I've wanted to tell this story for a long, long time. It has many fascinating aspects to it, the never-solved mystery of just what happened, the setting and time period (hometown America during World War II), and the excesses of the Chicago press coverage.

I began looking up and reading everything I could find on the subject. Looking up old Chicago newspapers, and even, on a trip through the midwest, taking a detour to Mattoon, a very trusting small town. I wanted to look at the back issues of the Mattoon Journal and stopped in at the office and asked if I could. They said they had back issues on microfilm, but no microfilm reader, but the library down the street had a reader. They handed me the microfilm reels and let me walk off with them. Naturally, I went to the library and read the microfilm (their reader did not have a printer attached, so I had to take notes) and returned the microfilm to the newspaper office.

I began to construct a story based on a returning GI from Mattoon, trying to string events together that would include the Phantom, the "deranged chemistry student," a female reporter who teams up with the GI. But, the "accepted" answer of mass hysteria did not work -- an unsatisfying climax unequal to the GI/Reporter duo.

I began to think of the Gas as a character in itself, separate from the Phantom; it was the Gas as an incarnation of Evil. The more I worked on this, it seemed too melodramatic, fantastic, even operatic. So I revised the story, adding a European prologue and a climactic fight between the GI and the Gas at the Atlas Diesel Works. Wow.

But, of course, it still didn't capture the true story or the human drama.

About this time, a new technology was being introduced -- the DVD. And, when it was first introduced, a lot of the hype about it was the ability to switch scenes or angles while you were watching the movie. You could, during a scene of a movie, press a button and see the same scene from another angle, or an alternate take of the scene. This ability to show alternate takes or parallel tracks of a movie fascinated me. I thought that you couldn't really tell the story of Mattoon within the frame work of one movie, so why not three movies, that would be constructed in parallel so you could switch from one film to another and still get the gist of the story.

The three movies would be a noir movie, a Big Hollywood film and a more "character-driven" drama.

More to come, later.