June 1925
First, the freighter is called the Corvallis.
She is one of more than 2,000 wooden cargo ships commissioned by the U.S. government to supply the American armed forces that unexpectedly find themselves fighting on the European continent, in what comes to be known—during an interlude of innocence—as the Great War.
And just as unexpectedly, the Great War ends. The wooden vessels, already obsolete, are no longer needed. A newly elected President Harding, none too creative and none too steady on his political feet, has to find a way to unload an expensive fleet nobody wants without destroying the domestic ship-building industry.
The 4,000-ton Corvallis, commissioned seven years earlier for $800,000, can now be purchased from the government for next to nothing.
A twist of fate: the First National studio has a script it wants to film, The Halfway Girl, which ends with a dramatic explosion aboard a vessel at sea. Of course, the disaster could be faked with miniatures. But the accountants have calculated that buying a government-surplus ship and blowing it up—for a total of something like $120,000—will actually save First National something like $25,000.
So the Corvallis, doomed by accountants in Astoria, is purchased by the studio and renamed the Mandalay.
On the night of June 15, crews board the Mandalay at a remote pier in New York harbor and burden her with eight tons of dynamite, two tons of black powder—to ensure a dramatic smoke cloud—and sixty mattresses soaked with a thousand gallons of gasoline. A violent electrical storm blows in suddenly from the west, and the crews still working aboard the ship hunker down and recite their prayers. Mercifully the floating powder keg at the pier doesn’t draw down any lightning bolts. The storm passes.
The next morning, four ocean-going tugs tow the Mandalay past Sandy Hook to its appointment with destiny. The seas are rough, again putting the vessel in premature peril. As the ship pitches and yaws, sticks of dynamite break loose and skitter across the deck: lethal little rolling pins. And now iron casks of gunpowder start breaking free below deck, rolling and tumbling, clanking boisterously as they bounce from one bulkhead to another. The skeleton crews aboard the Mandalay and its shepherding tugs understand that sound—coming up from below decks, seeming to increase by the minute—and once again they hold their breath.
At 2:00 p.m., the imperiled flotilla arrives at the agreed-upon destination and the tugs drop their anchors. The crew begins making final preparations for the (hopefully) dramatic death of the Mandalay. But now, out of nowhere, a Coast Guard cutter arrives and orders the convoy to steam another four hours eastward to ensure that transatlantic shipping lanes won’t be obstructed by debris. With precious afternoon light waning, the tugs and their derelict charge take off again. Because the Mandalay’s boilers are now inoperative—they were shut down for the final time at the scheduled demolition site—the leaky vessel has no power to run its pumps. It rides lower and lower in the water.
By 7:00 p.m., the fast-failing ship finally reaches a location that satisfies the Coast Guard. There is barely enough daylight left. The tugs back away and take up their new roles as floating camera platforms. On the crew chief’s signal, fuses are lit. Switches are thrown. Multiple cameras begin rolling.