THE WORLD THROUGH A CAMERA
There are two kinds of motion pictures.
One sort is the regular “feature,”—usually a six or seven reel
photoplay, the bulk of the evening’s entertainment—and the other kind
is illustrated by the “news reels.”
One kind tells stories. The other shows facts. “Robin Hood,” for
instance, tells a story. But the wonderful picture that showed the
great horse-race between Man-o’-War and Sir Barton was merely a series
of remarkable photographs of what actually happened.
There are of course many intermediate pictures and combinations, part
way between the two, as we shall see; but when you stop to think of it
all pictures fall under one or another of the two main classifications.
Either they are entertainment pure and simple, possibly with a
background of truth or philosophy or fact, or else they are reality,
presented as entertainment.
And here is an interesting thing: while the story side of
motion-picture making, that has developed to a great extent from stage
drama, has already reached very great heights, the other side of
picture-making, that we see illustrated in the news reels, is still
relatively in its babyhood. Scenics and news reels and an occasional
so-called “scientific” or instructive reel are about all we have so
far on this side of picture making, that will probably within our own
lifetime come to be far greater than the other.
The “reality” films have developed from straight photography. They
take the place of kodak snapshots, and stereopticon slides, and
illustrations in magazines, newspapers, and books.
Between the two, cameras have come already to circle the whole world.
Not long ago in a New York skyscraper given over mostly to
motion-picture offices and enterprises, three camera men met.
“Say, I’m glad to be back!” exclaimed one; “I’ve been down in the
Solomons for nearly a year. Australia before that, and all through the
South Seas. Got some wonderful pictures of head-hunters. They nearly
got _me_, once, when I struck an island where they were all stirred up
because some white man had killed a couple of them.”
“I’m just back from India, myself,” remarked the second, “Upper Ganges,
and all through there. Got a lot of great religious stuff.”
“You fellows have been seeing a lot of the world,” sighed the third,
“while I’ve been stuck right here solid for the last eighteen months.
Last eight months on a big French Revolution picture.”
Two of the men were globe-trotting “travelogue” photographers; the
third was a regular “studio” camera man; while the two had been
searching the world, to secure motion pictures of actual scenes, the
third had been taking pictures of carefully prepared “sets” that
faithfully reproduced—just outside New York City—streets and houses of
Paris as they were in the year 1794.
Let us take up first the kind of movies that we usually see to-day—the
photoplays made in Hollywood or New York or Paris or wherever the
studio may happen to be, that tell a story or show a dramatic
representation of life somewhere else.
Suppose a story of the Sahara Desert is to be filmed at Culver City,
California, where several different big studios are located.
Costumes are designed or hired, and actors and actresses are made up
and togged out to represent desert chieftains and wild desert beauties
and languid harem maidens and uncouth tribesmen. Horses are fitted out
with all the trappings of Arab steeds. Half a dozen rebellious camels
are hired from one of the big menageries that makes a specialty of
renting wild animals to film companies.
Then, sets are constructed to represent the interiors of buildings in
Tunis or Algiers, or some of the little cities of the desert. Possibly
a whole street is constructed—and it is only necessary to build the
fronts of the houses, of course, propped up from behind by braces and
scaffolding that do not show in the picture—to reproduce an alley of
some town near the North African Coast.
Finally, as the scenes of the story or “continuity” are filmed, one
after another, the company goes out “on location” to get the balance
of the exterior scenes. Perhaps the sand dunes of Manhattan Beach,
one of the small resorts near Los Angeles, not far from Culver City,
are used to represent the hummocks of the Sahara Desert. Perhaps a
part of the desolate bed of the San Gabriel River, where it leaves the
mountains twenty miles east of Los Angeles, is used to show a supposed
Sahara gulley. Or the company may travel to the Mohave Desert, or all
the way into Arizona, or some desolate portion of Old Mexico near the
border town of Tia Juana below San Diego, to get just a bit of the
real “Sahara” that they want. Maybe a desert tent is set up beneath
the palm-trees of a supposed oasis, that, by careful photographing,
looks like the real thing and gives no hint of the Los Angeles suburban
traffic officer at a busy crossing less than fifty yards away.
The result? Possibly a very good picture of the Sahara Desert, with
Americans playing the parts of Mohammedan tribesmen and pieces of
America representing Africa. But naturally there are many chances for
mistakes. The costumes may be wrong. The actors may not look the parts,
or act as the types they are supposed to represent really do. The dunes
behind Manhattan Beach, or the “Wash,” of the San Gabriel, may not
really look like the Sahara at all.
