The humidity in New York felt heavy in the air, it didnt help that the heat made the trash on the sidewalks smell like fermentation.
Duke sat in the third row of the empty Circle in the Square Theatre on Bleecker Street. The house lights were down, leaving the stage washed in a single work light.
He rubbed his eyes. He had been seeing actors for two days now.
He had seen the Juilliard graduates who projected their voices to the back row. He had seen the commercial boys with their smiles and hollow eyes.
He had even seen a counter-culture rebel who tried to portray Desmond Doss as a stoned philosopher.
None of them were right.
"Next," Duke called out, his voice echoing.
The stage door opened, and a young man walked in.
He was twenty-six years old, but he looked younger. He was thin, almost gaunt, wearing a cheap, oversized suit that looked like it had been pulled from a Salvation Army bin.
He walked with a strange, nervous energy.
Robert De Niro.
Duke checked his notes, already realizing who it was, he had few credits. Brian De Palma liked him. He had done some work in Greetings. But to the world at large, he was q nobody.
"Mr. De Niro," Duke said. "Thank you for coming."
De Niro didn't smile. He nodded, a quick, jerky motion. He was holding the three pages of script Duke had sent out.
"Mr. Duke," De Niro said. He had a thick New York accent, but he was forcing it down. "I... I read the script. It's... it's something."
"You like it?"
"I don't know if I like it," De Niro said, looking at the floor, then darting his eyes up to the seats where Duke was. "It hurts to read it. It feels similar to Love Story in that sense."
Duke sat up straighter. That was the first interesting thing anyone had said all day.
"What do you mean by that?" Duke asked.
"Because it's emotional," De Niro said. "He's in a room full of men who want to kill him, but he just... he just takes it. He's not passive either. And his beliefs just feel so strong.".
"Show me the barracks," Duke said, his voice echoing off the empty velvet seats. "Your ribs are cracked from the beating you took last night. Your face is a mess. The Sergeant is standing over you, giving you the easy way out. He's telling you to give up and go home."
De Niro didn't answer. He simply nodded and closed his eyes.
For ten seconds, the theater fell into silence. Duke watched the young man's shoulders roll back, shedding the energy of the New York kid who had walked in minutes before.
He stood perfectly still. He didn't puff his chest out, nor did he shrink. He simply grounded himself, his weight shifting forward just enough to show he wasn't going anywhere.
Harrison stepped on the stage to collaborate with the performance. "This isn't good for anybody."
"Sure ain't what I joined up for." De Niro said.
Harrison put some tiredness on his tone as he said his lines. "It's not about what you joined up for. It's about the lives of every man in here. And yours, son. It's time to quit this. Finish getting dressed and I'll walk you down."
"I got extra guard duty today, and I'm on KP this morning, so..." De Niro whispered, his voice steady. "Can't..."
Silence followed, Harrison looked around and nodded twice before continuing. "All right, Doss."
He raised his voice and sounded more serious. "Private Doss, can you identify the men that beat you?"
"No, Sarge."
Harrison continued, "Are you saying that you don't know who attacked you?"
"I never said I was attacked, Sarge."
"Cut," Duke said softly, he was a little shocked at how good De Niro was at playing Doss.
De Niro blinked. The tension vanished from his body, and the nervous, fidgety actor returned. He wiped his hands on his trousers.
"Was that... was that okay?" De Niro asked, squinting into the dark. "I tried to keep my acting controlled."
Duke let out a breath. "Yeah, Bobby, it was great."
"I can do it different," De Niro offered quickly, sensing the silence. "I can give you more anger. I can—"
"No," Duke said. "Don't change a thing."
Duke climbed onto the stage. He looked at De Niro up close. The kid was starving himself for the role, his cheekbones were razor sharp.
"You're a good actor," Duke said.
De Niro looked down, embarrassed by the praise. "I went to a Seventh-day Adventist church in Queens. Sat in the back. Listened to how they pray and talked to some of them."
"Stay here," Duke ordered. "I have someone coming in. I want to see you with her."
Ten minutes later, the stage door opened again.
Katharine Ross walked in.
