MAKING A MOTION PICTURE
Once I was turned loose in New York City with thirty-odd thousand
dollars and a novel by a popular author, and told to make a movie out
of them.
Suppose that should happen to you. How would you begin?
Of course you would want to make a better picture than so many of these
other fellows seem able to turn out. But how would you start? Just by
hiring some actors and a camera man and telling them to get busy?
It is not so easy as that.
The first thing for me, to be sure, was getting together the men
who would help make the photoplay. Re-writing the story into a
scene-by-scene continuity, hiring a studio and attending to all the
business details, selecting a cast, picking out the “locations” for
scenes, designing the “sets” and supervising the construction of them,
and “directing” the scenes, is more than any one person can do. The
Swiss Family Robinson itself couldn’t do it alone.
So I selected and hired a director, and a camera man, and a continuity
writer, and an art director to design the sets. That took quite a while.
Then the trouble began.
The director decided he wanted an assistant director; the camera man
decided he wanted an assistant camera man; the art director decided
that I didn’t know what I was doing, and the “owners” decided that
everything done so far was all wrong.
That brought out two very interesting things about motion pictures that
apply to lots of other businesses as well. And sports, too, if you
like, and almost everything else.
The first is the matter of coöperation.
When the rowers in a boat pull only when they feel like it, the boat
goes wabbling all over the place, instead of straight ahead, and
everybody gets his knuckles barked. Everybody has to pull together.
Imagine a football team without any teamwork!
Movies are so complicated, in the making, that dozens of people,
hundreds often, have to pull together when they are being made.
That very thing is one of the big reasons why moving pictures to-day
aren’t any better than they are. Mostly movie people haven’t yet
learned to pull well together, or how exceedingly important it is in
the making of pictures.
If you can’t work with other fellows without bucking and kicking,—don’t
ever try motion-picture work.
The other trouble was with the owners. There were too many bosses on
the job, which always makes a mess.
That quaint, humorous philosopher, “Josh Billings,” once said, “It
ain’t ignorance that makes so much trouble; it’s so many people knowing
too many things that ain’t so.”
With movies, that’s an ever-present danger.
Mostly, we’re all of us so sure of things, that we saw or heard or
thought or remember, that we just know we’re right, about this or
that, and can’t be wrong. If we know a little bit about surveying, we
feel we can tell surveyors how to survey, and so on. And the less we
know about a thing (as long as we do know something about it) and the
more indefinite that thing and the knowledge about it are, the more we
think we know about it.
Take stories: when you read one, you know whether you like it or not;
but could you tell how it would be apt to strike other people? It’s
easy to think you can do that—and most motion-picture producers and
financiers are sure they can. But as a matter of fact, an editor,
trained for years in the selection of stories, could probably do a lot
better.
In motion pictures, the man who puts up the money for a production has
to be pretty wise to realize how much less he probably knows about
motion pictures than the men he hires to make the pictures for him.
As yet, few owners or producers of motion pictures know enough to
keep their hands off all the things that they ought to leave to their
employees.
Well, to get back to this particular movie.
We got another director, and then decided to give him an assistant
after all. And we got another camera man—and then gave him an
assistant. We got a cast, and started off to the city where most of the
work was to be done.
I say “we.” That is correct. The owners insisted on “sitting in” on
everything, so that each decision was a compromise, instead of being
the best judgment of the one they had hired to make that picture for
them.
When we came to taking the first scenes we made a discovery.
Our hero was a sissy.
He looked like a regular fellow—we had every reason to suppose he was
at least as much of a regular fellow as most actors can be. But he
threw a baseball the way a girl does.
He couldn’t even throw a custard pie. Luckily we didn’t want him to.
But we did want him to look and act like a man’s man, and mostly it was
mighty hard for him.
He had fifteen or twenty different suits, but no sign of a
tennis-racket, or baseball glove, or golf-stick.
He couldn’t drive an automobile. But he was supposed to be a wonderful
actor—just the man to play a hero!
