CHAPTER IV
INSIDE THE STUDIOS
Ifyou have never been inside a motion-picture studio, an interesting experience lies ahead of you. For what soon becomes an old story to any one working “on the lot,” is fascinating enough to any one who sees it for the first time.
At Universal City, California, just across a range of hills outside Hollywood, lies a motion-picture plant that covers acres and acres. Administration and executive offices, big “light” and “daylight” stages, property rooms, costume department, garage, restaurant, power plant, carpenter shop, laboratory, great menagerie even, are all grouped along the base of rolling California hills that furnish countless easy “locations” for stories of the Kansas prairies or Western ranchos, or even the hills of old New England.
In the heart of New York City, close besidethe roaring trains of the Second Avenue “L” and within hooting distance of the tug-boats on the Harlem River, stands the old Harlem Casino—for years a well-known East-side dance-hall. In this building, now converted into a compact motion picture studio, the first big Cosmopolitan productions came into existence—“Humoresque,” “The Inside of the Cup,” and all the rest.
Both the great “lot” at Universal City, under the blazing California sun, and the old Harlem Casino, with dirty February snow piled outside under the tracks of the elevated,—each absolutely different from the other—are typical motion-picture studios.
In each you can find the same blazing white or greenish-blue lights, with their tangled cables like snakes underfoot, the same kind of complicated “sets” on various stages, the same nonchalant camera men chewing gum and cranking unconcernedly away while the director implores the leading lady with tears in his voice—and perhaps even a megaphone at his mouth—to: “Now see him! On the floor at your feet! Stare at him! Now down—kneeldown! Now touch him! Touch him again, as if you were afraid of him! Now quicker—feel of him! Feel of him! He’s DEAD!”
Suppose we step inside the door of a typical motion-picture studio. We find ourselves in a little ante-room, separated by a railing from larger offices beyond. The place seems like a sort of cross between an employment office and the outer office of some big business enterprise. At one point there is a little barred cashier’s window like that at a bank. There is usually an attendant at a desk or window marked “Information,” with one or two office boys, like “bell-hops” in a hotel, to run errands.
Coming and going, or waiting on benches along the walls, are a varied assortment of people: a young woman with a good deal of rouge on her cheeks and a wonderful coiffure of blonde hair, an old man with a wrinkled face and long whiskers, a couple of energetic-looking young advertising men, and a chap with big hoot-owl spectacles and a flowing tie who wants to get a position as scenario writer. In the most comfortable chair a fat man, with eyeglasses astride a thick curved nose, is waitingto see the general manager, and fretting at being detained so long.
A very pretty girl comes into the office with a big collie dog on a leash, as a motor purrs away from the door outside. One of the boys like bell-hops jumps to open the inner door for her, and she sails on through without even a glance around. She is one of the minor stars, with a salary of about six hundred dollars a week. The collie is an actor, too: he is on the pay-roll at $75 a week—and worth every dollar of it to the pictures.
At one side is the office of the “casting director,” who passes on the various “types,” hires the “extras,” and decides whether or not this or that actor or actress is a real “trouper” who can fill the bill. Into this office the army of “extra people” who make a precarious living picking up a day’s work here and there around the studios as “atmosphere” gradually find their way; here the innumerable applicants for screen honors come to be looked over, and given a try, or turned away with a shake of the head, and perhaps a single commentsuch as “eyes won’t photograph well—too blue”; here the many experienced actors, temporarily out of work, come to be greeted by: “Hello, Harry! You’re just the bird I wanted to see! Got a great little part for you in an English story; older brother—sort of half-heavy”; or: “Sorry, Mame—not a thing to-day. Try us next week. We’ll probably begin casting for ‘Wheels of Fate’ about Friday.”
Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.Applying the Mysteries of “Make-Up.”A veteran actor building a beard, bit by bit, with a surgeon’s artery-holding apparatus, an orange-stick, spirit gum, wool-carder, and a fine comb.
Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.
