I wrote the script of Julie in seventeen days. I updated it to the present but kept the essential simplicity of the story. Saint-Preux — sensitive, melancholy, heart driven — is tutor to the beautiful young blond Julie, who lives in an idyllic château. They fall in love. Julie and Saint-Preux independently confide in Julie’s friend Claire (sprightly, dark) and she makes sure that the two soon know of their mutual passion. Overwhelmed by their feelings, Julie yields herself to Saint-Preux. They make love. Then Julie is stricken with remorse and guilt. She recoils from Saint-Preux and, distraught, marries an old codger called Baron Wolmar (her father’s initial choice.) Saint-Preux, suicidal, heads for the fleshpots of Paris. In despair, he decides against taking his life when he receives a letter from Julie saying that even though she is married, Saint-Preux will always be close to her heart.
Wolmar — prudent, sagacious, a philosopher of the human spirit — who knows of Julie’s past relationship with her former tutor, invites him (Saint-Preux is on the verge of nervous collapse) to come and live in their household. It is a profound and tormenting trial, but somehow Julie and Saint-Preux remain virtuous. The Baron Wolmar announces he is going on a long journey and leaves the two behind. Julie and Saint-Preux suffer a terrible ordeal of temptation and frustration, but Julie does not succumb, she remains faithful. Then, tragically, she has a fatal accident. On her deathbed she informs Saint-Preux that she has always loved him. Cut to Saint-Preux’s stricken face. Julie dies. The end.
It was, I think, a good piece of work and the story was no more impossible than any other drama currently being made. Karl-Heinz loved it and it was he who suggested we take it to Realismus. I thought this was frankly a waste of time, but Karl-Heinz insisted there was some logic in his idea. He was currently filming Diary of a Prostitute; Realismus had a certain vested interest in his career and he had access to the head of the company, Duric Lodokian. I agreed to give it a try and he took the script of it with him.
Duric Lodokian was a hugely wealthy Armenian who had fled from his native country to Russia in 1896 shortly after the first Turkish massacres and pogroms against the Armenian people had begun. He had fled again in 1918 after the Russian Revolution and was among the first of the thousands of Russian émigrés who found sanctuary in Berlin. Lodokian had made his fortune in nuts. He described himself to me as a “nut importer.” He spoke Russian, German, French and passable English. He had sold many nuts to England, he said, but of only one type: Brazil nuts. Hundreds of tons of Brazil nuts. “What do they do with Brazil nuts?” he asked. I said I had no idea. I must say I find it hard to imagine a fortune founded on nuts, but this was Lodokian’s power base (“Every time I open a pistachio I am saying thank you,” he said to me once). The nut business sustained him through the few ups and many downs of his passion for films. Realismus Films Verlag AG was Duric Lodokian, and no film was made unless it conformed to the philosophy implicit in the name. His greatest success had been in 1920 with a movie about the horrors and dangers of venereal disease, called The Wages of Sin, and Unsparing Social Comment would, I think, have been a fair summary of the Lodokian and Realismus creed. True, it swam somewhat against the tide in the Berlin of the mid-twenties, but for every three flops there was a modest Realismus success that confirmed him in his principles, and he persevered. There was, in fact, a Realismus “school” notionally in opposition to the UFA films, the Expressionists, the Neue Sachlichkeit movement and all the other various artistic “isms” and groupings that flourished then. Two of Realismus’s regular directors were Werner Hitzig and Egon Gast. Lodokian had just persuaded the celebrated Swedish director A. E. Groth to join him and Diary of a Prostitute was the result.
Lodokian was a small, dapper brown man in his sixties. Brown as one of his nuts, I thought when I met him for the first time in the Realismus offices on the corner of the Französischestrasse and Friedrichstrasse. His face and hands were speckled with copious liver spots. He was smoking a Russian cigarette with a cardboard filter, the hand holding it trembling slightly. When he spoke it was through a kind of surf of wheezes and vascular gurglings, as if he were crippled with emphysema. There was a wheelchair and an oxygen cylinder behind his desk. He introduced me first to his son, Aram, who stood beside him. Aram was as small and neat as his father, my age, and running to fat. He had dark, slightly hooded eyes and a neat cleft in his chin. His plump cheeks gave a strange oblate look to his head. We shook hands and he smiled. It was a brilliant smile. Charm came off him like a perfume. He had the same immediate effect on me as Karl-Heinz had. Within seconds of meeting them both, you liked them and, more importantly, you wanted them to like you back. The only difference with Aram Lodokian was a slight side effect. A minute or so after yielding to the charm came a moment’s doubt as to the wisdom of so doing. Just a fleeting moment, then it passed. Although Karl-Heinz was in many ways utterly disreputable, this aftertaste never occurred.
I sat down.
“What do you know about my country?” Lodokian asked.
I decided on honesty. “Absolutely nothing.”
With enormous effort he got to his feet, shuffled laboriously to the window and beckoned me over. We looked down on the crowds in Friedrichstrasse.
“Do you think they know about the two million? Of course not.”
“Two million what?”
“The two million Armenians the Turks killed in 1915. The biggest genocide in the history of the world.”
I did not know what to say.
“Nobody wants to know the truth. That’s why I made these films.”
He clasped his mottled hands together and shook them at me in a curious gesture. He always did this to emphasize a point.
“Don’t turn your back on reality,” he said fiercely to me. “Don’t let people dream too much. Is dangerous.”
A line from some modern poem came into my head. “Human nature cannot stand too much reality,” I misquoted.
“It’s the only medicine,” he said. “The only medicine.”
I was wordless once more.
It took him two minutes to regain his seat, where he lit another cigarette.
“This is why I like your film,” he said, mystifyingly. “Very good philosophy, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Now this is Realismus. You talk to Aram, he will make the contracts.”
I felt an effervescence in my body — my blood turned to seltzer. I shook the old man’s hand and then Aram Lodokian showed me into another office. I think we talked vaguely of contracts. I remember Aram suggesting a fee of ten thousand dollars. He said they paid in dollars because of the last inflation. He smiled apologetically. I promised to acquire a lawyer that afternoon. He called for coffee and cake and offered me a Russian cigarette. His smiles and charm enfolded me like a shawl.
“Have you thought of a cast?” he asked, leaning over to light my cigarette. His English was perfect, accentless and somehow all the more foreign sounding because of that. He sat back and rubbed the knuckle of his forefinger up and down the cleft in his chin. It was a frequent gesture. I thought suddenly of it as a groove worn away by the constant motion.
“Well … Karl-Heinz Kornfeld for Saint-Preux.”
“Excellent! What about Monika Alt for Julie?”