Recently a widely traveled oil man was telling me of an afternoon he
spent at a trading town on the East African coast, a thousand miles or
so north of the Cape.
“I was killing the day with an old trader,” he said. “We were to set
out into the interior the next morning, and had nothing to do but amuse
ourselves until we were ready to start. We saw the posters of a movie
that was being shown, that told a story of the very town where we were.
And say! When we went in, we certainly were amused, all right!
“It was an American film, made by one of the Hollywood companies.
The heroine was washed ashore from the wreck, and regained
consciousness just in time to see a tiger ready to spring at her
from under the palm-trees at the edge of the beach. But the hero was
Johnny-on-the-spot. He was tiger-hunting himself, and dropped the beast
with a single shot. He was wearing riding-breeches, and puttees, and a
pith helmet,—sort of a cross between a motion-picture director and a
polo player.”
“What was the matter with it?” I asked, “Everything?”
“Pretty much. First place, the beach along those parts isn’t anything
like what was shown in the picture. There aren’t any palm-trees within
a thousand miles. Tigers don’t grow in that part of the world, either.
Lions, yes. But tigers, no. You have to go clear to India to get tigers.
“But that hero’s outfit was the best. In the heat, there, he’d have
died in six hours, in that outfit. My friend the old trader and I were
wearing about all that anybody ever wears in those parts—ragged old
shirts, and “shorts”—like running pants, or B. V. D.’s—and keeping
out of the sun. If you do have to go around, in the heat of the day,
the one important thing is to wear some kind of a hat or cloth that
protects the back of your neck and saves you from sunstroke. But the
movie hero was sprinting around in the middle of the day with leather
legs and a cartridge belt that would weigh at least ten pounds. Say, we
had a great laugh!”
Not long ago I was asked to look at a film, made in Austria, that
told a story of love and intrigue among the American millionaires.
The hero’s father was supposed to be a railroad king who lived in New
York City, and the girl’s mother, who also lived in New York, was a
“railroad queen” at the head of a rival organization. Each morning the
lovers, the hero and the heroine, slipped away from their homes—that
looked more like the New York Public Library or the Pennsylvania
Station than anything else except an Austrian palace—and ran down
to the railroad yards. The boy stole a regular German engine from
his father’s round-house, and the girl got its twin sister from her
mother’s shop on the other side of the city, and they each climbed
aboard and ran them outside the city until they met, on the same track,
head on. Then the lovers got down and kissed each other on both
cheeks in true American fashion (Austrian interpretation) somewhere
near Hoboken, I suppose.
[Illustration: _Courtesy Universal Pictures Corporation._
GETTING THRILLS WITH A BALLOON.
Motion-picture camera men circle the globe, and companies go almost
any distance for a novel location or sensation. Note the carefully
assembled “properties” apparently carelessly strewn on the ground
beside the basket.]
[Illustration: _Courtesy W. W. Hodkinson Corporation._
AN OLD WHALING SHIP REFITTED TO MAKE A NEW MOVIE.
The _George W. Morgan_, nearly 100 years old, refitted and sent to
sea to make a whaling story called “Down to the Sea in Ships.”]
On the other hand, in contrast to these hurriedly made, inaccurate
pictures, made to make money for ignorant people by entertaining still
more ignorant people, are the really worth while historical films and
others made with painstaking care. Some of the great American directors
maintain entire departments for research work, that check up on the
accuracy of each detail before it goes into production, costumes are
verified, past or present, details of architecture are reproduced from
actual photographs, and even incidents of history and the appearance of
historic individuals are treated with scrupulous accuracy.
Valuable impressions of life in ancient Babylon could be gathered
from Griffith’s great picture “Intolerance.” While not necessarily
accurate in every detail, the wonderful Douglas Fairbanks films “Robin
Hood” and “The Three Musketeers” instruct as well as entertain. In
a magnificent series of historic spectacle films such as “Peter The
Great,” “Passion,” and “Deception,” the Germans have set a high-water
mark of film production that combines dramatic entertainment with
semi-historical setting.
It seems a pity after watching one of the really well-made historical
photoplays, to have to see a picture of the American Revolution so
carelessly made, in spite of its cost of nearly $200,000, that you
feel sorry for the poor British redcoats at the battle of Concord,
when the American minute men, outnumbering them about ten to one,
fire on them at close range from behind every stone wall and tree
or hummock big enough to conceal a rabbit. Why, according to that
particular director’s conception of the British retreat from Lexington,
the patriots might just as well have stepped out from behind their
protecting tree-trunks and put the entire English army out of its
misery by clubbing it to death in three minutes.
Leaving dramatic photoplays, then, let us turn to the other kind of
movie that shows what actually happens.