"Duke!" she called out, walking over to give him a hug. She smelled of vanilla. "You look tired."
"Just a little," Duke smiled. "Katharine, I want you to meet Robert."
Katharine turned to De Niro. She saw the cheap suit, the awkward posture. She didn't dismiss him.
She had worked with Hoffman, she knew that looks were deceiving.
"Hi, Robert," she said, extending a hand.
"Miss Ross. I... I saw The Graduate. You were... very great in that film."
"Thank you," she smiled.
"Alright," Duke said, stepping back. "Let's do the proposal. Desmond is going to war. He's scared, but he can't show it. Dorothy is scared, and she wants him to stay."
Duke sat on the edge of the stage, his legs dangling. "Action."
The transformation happened again. De Niro became Doss gentle, awkward, deeply sincere.
"I have to enlist," De Niro said, his voice cracking just a fraction. "I can't stay here while all of them go fight for me.."
Katharine responded instantly. She dropped the "movie star" persona and became the grounded, practical nurse.
"Yes, you can. You can stay here."
"Dorothy, I have to. I want to be a medic. I figure I'll be saving people, not k*lling them," De Niro said, touching his chest in an attemp to explain.
Duke watched them. He realized he had solved his problem.
"Cut," Duke said.
Katharine stepped back, wiping a genuine tear from her eye. She looked at Duke and nodded.
De Niro stood there, waiting for approval.
"Bobby," Duke said. "Go home. Eat a sandwich. I'll call you."
He took the flight back to California after he found his Doss.
He arrived and a car was already waiting to take him to Santa Clara.
The Atari facility had changed in the weeks Duke had been gone. It was no longer a quiet workshop. It was a real factory.
Duke walked through the lines. The Pong cabinets rebranded now as the Atari Pong for the commercial release stood in rows.
They were sleek, yellow and black, with the instructions printed clearly on the front, AVOID MISSING BALL FOR HIGH SCORE.
He found Nolan Bushnell and Ralph Baer in the glass-walled office overlooking the floor.
The mood was tense.
Nolan was pacing, his tie loosened, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
Ralph was sitting calmly at the table, reviewing a schematic.
"Duke!" Nolan shouted, throwing his hands up. "Tell him! Tell Ralph that he's living in the Stone Age!"
"Hello to you too, Nolan," Duke said, dropping his bag. "So what's the crisis?"
"It's not a crisis," Ralph said calmly, his German accent slipping out for a moment. "It is a disagreement on fundamental strategy."
"A distributor from Chicago called," Nolan said, leaning over the table. "Bally Manufacturing, the same guys selling us the coin slots."
"They want five hundred units. They want to put them in every arcade from Detroit to St. Louis."
"That's good news," Duke said.
"It is," Nolan agreed. "But they want to buy them. They want to pay us $900 a unit cash. That's nearly half a million dollars, Duke! We can expand the line. We can build a second factory."
"And I say no," Ralph said, not looking up from his papers.
"Why?" Duke asked, pouring himself a coffee from the pot in the corner.
"Because if we sell them the machine," Ralph said, removing his glasses, "we sell them the business. Once they own the box, they keep the quarters. We get a one-time fee."
Ralph stood up and walked to the whiteboard, where he had drawn a graph.
"The math is simple, Duke. A machine in a good location, a busy bar, a bowling alley pulls in $40-$50 a week. That is $2,000-$2400 a year. In two years, that machine generates around $4,000. If we sell it for $900, we are losing $3,000 per unit in the long run."
"But we need the cash now!" Nolan argued. "We can't wait two years for the quarters to trickle in! We have payroll. We have parts suppliers who want to be paid."
"If we don't scale up, someone else will. Magnavox is sniffing around. Nutting Associates is already trying to copy our arcades."
Duke looked at the two men.
It was the classic dilemma of the early arcade era.
The Operators, who owned the locations wanted to buy the machines. Meanwhile, the Manufacturers like Atari wanted to lease them to keep the recurring revenue.
In the original timeline, Atari sold the machines. They needed the cash flow to survive.
They flooded the market, made a fortune, but eventually lost control of the hardware as clones flooded in.
Duke walked to the window and looked down at the factory floor.