Then, along came the property man.
You will remember that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link. A
motion picture, that is made by the combined efforts of a whole group
of people, all pulling together, is much the same way. If any one
of the group, on whom some particular duty depends, is ignorant, or
inexperienced, or lazy, or pig-headed, the defects of his work will mar
the finished film.
If the actors can’t act well, the picture will be laughed at; if the
camera man is poor, the photography will be poor, and so on.
The property man is the one who has to see that the details of a
picture are correct; that if the hero has a handkerchief showing in his
pocket when he walks out of one scene, he has it when he walks into the
next, and so on.
When you realize that a picture is usually taken location by location
and set by set, instead of in the natural order of the scenes, you
can realize how important it is to have some one check up on all the
details.
[Illustration: _Courtesy W. W. Hodkinson Corporation._
GETTING A COMEDY CLOSE-UP FOR A LAUGH.
In this scene, where detail of expression is important, the big
reflector is brought close to the subject and held in place by the
property man, whose head is just outside the “camera angle.”]
[Illustration: _Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation._
A “LOCATION” WHERE REFLECTORS ARE ESSENTIAL.
Under the big trees of a forest there is never very much illumination
for quick photography, and reflectors to throw additional light on
the actors’ faces are doubly important.]
The first interior scenes to be taken, we will say, are those in a
drawing-room set, that the carpenters completed first. They are,
perhaps, the scenes that in the script are numbered 22, 23, 49, 107,
108, 109, 191, 224, and 225. In Scene 22 the hero comes into the
drawing-room and finds that his father has just had a severe paralytic
stroke. In Scene 21, perhaps, he said good-by to a companion on
the front steps and then entered the house. Scene 21 was taken “On
location” three months before Scene 22 is to be taken in the studio.
But in the finished picture, the hero will walk through the front door
and immediately come into the drawing-room.
It is the duty of the property man to see that he isn’t wearing a golf
suit when he goes in the door on one side and riding-breeches when he
comes out on the other side of the door.
Our property man was a friend of the owners, who had no previous
experience to speak of. They wanted him to learn the business (or art,
if you prefer) and insisted on his appointment.
That is no unusual thing in picture-making; it would amaze people to
know how far, in the case of the great majority of all pictures that
are made, the owners influence things.
If you have a good director, and assistant director, and photographer,
and actors, what difference does a property man make? It would seem,
would it not, that the various assistants would look out for all the
details necessary, dividing the work up among them?
But they can’t. There was the cat, for instance.
We were taking some of the early scenes in a city of the Middle West
(one of the great charms about movie-making is that you often travel to
the places you want to photograph, instead of trying to “fake” them in
the country around the studio) and the script called for a cat.
The hero, according to the story, would not desert his old cat when he
left town, so he took her along in his automobile.
All correct as far as the written story was concerned—but now to
get the genuine purring and mewing or scratching cat. The assistant
director couldn’t do it, because he was busy sticking with the director
and helping him in the scenes, keeping the numbers of the scenes, the
“takes” (or different shots of the same scene) and so on. The assistant
camera man also had to be on the set, holding the number-board,
reloading cameras, and all the rest. The continuity writer was making
some changes in the script. The owners were buying an automobile. The
art director, and everybody else available except the property man,
were out hunting for locations.
So the new property man must get the cat. And he had no experience.
He had plenty of time, to start with. But instead of securing a likely
candidate and trying it out, he decided that the cat of a friend of his
would do.
It wouldn’t. Friend wouldn’t let cat act. The property man only found
that out the day we wanted to have the scenes taken. If he’d been
experienced, he wouldn’t have let an “unimportant” detail wait so long.
But there was a big grocery store near the hotel where we were staying,
where they had a wonderful big tiger Tommy—tame as anything. Property
man, in a hurry, decided he would do nicely.
