The date was December 9, 1968 and while the rest of the world was looking toward the moon or the war in Vietnam.
A group of people had gathered for what would later be called 'The Mother of All Demos.'
Duke sat in the darkened auditorium, feeling a strange sense of displacement.
He wasn't surrounded by actors, executives or studio heads.
Instead, the room was filled with men in short-sleeved white shirts and messy hair.
On the massive screen at the front of the hall, Douglas Engelbart was doing the impossible.
He was demonstrating a mouse, hypertext, and collaborative editing.
Duke leaned back, his mind racing.
He remembered a documentary he'd seen about Xerox PARC and the "Pirates of Silicon Valley."
He knew exactly what he was looking at.
'I could maybe do this', Duke thought.
The temptation was a physical pull in his gut.
With his knowledge of the future, he could head down to Palo Alto, buy up the patents, and be the man who beat Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
He could be the architect of the digital age. He had the charisma to lead the engineers and the foresight to outmaneuver the venture capitalists.
He would dominate.
But then, he looked at the screen. He watched the flickering black-and-white interface, the clunky wires, and the sterile, mathematical precision of it all.
He realized he didn't want to do it. He was a person of narrative.
He loved the mess, the ego, the drama of the screen.
"Not this life," Duke whispered to himself.
He pulled out his small, leather-bound notebook. He wouldn't build the computers, but he wasn't a fool.
He quickly wrote down five names. Intel, Fairchild Semiconductor, AMD, Nvidia and Texas Instruments.
When he find these, he'd buy the stock, let the people do the heavy lifting, and use the dividends to fund his company.
As the demo broke for a small recess, Duke wandered toward the back of the hall, where a tall, gangly man with a electrifiyng energy was hovering near one of the display terminals.
He looked younger than the other engineers, less like a professor and more like a well dressed homeless guy.
Duke recognized him immediately, Nolan Bushnell. The future founder of Chuck-E-Cheese.
And Atari too.
"Incredible, isn't it?" Bushnell said, gesturing toward the stage as he noticed Duke. "But it's too serious. Engelbart is only thinking about productivity and retrieval of information. I wish DARPA invested on other stuff."
"And what's that stuff?" Duke asked, leaning against a table.
Bushnell grinned. "I mean people want to be entertained, man. These people want to give a man a screen and a control, and make him categorize information. But this could be used to create a sort of game."
Duke smiled. "You're thinking about Videogames, like Hamurabi."
Bushnell's eyes lit up. "Exactly! I've been thinking on things like that. There's this guy Ralph Baer that works for a defense contractor, Sanders Associates."
"He's got this Brown Box that hooks up to a television. He's already got a ping-pong game running on it. It's the future, man!"
Duke felt a little of his previous ambition come up again. This was a sort of middle ground.
It wasn't just cold computer, it was still entertainment. A new way to tell stories, a new way to capture the imagination.
"That would be a great idea for a company," Duke mused. "Would be amazing for every kid in America who's got a TV set."
"I'll be bigger than the movies," Bushnell said with the bravado of a true believer.
"I wouldn't go that far," Duke countered, "but it could be the perfect companion to it. Tell me... how much capital would it take to get a prototype into this type of machine? Something simple."
Bushnell blinked, taken aback. "I... I haven't run the full numbers. Maybe a few thousand for the first cabinet? Why? Are you an investor?"
Duke reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card, a simple, high-quality card that just said Duke and a phone number.
"Im something similar to an investor," Duke said. "Call me next week. We can talk about Baer, that Brown Box and how we could accomplish our goals."
Bushnell looked at the card, then at Duke. "What do you do, sir? I mean for a living."
"I make films," Duke said, turning to walk away already.
(Didn't want to make this part too long)
---
The end of a film production doesn't sound with a 'Cut'.
It happens with the sound of zippers and the sound of heavy equipment bags being closed,.
By mid-December, the red dust of Zion National Park had become a permanent part of Duke's wardrobe. It was in his boots and around some parts of his skin.
He stood on the edge of the clearing that had served as the base camp, watching the last of the Panavision crates being hoisted into the back of a truck.
Gary Kurtz stood beside him, looking like a man who had just survived a shipwreck. He was clutching a metal briefcase containing the final reels of the Bolivia sequence.
"It's all in there," Kurtz said, his voice raspy from the desert air. "Every frame. Steve's final charge, the freeze-frame, the whole work."
"You're taking it straight to the lab?" Duke asked.
"Straight to the lab in LA. Roy wants to start the assembly on Monday. He's already talking about a six-day-a-week schedule in the edit suite."
Kurtz looked at Duke, his eyes squinting against the low winter sun. "You coming? Roy is going to want you in the room when we start cutting."