Applying the Mysteries of “Make-Up.”
A veteran actor building a beard, bit by bit, with a surgeon’s artery-holding apparatus, an orange-stick, spirit gum, wool-carder, and a fine comb.
Courtesy W. W. Hodkinson Corporation.A Typical Movie “Interior.”Notice the carbon arc lights at sides of the picture, used to illumine the set. The glaring oblong faces of the lights can be noticed in the center lights on the right. From the glare of these lights actors often get an intensely painful affliction called “klieg-eyes.”
Courtesy W. W. Hodkinson Corporation.
A Typical Movie “Interior.”
Notice the carbon arc lights at sides of the picture, used to illumine the set. The glaring oblong faces of the lights can be noticed in the center lights on the right. From the glare of these lights actors often get an intensely painful affliction called “klieg-eyes.”
Courtesy Universal Pictures Corporation.Staging a Movie Prize-Fight.Notice how each actor in the foreground has to play his part, no matter how unimportant. To make the scene realistic, each “extra” must appear as interested as any spectator at a real prize-fight.
Courtesy Universal Pictures Corporation.
Staging a Movie Prize-Fight.
Notice how each actor in the foreground has to play his part, no matter how unimportant. To make the scene realistic, each “extra” must appear as interested as any spectator at a real prize-fight.
But let us pass on beyond the outer offices, and see where the girl with the collie went.
Through a hallway we come suddenly into a vast, dark, cavernous interior, high and wide and shadowy. From somewhere off at our left comes a sound of hammering, where a new “set” is being erected. Off at the right is more hammering and pounding with the squeaking of nails being drawn as another set, in which the “shooting” has been finished, is being “struck,” or taken down. From a far corner of the great cavern there is a radiance of bluish-green light, where one of the companies is “working.”
Curiously enough, this huge dark place is called the “light” stage. It gets its name fromthe fact that scenes can be photographed on it only with artificial light.
All about is a labyrinth of still standing sets—here a corner of a business office, and just beyond the interior of a drawing room in a rich home, with a beautiful curved stairway mounting ten feet or so into nothing at the right. Next comes the corner of a large restaurant. Under the guidance of an assistant director, in the glare of a single bluish-green Cooper-Hewitt “bank” turned on as a work light, property men are “dressing” it. They are putting yellow table-cloths on the tables (in the finished picture they will look white; in reality they are yellow instead of white in order not to be too glaring, before the picture can be exposed long enough to bring out the contours and details that are more important in the darker places); and hanging a row of horse-race pictures along the wall.
This is a big studio, supposed to be making a dozen or more pictures at once. We are surprised that on this whole great dark “light” stage only one company is working; we learn that two others are “shooting” elsewhere onthe lot; one in back of the carpenter shop, where a clever director has found an ideal “location” for his purpose right under his nose, and another on one of the big “daylight” stages that we shall see presently. Several other companies are out on location miles from the studio—one perhaps in another State on a trip that will last a couple of weeks. Still others are not at the “shooting” stage of their picture at all; one or two are still “casting,” one that follows the methods used by Griffith is “in rehearsal,” and still others are merely waiting while scenario writer and director work out the final details of the scenario or “continuity,” or while the director “sits in” with the cutter or “screen editor” and title writer to put the finishing touches on the completed product.
We go over to the corner where the one company on the big stage is “shooting.” A dozen people are sitting around on chairs or stools, just outside the lights. About in the middle of them, with a whole phalanx of lights at right and left, two cameras are set up. Beside them, in a comfortable folding camp-chair with aback rest, sits the director. He is wearing what a humorous writer has called the “director’s national costume” of soft shirt, knickerbockers, and puttees. On the floor beside his chair is a megaphone.
If you hold your hands together with the palms flat, making a narrow angle about a third of a right angle, you can get an idea of what a camera “sees.” This angle is called the “camera angle.” Only what happens within that narrow angle will be recorded on the film. Sometimes white chalk-lines are drawn on the floor to mark the camera angle; what is within the lines will be photographed, while what is outside will not show.