But he didn’t. Tommy was well-mannered enough, and friendly, in the
store, among his friends and customers and customary surroundings; but
after he had been shut up in a basket half the morning, and all jolted
up in the automobile getting out to “location” besides, he was another
Tom entirely.
He would push like an elephant to get his big striped head out of the
basket, and once his head was out the rest of him would follow it; and
once the whole of him was out he would scratch and claw until he got
clear of all hands that tried to reason with him or delay him; and once
he got clear he was on his way to somewhere else at about ninety miles
an hour.
It would have taken a mighty fast shutter, with a telescope lens behind
it, to have photographed Thomas that day. He wasn’t sitting for his
portrait.
So the property man, desperate now, because he was holding up the
whole company, tried again. This time he drew a white angora lady cat,
with a kitten five inches long to keep her from brooding on living in
a basket. She was contentment itself, and because he couldn’t waste
another day we had to use her.
Result of two days’ cat-hunting by a new property man: a
garage-mechanic hero with a beautiful mother-cat shedding long Persian
fur over him.
The cat always looked in one direction. People who watched the picture
afterward wondered why. We knew. She was looking at the kitten. To make
her shift her lovely eye we had to move the kitten.
The director wanted a metal aeroplane with a propeller that would whirl
in the wind for the radiator cap of the hero’s automobile. Before
the property man found one he had to put two cities with a combined
population of nearly half a million on their respective ears, and we
nearly all of us had to turn in and help him do it. But in the end we
got the little aeroplane, and the director was happy.
It is interesting work, this “shooting” picture out on “location.”
There were nearly twenty of us in the party—owners, cameramen,
writers, and assistants, besides the actors. Only the actors taking
the principal parts were along with us, on account of the expense. For
“bits” or “extras”—characters that appeared only once or twice for a
moment or so in the finished picture—we relied on finding people in the
cities and towns we visited, ready and able to take the parts.
Indeed, it would surprise you—or maybe it wouldn’t—to know how far the
lure of picture-making has spread. Set up a camera almost anywhere in
the country, and interested spectators will come out of the air from
nowhere at all, as mosquitoes seem to come to a fisherman. And for the
parts in your picture, if you want them, you can have almost any one,
from the leader of the sewing circle to the village derelict.
More work for the property man!
Mostly, the boys that you find do the best work of all. A youngster of
six or eight, if he once gets the spirit of the thing, falls into a
part wonderfully, and acts as naturally as a pup in a barnyard.
We would start out in the morning from the front of the hotel where
we happened to be staying. Spectators, few or many, always gathered
in a fringe as soon as they saw the cameras being carried out to the
machines.
There were two machines that we needed to use in the picture—both
roadsters. Then there was a big “work car,” some old seven-passenger,
to take the camera men and actors and as much of the duffle as could
be crowded in. There was always a tremendous amount of stuff to be
lugged—cameras, and film-boxes, and big mirrors and reflectors to use
in getting additional light, and so on.
If we were to take any “inside shots” as well, there was also a truck
to take along a load of lights—big metal standards with intricate
carbon lights and their reflectors above—with transformers and
yards and yards of cable to connect them up with, and mechanics and
electricians to do the work. Or perhaps a generator on a truck—a big
150-horse-power motor and electric generator to provide a current that
could be taken anywhere the truck could go.
Almost always there was a delay about the start; sometimes one thing,
sometimes another. A reflector broken and not yet returned repaired—a
property gravestone to be taken along, and late—the everlasting cat
gone from its basket. Sometimes five minutes, sometimes fifteen; once
in a while a whole beautiful morning lost, representing, say, a loss,
or additional expense to the picture, of possibly hundreds of dollars.
Then at last away we would go—a whole young cavalcade of autos, bulging
with people and duffle, heads of actors and legs of camera tripods
sticking out in every direction—bumping and jouncing along out into the
country to our selected “location”—perhaps an old farmhouse, twelve
miles out.
