ARGO

A COSMIC CONFLAGRATION

FROM A STORY BY TERESA HARRIS

COMMENCING PRINc.i.p.aL PHOTOGRAPHY

MARCH 1980

The following day, Calloway and I went down to the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety to place the full-page ad, which was scheduled to run on Wednesday, January 16.

While this was going on, Sidell went out to get us some props, heading to an industry-backed retail establishment that provided various tools and equipment for the motion picture industry. There, Sidell picked up a shooting schedule board with the daybyday divisions to make it look like the production board for the film, as well as a viewfinder for the cameraman to wear around his neck.