  We present optical and IR spectroscopy of the first two months of evolution
of the Type II SN 1999em. We combine these data with high-quality optical/IR
photometry beginning only three days after shock breakout, in order to study
the performance of the ``Expanding Photosphere Method'' (EPM) in the
determination of distances. With this purpose we develop a technique to measure
accurate photospheric velocities by cross-correlating observed and model
spectra. The application of this technique to SN 1999em shows that we can reach
an average uncertainty of 11% in velocity from an individual spectrum. Our
analysis shows that EPM is quite robust to the effects of dust. In particular,
the distances derived from the VI filters change by only 7% when the adopted
visual extinction in the host galaxy is varied by 0.45 mag. The superb time
sampling of the BVIZJHK light-curves of SN 1999em permits us to study the
internal consistency of EPM and test the dilution factors computed from
atmosphere models for Type II plateau supernovae. We find that, in the first
week since explosion, the EPM distances are up to 50% lower than the average,
possibly due the presence of circumstellar material. Over the following 65
days, on the other hand, our tests lend strong credence to the atmosphere
models, and confirm previous claims that EPM can produce consistent distances
without having to craft specific models to each supernova. This is particularly
true for the VI filters which yield distances with an internal consistency of
4%. From the whole set of BVIZJHK photometry, we obtain an average distance of
7.5+/-0.5 Mpc, where the quoted uncertainty (7%) is a conservative estimate of
the internal precision of the method obtained from the analysis of the first 70
days of the supernova evolution.