The news reels are the simplest form of this kind of movie. They
correspond to the headlines in the daily newspapers, or newspaper
illustrations. Indeed, a good many newspaper illustrations, nowadays,
are merely enlargements made from single exposures, or “clippings,”
from the news reels. You may yourself have noticed pictures in the
rotogravure sections of Sunday newspapers that show the same scenes you
have already seen in motion in the news reels during the week.
To get the news reel material camera men are stationed, like newspaper
correspondents, at various places all over the globe. Or, when some
important event is to occur at some far-away place, they are sent out
from the headquarters of the company, just as special correspondents
or reporters would be sent out by a big city newspaper, or newspaper
syndicate. Sometimes a camera man and reporter work together; usually,
however, each works separately, for newspapers and movies are still a
long way apart. If a new president is elected in China, a news-reel
camera man—Fox, or Pathé, or International, or some other, or maybe a
whole group of them—will be on hand to photograph the ceremonies. If
a new eruption is reported at Mount Etna, some donkey is liable to
get sore feet packing a heavy motion-picture camera and tripod up the
mountain while the ground is still hot, so that a news-reel camera
man—possibly risking his life to do it—may get views of the crater,
still belching fire and smoke and hot ashes and lava, for you to see on
the screen.
The news camera men, like city news reporters, have to work pretty
hard, not infrequently face many dangers, and get no very great pay.
The tremendous salaries and movie profits that you sometimes hear
about usually go to the studio companies, and not to these traveling
employees.
Recently I talked with a “free lance” camera man, who had just
completed a full circuit of the earth—England, Continental Europe,
Turkey, and Asia Minor, through the Suez Canal and down into India,
then Australia, New Zealand, Samoan Islands, and back to New York by
way of San Francisco. He had paid his way largely with contributions
to news reels, sold at a dollar or a dollar and a half a foot. The
last part of the way home he had worked his passage on a steamer. He
had borrowed enough money from a friend in San Francisco to get him
back to New York. He had about ten thousand feet—ten reels—of “travel”
pictures, for which he hoped to find a purchaser and make his fortune.
But he owed the laboratory that had developed his film for him a bill
of some three hundred dollars that he couldn’t pay, and was offering to
sell the results of his whole year’s work for fifteen hundred dollars.
And at that he couldn’t find a purchaser.
News reels and travel pictures, and beautiful “scenics” too, are only
the forerunners of much more ambitious efforts to come, that before
many more years have passed will be bringing the whole world before us
through the camera’s eye. Did you happen to see the marvelous record
of sinking ships made by a German camera man on one of the U-boats
during the ruthless submarine campaign of the Great War? Or the equally
remarkable series taken of the marine victims of the German cruiser
_Emden_? They show what the camera can do, when the movie subject is a
sufficiently striking one.
More than two years ago a camera man named Flaherty secured the backing
of a fur-exporting firm to make a trip with his camera to the Far
North. After laborious months of Arctic travel he returned to the
Canadian city whence he had started with some thousands of feet of
splendid negative. While it was being examined—so the story goes—a
dropped cigarette ash set it on fire. Celluloid burns almost like
gunpowder. The entire negative was destroyed in a few moments.
But Flaherty started out again, and returned once more with thousands
of feet of film depicting the Eskimos’ struggle for life against the
mighty forces of Nature in the frozen North. From this negative a
“Feature Film” was edited, called “Nanook of the North.” It showed
how the Eskimos build their snow huts or igloos, how an Eskimo waits
to spear a seal, and how he has to fight to get him even after the
successful thrust.
At first the big distributing companies that handle most of the films
that are rented by theater owners in this country didn’t want to handle
the picture because it was so different from the ordinary movie that
they didn’t think audiences would like it. But finally, after it had
been “tried out” successfully at one or two suburban theaters, the
Pathé Company decided to release it. Likely you’ve heard of it. It
has been a big success. It is now being shown all over the world. It
will probably bring in more than $300,000. Flaherty, as camera man,
director, and story-teller rolled into one, has been engaged by one of
the big photoplay producing companies at a princely salary to “do it
again.” This time, he has gone down into the South Seas, to bring back
a story of real life among the South Sea Islanders.
Quite a number of years back a man named Martin Johnson went across
Africa and secured some very remarkable pictures of wild animals.
These jungle reels were released by Universal, and proved such capital
entertainment that they brought in a fortune. Others followed Johnson’s
example, but for years no one was able to equal his success. As
Flaherty has done more recently, Johnson next went to the South Seas
and made another “Feature Film” of life upon the myriad islands that
dot the Southern Pacific Ocean. The film was fairly successful, but did
not begin to make the hit that had been scored by the animal reels.