He saw the workers assembling the circuit boards. Those boards were primitive. No CPU. Just logic gates. Anyone with an oscilloscope and a soldering iron could tecnically reverse-engineer a Pong board.
"Ralph you are right about the revenue," Duke said slowly. "But Nolan is right about the threat."
Both men looked at him.
"If we lease them," Duke continued, turning back to the room, "we have to build a service network. We'll need trucks."
"We need guys with coin bags driving around to every dive bar in America collecting quarters. That's a logistics nightmare. After all, we aren't a vending machine company. We're a technology company."
"So we sell?" Nolan grinned.
"No," Duke said. "If we sell the board as it is, Midway will clone it. They'll buy five hundred from us, reverse engineer it, and build five thousand of their own. We'll be creating our own competition."
Duke sat down at the head of the table.
"We need a third way."
He looked at Ralph. "Ralph, how is the patent application coming?"
"Filed," Ralph said. "The concept of a 'manipulatable symbol on an electronic display' is ours. But patents take time to enforce. By the time the courts rule, the market could already be flooded."
This patent was one of his plans US Patent 3,728,480.
The patent that founded videogames, the patent that took atari to court and the patent that once made Japan Trade deparment complain to the US.
The patent described a system that could generate, display, and manipulate symbols (like dots or rectangles) on a standard television screen.
Before this patent, televisions were strictly "passive" devices meant for receiving broadcasts, Baer's patent turned them into "active" instruments.
"Exactly," Duke said. "So we don't just rely on the courts. We rely on the chip."
Duke pulled a notepad toward him. He began to sketch.
"We sell to Midway," Duke said to Nolan. "We take their half-million dollars."
Nolan pumped his fist. "Yes!"
"But," Duke raised a finger. "We use that money to start funding a custom chip. A proprietary chip. Right now, we're building these boards with off-the-shelf TTL components."
"Anyone can buy them. I want to move to a custom masked chip. We pot the essential circuits in epoxy. We make a black box inside the machine that nobody can copy."
Ralph nodded slowly. "That sounds... it's expensive. Very expensive."
"That's why we sell the first run," Duke said. "We sell the 'Model A' to Midway. Let them have it. Let them make their money. Meanwhile, we use that cash to build the 'Model B'—the one that can't be copied. The one that has color. And that one... that one we lease after we have enough patents and size to overwhelm companies."
Nolan frowned, processing the strategy. "So we sacrifice the first generation? We let them clone Pong?"
"We let them clone Pong," Duke corrected. "But when we release Space Race? They won't be able to touch us, we need time."
Duke looked at Nolan. "Take the deal with Midway. But tell them it's a limited license. And tell them the price is $1,100, not $900."
"They'll balk," Nolan said.
"They won't," Duke said. "Because the machines are earning $40 a week. They'll pay it."
Duke turned to Ralph. "Take the money. Hire the best silicon engineers you can find. Let's get a proprietary architecture by 1970."
Ralph smiled, a rare expression for the stoic engineer. "I like the strategy."
"Good," Duke said. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to make a phone call to New York."
Duke retreated to his private office in the corner of the warehouse. He closed the blinds.
He picked up the phone and dialed the number for Kurtz who was still in Manhattan.
"This is Duke," he said when the agent answered.
"Duke! I was expecting to hear from you. Did you... did you like the De Niro guy?"
"I want him," Duke said.
"For... for a supporting role? One of the privates? Or for-"
"No," Duke said. "For Doss. I want him for the lead."
There was a silence on the other end of the line. "Are you sure? He's... he's very green. Paramount probably wants a name."
"I'll handle Paramount," Duke said, "He plays the role correctly. That's what I need."
"And the girl?" the agent asked. "Katharine Ross?"
"Lock her in," Duke said.
"Okay," Kurtz said, "I'll... I'll call them."
"And one more thing," Duke added.
"Yes?"
"Tell De Niro to keep the suit. Tell him to wear it to the costume fitting."
Duke hung up the phone.
He leaned back in his chair. The factory hummed outside, a vibration that traveled through the floor.
___
Movie Recomendation: Caveat(2020)