Duke shook his head, a slow, deliberate movement. "No. Roy doesn't need a producer breathing down his neck. Besides, I have different things to do."
"Paramount?"
"Paramount," Duke confirmed. "Evans is sitting on a powder keg with Midnight Cowboy. If I don't go down there and calm him down, he might let the editors turn it into a bad film."
Kurtz nodded, extending a hand. "Good luck in there, Duke. I'll keep the cowboys in line."
Duke watched the dust cloud from Kurtz's Jeep disappear down the canyon road.
He felt a strange, hollow sensation in his chest, the post-set depression was finally hitting him.
For months, his life had been defined by the physical work, heat, horses, the smell of gunpowder, and the mood changes of McQueen, to have that change from one moment to the other, feels like emptiness.
He climbed into his own car and turned the key.
The drive from Utah to Los Angeles was calm, by the time Duke pulled through the Bronson Gate at Paramount Pictures, the temperature had dropped into a California winter..
The lot was decorated for Christmas. There were plastic reindeer on the lawn of the administration building and tinsel wrapped around the palm trees.
Yet the air still felt streesed. The year had sort of been a meat grinder, the assasination of MLK and RFK, the riots in Chicago, the Tet Offensive all had been widely shown on TV.
Everyone seemed to be waiting for the clock to run out on the 60s, hoping the 70s would be kinder.
Duke walked past a Soundstage, where a line of dancers in bright yellow costumes were rehearsing a number.
He headed for the administration building, his boots clicking on the pavement.
He wasn't wearing his desert gear anymore, he'd stopped at a hotel to change into a charcoal-grey suit and a crisp white shirt.
He was considering wheter to take a vacation to Italy to get some suits, in his past life, he went to Milan once and thrifted a lot of good clothes.(Real story btw)
When Duke entered Evan's office, the air was thick with the scent of expensive Cuban cigars.
Robert Evans wasn't pacing this time. He was sitting behind his massive desk, his chair swiveled toward the window, staring out at the lot. He didn't turn around when Duke entered.
"You're late," Evans said.
"Traffic's a bitch," Duke said, taking a seat in one of the leather armchairs. "I hear there were good audience response to the rough cut."
Evans swiveled his chair around, he looked exhausted.
"They loved the rough cut of Midnight Cowboy," Evans said. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk. "Of course, the press mildly criticize us."
(Before Reagan, the Media was called The Press)
He went silent for a moment, as if trying to find the words.
"Duke... I thought we were making a movie about a gay cowboy. I really thought the X rating was just a gimmick we would use to sell tickets to the perverts and the college kids."
Evans reached out and picked up a crystal paperweight, turning it over in his hands.
"I was wrong," he whispered. "It's a great movie, and audience seems to love it."
Duke leaned back, crossing his legs. "You saw the bus scene?"
"I saw Ratso die," Evans said, "Duke, let's hope this movie does well."
He looked at Duke for a moment.
"The executives in New York still want me to cut it. They saw the party sequence and they think we were promoting drug use and deviancy. But I told them to go to hell, they surprisingly backed off."
Duke smiled. This was the Evans he needed. The man who would go to the ring for a film.
"So, the X rating stays?" Duke asked.
"The X rating stays," Evans confirmed. "In fact, I'm leaning into it. I've already got my guys leaking stories to the LA Times and the Trades. We're positioning it as 'The Only Honest Movie.'"
Evans stood up and walked over to a sideboard, pouring two glasses of high-end scotch. He handed one to Duke.
"You gambled on this, Duke. You stood in this room when I was ready to fold, and you told me to hold my nerve. Why?"
"Because the audience wants a film like this, Bob," Duke said, taking a sip of the scotch. "People are tired of being lied to. They look at the news every night and they see the world falling apart."
Evans nodded, looking at his own reflection in the glass. "That kind of people's attitude is probably going to change things, isn't it?"
"Let's hope 1969 is a great year," Duke said. "Have you seen the footage from that biker movie Columbia is making? Easy Rider?"
Evans waved a hand dismissively. "Dennis Hopper is a maniac. He's going to end up in a ditch or a jail cell."
"Probably," Duke said.
They moved out onto the balcony, the cool December air a welcome relief from the heated office.
"So," Evans said, leaning his elbows on the railing. "The Western and Midnight Cowboy are wrapped. What's next for Ithaca?"
"I got no idea," Duke said. "I would love to make something like 2001: A Space Odyssey."
As he spoke, he looked up at the moon a pale, distant sliver in the sky.
Across the country, on Christmas Eve, three men were going to be the first humans to orbit the moon.
They would look back at the Earth and see a tiny, fragile blue rock hanging in the blackness. They would read from the Book of Genesis to all the people listening on the radio.
It would be a moment of peace in the middle of a year defined by war.
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Next chapter plot is already written but im working on it still