“Hunting Big Game in Africa,” the next big “reality” film to make a
hit with American audiences—aside from short reel pictures and an
occasional story-scenic—“broke” on the New York market in 1923. It was
made by an expedition under H. A. Snow, from Oakland, California, and
represented some two years of work and travel, with a big expenditure
of money.
Snow’s experience in getting his picture before the public was not
unlike that of Flaherty. The motion-picture distributors and exhibitors
were so used to thinking in terms of the other kind of pictures, the
regular movies or photoplays that you can see nearly every night in
the week, that they were afraid people wouldn’t be interested in “just
animal stuff.” In spite of the success made by “Nanook of the North,”
and the Martin Johnson pictures before that, they were afraid to try
out pictures that were different from the usual run.
“Hunting Big Game in Africa” was more than ten reels long—two hours
of solid “animal stuff.” The Snow company finally decided to hire a
theater themselves and see what would happen when the picture was
presented to a New York audience.
You can imagine what the audience did. They “ate it up.” The picture
started off with views of the ship that was carrying the expedition
to South Africa. Then there were shots of porpoises and whales. And
thousands and thousands and thousands—they seemed like millions—of
“jackass penguins” on desolate islands near the South African coast.
Funny, stuffy little birds with black wings and white waistcoats, that
sat straight up on end like dumb-bells in dinner jackets—armies and
armies of them, a thousand times more interesting (for a change at
least) than seeing the lovely heroine rescued from the villain in the
nick of time, in the same old way that she was rescued last week and
the week before. And for that matter, two or ten years ago—or ever
since movie heroes were invented to rescue movie heroines from movie
villains when the movies first began.
From the penguins on, “Hunting Big Game in Africa” was certainly “sold”
to each audience that saw it. There were scenes that showed a Ford car
on the African desert, chasing real honest-to-goodness wild giraffes,
and knocking down a tired wart hog after he had been run ragged. Only
at the very end of the picture was there any particularly false note,
when a small herd of wild elephants, that appeared very obviously to be
running away from the camera, were labeled “charging” and “dangerous.”
Possibly they really were dangerous, but the effort to make them seem
still more terrible than they actually were fell flat. When you’re
telling the truth with the camera, you have to be mighty careful how
you slip in lies, or call out, “Let’s pretend!”
Then there came another Martin Johnson picture of animals in Africa,
possibly even better than the Snow film, and quite as successful. As
usual, Martin Johnson took his wife along, and the spectacle of seeing
a young woman calmly grinding away with the camera, or holding her own
with a rifle only a few yards away from charging elephants or rhinoceri
was thrill enough for any picture. At many of the scenes audiences
applauded enthusiastically—a sure sign of unqualified approval.
An interesting discovery that has come with the success of these
“photographic” pictures, that show what actually happens as pure
entertainment, so interesting that you don’t think of its being
instructive, is that ordinary dramatic movies can be made vastly more
interesting and worth while if a good “reality” element is introduced.
The Germans were on the trail of this when they had wit enough to
plan their historical pictures based on fact and actual historical
personages, that would appeal to people of almost any civilized nation
on the globe. So good was their example, that we have followed suit,
here in America, with “Orphans of the Storm,” and the big Douglas
Fairbanks pictures, and a whole lot more.
But now, we have gone a step farther, a step that adds to the danger
and difficulty in picture making, but that shows more and more the
wonderful possibilities of the screen.
Take “Down to the Sea in Ships.”
A writer named Pell who lived up near New Bedford, Massachusetts, where
the old whaling industry used to center, in the days before steam
whalers carried the business—or what there is left of it—to the Pacific
coast—had an idea. He wrote a story about a hero who turned sailor-man
and went to sea on a whaler, and harpooned a real whale.
They make some wonderful motion pictures in Hollywood, but they
don’t harpoon many whales there. When you’re a motion-picture actor,
harpooning a real whale is a good trick—if you can do it.
Pell took his story to Mr. D. W. Griffith, famous ever since “The Birth
of a Nation.” But Mr. Griffith didn’t have time to play with it, so he
turned it over to a director named Elmer Clifton, who decided that a
picture of a real whale would make a “real whale” of a picture. He got
a company together and went to work.
[Illustration: _Courtesy W. W. Hodkinson Corporation._
CAPSIZED BY A REAL WHALE.
Remarkable picture, taken during the cruise of the _George W.
Morgan_, of a whaling-boat attacked by a wounded whale. (See page
62.)]
