The Empire Express

"Continuing with the idea of not looking at films but at something else, it’s a book called Empire Express , which is a history of the building of the Union Pacific Railroad. This book is just the best way of reading about the film industry – it’s like reading about it in a mirror. It’s about this massive project that took a humungous amount of money, which had been prised out of people with hype and with lies and with bribery and, above all, with spectacle. Of course there’s a great John Ford movie about building this railway anyway, but the book feels really cinematic, not just in the sense that it’s a great spectacle, but it’s like reading about cinema. These railway guys travelled around in fantastic state, they had huge egos and they were all like the Great Oz – little men who pretended to do magic and were therefore able to – and the railway goes all over the place to please people, just as films are always chasing the audience. It’s full of amazing scenes. There’s a fantastic one where they take people from the East out to the Midwest to try to persuade them to invest, and they do things like staging an Indian raid. They pay some Indians to raid the train to show that they can rebuff it, and they burn chunks of the prairie to produce a fantastic spectacle, and they have people round up massive herds of buffalo and bring them down to the railways. Exactly – they were making a movie to look at out of the train window. Trains and cinema are so closely intertwined: the very first story that we have of an audience reaction is of the Lumière Brothers’ film of the train arriving. Reading the history of railways is like reading a transmogrified version of the history of cinema, I think. I can’t remember the guy’s name but one of them had a sort of special Pullman car built for his meetings, and it was every bit as luxurious as those they had for the Tsar, and he would turn up in these little tiny towns like a maharajah and, of course, people did what he said. It’s a brilliant book."