IN WHICH THE FIRST-FLOOR-FRONT UNFOLDS AND SOME OF THE SECRETS OF A
REMARKABLE INDUSTRY ARE LAID BARE
Mr. Lacey has now introduced me to Mr. Furley, with whom he divides
the first floor, and whom we hear moving restlessly about overhead at
all hours. On my mentioning this habit to him he said that he always
walked when he was inventing. Asked what he was inventing, he said
film stories. For Mr. Furley not only makes pictures of real events,
which is the staple of his odd business, but devises dramas too. He
has bought an estate near London, in Essex, where walled gardens with
fine trees in them are so plentiful and cheap, and here he has
erected a huge crystal palace for indoor photography as well as
having natural surroundings for open-air episodes. Here, too, he has
formed a stock company of actors and actresses to perform his plays.
Mr. Furley sent a message in one fine morning to say that he had a
drama in the making that day, and would I like to see it. I said I
would, and we were soon dashing off to his suburb in his motor-car.
We turned into the gateway of his estate, and there among the trees
was a Red Indian encampment with a number of tethered horses--only a
few yards from a busy High Street with electric trams in it. Cowboys
on ponies waited near by, and an excited manager was shouting through
a megaphone while the camera clicked off its myriad impressions. The
whole effect was strangely bizarre, and I must admit it struck me as
desperately silly. At least it seemed desperately silly that in a
few days' time thousands of my countrymen all over England, and
later, thousands of people all over the rest of the world, were going
to pay to have their feelings worked up by such cynically
manufactured heroics.
"I had no idea," I said, "that these cowboy dramas were made in
England."
"Bless your heart, why not?" said Mr. Furley. "Nearly everything can
be done in England. A background of trees in Essex is enough like a
background of trees in Texas to satisfy most people. It's the
movement and the humanity that they look at; they don't criticize.
As a matter of fact, the cinema won't let them--it's too hypnotic.
It lulls you."
The cowboys having done their scene, a cardboard room was quickly
erected and the unhappy heroine sat in it to receive a visit from a
drunken lover whom she was to reclaim from whisky. There were but
three walls, and the two side ones were set at an obtuse angle to the
back.
"You wouldn't think when you see these things on the screen," said
Mr. Furley, "that the fourth wall is the world itself, with the
camera in the midst. We build up the three walls in the open air for
the most part, and keep the actors in focus by means of those long
strips of wood on the ground, over which they mustn't step. When
they are ready we take them, but they have been rehearsing a long
time. Some words, you notice, are being spoken or the time would be
wrong and the actions wouldn't fit; we don't ask them to learn
anything by heart, but merely get the sense. No actor need ever
retire into private life any more because his memory or voice has
gone: the cinema will employ him.
"There's nothing you can't do with the cinema," he said. "For
instance, suppose I want to show you run over by a steam-roller. I
could do it so thoroughly as to make your wife shriek. First of all,
I place you here and then the roller advances on you. I take
photographs until the roller touches you. Then I stop the camera,
lay on the floor a dummy figure, and take the roller advancing over
that. I stop the camera again and place on the floor a brown-paper
shape like a pressed-out man and I take the roller just passing off
that. Then a lot of people crowd in, and I stop it while you take
your place on the ground in the middle of them, and then I turn the
wheel again and we see you restored to life. When the picture is
exhibited it runs straight on as if there had been no breaks at all;
but the breaks do it. It's the art of leaving out. The camera's
good for anything; it's the new ideas that we want.
"Another thing we want is English actors and actresses with a sense
of gesture. The idiots, they stand there and deliver their speeches
as if they were posts, and how do you suppose that comes out on the
film? The result is that we have to get foreigners for all the best
plays--Italians first of all--because they move their hands while
they are speaking and convey their meaning. Our own actors can do
certain things all right, but not the best emotional things, and the
result is I'm now writing a series of purely English plays where only
English stolidity is needed. Then they'll be at home."
Mr. Furley showed me how some of the trick films are made. For
example, one in which a box of bricks opened automatically, the
bricks came out and built themselves into a house, and then unbuilt
themselves and returned to the box.
"It's on the single picture principle," he said. "One picture at a
time and then they're reeled off as if they were taken continuously,
like views of the opening of Parliament and so forth. Suppose this
is the box of bricks and you want that brick to come out of it by
itself and stand itself on end. You take a piece of thread so fine
as to be invisible and fasten it to the brick. Then you lift the
brick an infinitesimal way and that is photographed; a little more,
and another photograph; a little more, and another; and so on.
Perhaps before that brick is on end sixty separate pictures have had
to be made, and so on with the others. The film may take five
minutes to exhibit; and it has required two weeks of ten-hour days to
make.