For a week or so it is always fascinating; then it gets to be just
the usual routine of work, like almost everything else, and the real
joy of it is in the ability to keep open-minded for the sight and
appreciation of new things—in the enthusiasm of work to be done, and in
the satisfaction of getting good results. Folks standing at the curb
to see us start from the hotel probably wished that they too might be
journeying off into the open country, with all the glamor of adventure
surrounding the expedition—but they knew nothing of the long, long
hours of waiting through the day, while the director rehearsed and
rehearsed one or two actors in a particular scene, or the whole company
just shifted from one foot to the other, hour after hour, ready to be
on the job the moment the sun came from behind the passing clouds—if it
ever did.
Sometimes, though, there were new and entirely different experiences,
as the picture gradually progressed from stage to stage, and scene
was added to scene in all the thousands of feet of film sent to the
laboratories to be developed and printed.
For instance, for a time I went on ahead, acting as “location man” in
advance of the company, as we went from locality to locality where our
scenes were to be filmed.
In one little Montana town the only car I could get to take me around
for a day was a “closed” Ford. It was “closed” by having the top
and body of a sedan, but all the glass was broken out, including
the windshield, and the floor-boards were gone besides, so that you
propped your feet on whatever rods came handy, while the road rushed
past beneath you, and occasionally tossed a pebble into your lap. The
fenders were dilapidated, and the poor little old buggy looked like
an utter wreck, but we covered nearly two hundred miles in it before
dark, over prairie roads that were hardly more than wheel-ruts through
the grass. Twice we ferried across the Yellowstone, and once over the
Missouri, before that valiant little wreck of a bus got back to the
bleak prairie town, amid all the glory of a marvelous western sunset.
Well, I have been running along this line for a reason.
When an actor comes on the screen, in the early scenes of a photoplay,
we look at him without much interest. But if we see him chop wood, or
come through a fight, or learn what a time he had selling papers when
he was a youngster, we unconsciously begin to get more interested in
him. We like him better. Because we know him better. It is the same in
real life. Old friends are the best friends; we know them better.
If I were going to school with some new arrival who was sure to be
something of a leader, and who was going to have a lot to do with me,
and influence me, and whom I might influence in a measure in return,
you better believe that the sooner I became really acquainted with him,
and liked him, and really knew his weaknesses and disliked them—why,
the better it would be for both of us.
That is the way it is with this great new arrival—the motion-picture
industry. It is a sort of big newcomer at the school, and we are
going to see a lot of it, and be influenced a lot by it, and possibly
influence it a bit ourselves, sooner or later.
It is worth while to get better acquainted with it as soon as possible.
That is why I’ve taken you along on this all-forenoon ramble, as it
were, through some of the paths of picture-making. And having gone
so far, when next you watch a photoplay, you can think of how many
people, doing so many different things, had to take part in the making
of that picture, and how many problems they had; and how perhaps they
had to stand around, day after day, waiting for the sun to come from
behind a cloud at just the right time. And you can notice the clothes
the actors wear, and the other properties, and wonder how much of a job
the property man had keeping them all straight, and how good he was on
his job. And if the film is an unusually good one, and everybody seems
to have pulled together particularly well, you can praise it all the
more; and if it’s poor, you can analyze it, and perhaps decide where
the trouble, or part of it, lies.
Then, taken all in all, you’ll know motion pictures a little better,
and be more interested in them, and like them better, and find they’re
a little more useful to you, while you’re a little closer to the point
where you’ll be useful to them.
[Illustration: _Courtesy W. W. Hodkinson Corporation._
WHERE SCENIC BEAUTY IS REQUIRED.
This scene was taken in Western Montana by a New York company. The
way the heroine is handling the rod in this picture betrays the fact
she is an actress instead of an expert.]
[Illustration: _Courtesy W. W. Hodkinson Corporation._
A PROPOSAL ON A MOUNTAIN TOP.
To secure this picture the cameras were carried up to a height of
nearly ten thousand feet on horseback. Two cameras were taken to
minimize the risk of having to take the hard trip again and make the
scene over.]