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The director's account of how Metropolis came into existence—his aweinspired brainstorm after gazing on New York City from the deck of the Deutschland ("his first premonition of a city of the future," in Frederick Ott's words)—was one of those anecdotes Lang didn't mind repeating, with minor variations, in interview after interview. But it couldn't have happened quite that way. Erich Pommer was already telling people about this next Fritz Lang project during the final days of filming Die Nibelungen, months before the American trip. Erich Kettelhut said he first read a version of the Metropolis script at Hohenzollerndamm right after the premiere. "What [Lang and von Harbou] wanted could only be carried out on a utopian-scale budget," he recalled. "It took me a long time to read the screenplay." Further proof that Lang's version of the genesis of Metropolis was simply one of his carefully cultivated myths comes in a May 1924 report of the director 's publicity jaunt to Vienna. Accompanied by Thea von Harbou, Lang visited the city of his birth as a guest speaker at a conference on the cinema, as well as to promote the Austrian premiere of Die Nibelungen. A reception was held at the Hotel Osterreichischer Hof, where the people who gathered in the director's honor urged him, among other things, to make a film commemorating Vienna. This was not, however, a trip soaked in the romance of nostalgia. Lang was still litigating over his mother's will, and the conference organizers annoyed him with their patronizing and censorious attitude toward the cinematic medium . He wrote a letter afterward denouncing "the pure hatred of these ladies and gentlemen for film and the film industry," and then assigned his speaker's fee to a society for war-blinded veterans. Some fortuitous encounters brightened his stay. A Viennese actress brought her fourteen-year-old daughter to meet Lang. Lien Deyers was half-Dutch, a blossoming young girl, like Lil Dagover, "very beautiful and very blond," with "an interesting face." Having practiced a few German phrases, Deyers walked up to the film director, stuck out her hand and asked, "Don't you want to discover me for one of your films?" "A calm stern glance through his monocle," recalled Deyers, "and Fritz C H A P T E R 6 1925 1927 I 925 - 1 9 2 7 109 Lang wrote on the paper I gave to him, 'Come to Berlin.' " Several weeks later Deyers arrived there with her mother, was granted a screen test, and assured of a role in some future Fritz Lang production. Also importantly, Vienna in May of 1924 is where the director made the acquaintance of Gerda Maurus, another blue-eyed blonde, from the suburb of Breitenfurt. Her father was an engineer and inventor, and like Lang she had been raised a Catholic. Maurus had started acting when she was fifteen years old, and had built a reputation in Vienna as a stylish presence in cabarets, plays, and operettas. Lang couldn't help but notice the sensuous twenty-one-year-old beauty when he made the rounds of Vienna's theaters, as he usually did on such homecomings . "She handled a small part very well," recalled the director. "I was impressed by the fact that she had worked out every facet of her characterization —even down to a hole in her stocking." Her ethnic background was Croatian. "Gerda Maurus had an indescribably beautiful face," in the words of Curt Riess, "an almost classically beautiful face, but note the 'almost.' She had very high cheekbones, eyes set wide apart. This gave her face something foreign, something strange, something tremendously riveting and exciting." Everybody except Gerda Maurus wondered whether the famous director sitting in the front row of the Kammerspiele would pay a backstage visit. Maurus herself had no burning ambition to appear in motion pictures. As it happened, though, Lang did not materialize; he arrowed one of his complimentary notes backstage, urging the actress to come to Berlin for a screen test. The theater manager insisted she was vital to the Vienna stage scene, and her note back to Lang ("I am indispensable here") made an impression. Maurus was encouraged to stay in touch. The Vienna newspapers covered the native son's every movement. Most interesting of all, a July 4, 1924, item in the Austrian newspaper Hlustriertes Wiener Extrablatt noted that after leaving the city Lang and von Harbou were embarking on their...

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