"Historical scenes are still popular in some places," he said. "But
you have to be careful how you do them. The public doesn't want them
exact, but exact in the way it has always thought of them. For
instance, I wanted to do an execution of Mary Queen of Scots, so I
went to the British Museum to see contemporary pictures. But do you
think I could use them? Not a bit of it. The public, accustomed to
think of Mary as they have seen her in so many modern paintings,
wouldn't have stood it. So I went to the modern painters instead and
got some good ideas. But it isn't the real thing. Executions are
always popular. The women like it. And a sad story--Jane Shore, Amy
Robsart, the Princes in the Tower, Charles the First--you can't go
wrong with those.
"But as a matter of fact, I hold that whatever you give the public
now will do, because they've got the cinema habit. The films change
every Monday and Thursday in most halls. Well, every Monday and
every Thursday you see the same people roll up. If it's a good set,
they tell their friends it's good and perhaps come again themselves.
If it's a bad set they say nothing but hope for better luck next
time. The one thing they can't do is to stay away. The cinema's got
them."
As I looked over this strange place and heard Mr. Furley's
explanations, ideas as to the further possibilities of the cinema
crowded into my mind. Its educational advantages, for example, are
remarkable, and a day will certainly come when most schools will have
a machine for exhibiting films. The most delicate physiological
processes can be recorded: the evolution of the butterfly from the
egg; the hatching of chickens; and so forth--all making a biology
lesson as fascinating as a romance. Every science can in fact be
humanized by this invention, and school children actually see the
world in the act of growing. My own particular hobby just now,
too--folk dancing--how easily the cinema could help that, by
reproducing the steps and movements so exactly as to make teachers
almost unnecessary.
Geography again--how vastly more entertaining a lesson would be if
the scholar was taken for a short trip through the country that was
under examination. London in the early days of the cinema had
several halls where only scenery was shown; and they were very
popular. To-day the taste has declined and everyone wants melodrama.
But those old topographical films are not lost and they would be
priceless for quickening the imagination of the young at school.
I made some of these suggestions to Mr. Furley, but he was not
enthusiastic. He is a serious man with taste, but he does not let
that interfere with his business. "In our trade," he said, "you must
give the public what they want. People like you come to me and say,
'Why don't you raise the tone of the films and make them more
instructive?' But I want to retire, and in order to do that I must
make money. I used to have a notion once that I would be ahead of
the time, but I've given that up. The fact is, the cinema managers
who buy my films won't let me. They decide what the public want, or
the public want what they decide: I'm not sure which it is, but
whichever it is, there's no chance for much that isn't vulgar. After
the real events, and now and then a landscape film, everything has to
be either passionate or comic.'
"Well," I said, "the time must surely come, and soon, when the cinema
will begin to need brains. All this sham stuff will fatigue and the
real thing will have a chance. If you take my advice you will try to
be in the van. As it is, I feel sure that London could stand one
hall at any rate where something better was given. There are such
possibilities. Satire, for example, never had such an ally. Think
how deadly at political meetings could a film be which depicted the
rival candidate in ridiculous situations! Think of what Socialism
might gain from a series of views of the stately homes of England and
their idle plutocratic owners at play! Think of the way in which the
cinema could fortify and supplement the work of the illustrated
papers! No, you are only just beginning, and it is absurd for you to
talk of retiring yet. For every ten camera films you make, to
satisfy the stupid public, you ought to make one good one for your
conscience's sake."
But Mr. Furley only laughed. "You don't know the ignorant buyers I
have to deal with," he said.
"Then open theatres of your own," I urged.
"Not for anything," he replied. "No, I want to get out of it all.
It's getting on my nerves. I can't sleep. My eyes have turned into
lenses and my brain into a camera, and I see everything like that.
Nothing but farming will do me any good, and I want to get to my farm
as soon as I can and stop there. When I'm talking to people--as it
might be you now--I find myself all ready to swear at them for not
being more animated. I search the papers for the death of kings,
because there's nothing so popular as royal funerals. I'm a lost
soul."
No one who has not gone into the matter has any notion of what an
industry has sprung up around the cinema. There is first of all the
photographer, who must be supplied with materials, not the least of
which is, annually, many miles of celluloid film. This film has to
be made, and factories came into being to do nothing but make it.
Passing over the other photographic accessories, we come to the
buildings, where the dramas are enacted, the actors who perform, the
costumes, horses, motor-cars, and scenery which they require, and the
managers who rehearse them--often day after day for hours before the
few minutes occupied by the final photography. Then the development
and reproduction of the film, its sale to various syndicates that
control the cinema shows of the world, and its exhibition in the
theatres themselves, all day long, for three days only, in each, for
the delectation of the thousands of spectators. And the whole thing
isn't more than fourteen years old.
I made some remark to this effect.
"Oh," said Mr. Furley, "the cinema industry's nothing here compared
with America. There they take it seriously. Expensive actors and
actresses are retained, large tracts of country are rented, and the
activity is prodigious. In Italy and France too they pay immense
salaries to their funny men and huge fees to dramatists to devise
scenarios. Here we pay next to nothing, and if possible nothing at
all. One can get all the plots we want out of our heads or old
novelettes. I have a man always at work reading old novelettes for
plots."
England, my England!