[Illustration: _Courtesy W. W. Hodkinson Corporation._
AIDING NATURE BY A SKILFUL FAKE.
In the original of this picture the boat appeared much as in the
photograph above. Added dramatic value has been given by “retouching”
or painting in the imaginary flukes of the whale, as he _might_ have
raised them if he had been more accommodating. (See page 62.)]
[Illustration: _Courtesy W. W. Hodkinson Corporation._
REAL DANGER ON THE HIGH SEAS.
Imagine working to right an overturned whale boat in shark-infested
waters, with a dangerously wounded whale still cruising about in the
vicinity, just for the sake of a motion picture! (See page 62.)]
[Illustration: _Courtesy W. W. Hodkinson Corporation._
THE SECOND STEP TO SAFETY.
The hero of the picture again sitting in the righted boat. A
microscope will show the pains taken to secure realism in its film;
the actor actually became a sailor for months, with hair grown in the
fashion of sailing days. (See page 62.)]
They decided the first thing to do would be to get the whale. If
that part worked all right, they’d go ahead and make the rest of the
picture, if it didn’t—well, they could start over again and make some
other picture, of a cat or a dog or a trick horse that wouldn’t be so
hard to play with.
They held a convention of old sea-captains, who decided that Sand Bay
or some such place, in the West Indies, would be a likely spot for
whales. They fitted up an old vessel, the last of the real old whalers,
and sailed away.
Luck was with them. They struck a whole school of whales almost as soon
as they had dropped anchor at the point that had been selected.
Green hands at whaling, they started off with every whale-boat they
had, and cameras cranking. They tried to harpoon the first whale
they came to, I’m told,—and missed it. But luck was with them again,
decidedly. Missing the big whale, which happened to be a female, the
harpoon passed on and struck a calf on the far side of her, that the
amateur whalemen hadn’t even seen.
Ordinarily, they say, a school of whales will “sound” or dive and
scatter for themselves when one of their number is harpooned, but in
this case it was a calf that was struck, and its mother stuck by it,
and the rest of the school stuck by her, while the movie-whalers herded
them about almost like cattle. They got some wonderful pictures.
Later, they captured a big bull whale, and had an exciting time of it.
More pictures, and a smashed rowboat.
Then they returned to New Bedford and completed the photoplay.
As a “Feature Film” the final picture, “Down to the Sea in Ships” is
nothing to boast about, _except_ for the whales. Without the whaling
incidents, it is a more or less ordinary melodrama, beautifully
photographed, of the whaling days in old New Bedford. But the real
whales make the picture worth going a long way to see.
A Scandinavian film, released in this country by the Fox organization
under the name of “The Blizzard,” does the same thing as “Down to the
Sea in Ships.” Only, it has a reel that shows reindeer incidents,
instead of whales. But it is just as remarkable. You see a whole
gigantic herd of reindeer—hundreds and hundreds of them, the real
thing—follow their leader across frozen hillsides and rivers and lakes,
through sunshine and storm. Finally, in a blizzard, the men holding the
leader that guides the herd get into trouble. One of them falls through
the ice, while the other is dragged by the leader of the herd over hill
and dale, snowbank and precipice until at last the rope breaks. The
herd bolts and is lost.
It’s a wonderful picture. Because of the reindeer incidents. But
it couldn’t have been made in Hollywood. It combines fiction with
fascinating touches of actual fact.
About the time the reindeer picture was released in this country,
a five-reel film that was made in Switzerland was shown at the big
Capitol Theater in New York. It was made up of scenes of skiing,
ski-jumps, and ski-races, in the Alps. Nothing else. But it furnished
many thrills and real entertainment.
Here we come back again to the crux of the whole matter,
_entertainment_. A picture has to entertain us, whether we want to be
instructed, or only amused. But between the two kinds of pictures that
I have outlined in this chapter—the movies that merely tell a story and
the pictures that show facts—there is this difference: Photoplays that
are designed to be merely entertaining, to be good, have to _seem real_.
But photoplays that actually _are_ real have to be genuinely
_entertaining_.
[Illustration: _Courtesy United Artists Corporation._
A DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS “SET” USED IN “THE THREE MUSKETEERS.”
Note the wheelbarrow, the peddler’s box, and all the wealth of minute
properties and detail necessary to properly costume and equip the
actors and “dress” this elaborate set. (See next illustration).]
[Illustration: _Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation._
HOW A MOVIE “SET” IS MADE.
The scaffolding shows the flimsy construction of the movie buildings.
Only the walls that will appear in the picture are constructed,
propped up from behind by undressed scantlings. Note the reflectors
set up to throw additional light on the scene that is being
photographed.]