Along the sides of this open space that the camera will photograph are ranged the bright white carbon lights and the bluish-green vacuum lights that illumine the scene. Overhead, suspended by heavy chains from tracks that traverse the ceiling of the great stage, are more lights; white carbon “dome” lights, and additional bluish-green Cooper-Hewitt “overhead banks.”
Courtesy Brown Bros.How a Motion Picture Interior is Made.A mass of complicated paraphernalia is necessary to light and equip a motion-picture stage. The tall lights with the lines across them are the “Cooper-Hewitts,” or vacuum lights, called “banks.” The smaller square lights are the white arc-lights or “Kliegs.” The snake-like cables on the floor carry the electricity.
Courtesy Brown Bros.
How a Motion Picture Interior is Made.
A mass of complicated paraphernalia is necessary to light and equip a motion-picture stage. The tall lights with the lines across them are the “Cooper-Hewitts,” or vacuum lights, called “banks.” The smaller square lights are the white arc-lights or “Kliegs.” The snake-like cables on the floor carry the electricity.
Courtesy W. W. Hodkinson Corporation.Engine Trouble on a Dakota Prairie.To get the scenes shown in this story of a transcontinental tour the motion-picture company travelled almost across the continent.
Courtesy W. W. Hodkinson Corporation.
Engine Trouble on a Dakota Prairie.
To get the scenes shown in this story of a transcontinental tour the motion-picture company travelled almost across the continent.
Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.When the Hero is the Captain of a Steam Shovel.Note how the reflectors, seen at the bottom of the picture, are tilted down to throw the light up into the face of the engineer, while the camera is raised to the right place on a platform.
Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.
When the Hero is the Captain of a Steam Shovel.
Note how the reflectors, seen at the bottom of the picture, are tilted down to throw the light up into the face of the engineer, while the camera is raised to the right place on a platform.
Thin bluish smoke, like vapor, curls outward and upward from most of the white carbon lights. They give off a good deal of heat. A couple of spot-lights like those used in theaters are situated on scaffolding higher than a man’s head, behind the cameras to left and to right, with an attendant in charge of each.
In the bright glare the faces of all who are not “made up” with grease paint and powder look greenish yellow. All color values are distorted. Tan-colored shoes look green.
A scene has just been taken. The assistant director turns to an electrician. “Kill ’em!” he says. The electrician goes to the different lights, pulling switches to “cut ’em off.” In a moment only one of the bluish-green “double banks” is left to serve as a working light. This is to save electricity, of which the array of lights takes an enormous amount.
The scene that has been taken is, we will say, of an old-fashioned New England sitting room. In the center is a marble-topped table. In a far corner is a “what-not,” with marble shelves. There is a bookcase against one ofthe walls, and old prints and lithographs are hung here and there. In one place is a needlework “sampler,” with a design and motto.
The director is talking with the two actresses who were in the scene. They are in costumes of the Civil War period, with flounces and hoopskirts. They are supposed to be sisters.
Suddenly the director decides to take the scene over again. He has thought of a bit of more effective action that will get the point he is trying to make in the story over more effectively. “We’ll shoot it again,” he says. “Let’s run through it once more first.”
The two actresses, already thoroughly familiar with the scene, rehearse it again, adding the new bit of detail as the director instructs them. He is not quite satisfied, and takes one of the parts himself, showing the actress how he wants her to put her hand up to her face. Finally she does it to suit him, and he is satisfied. “All right,” he says, “we’ll shoot it.—Lights!”
The lights are switched on once more, and in the bright, sputtering glare the sisters walk into the scene. Just before they cross the lineinto the camera angle both camera men start grinding.
After about fifteen seconds of action the director nods, well pleased. “Cut!” he says shortly, and both camera men stop.
Half an hour’s preparation and rehearsal for fifteen seconds of action!
Again the lights are switched off. The man in charge of the script, sitting on a stool with a sheet of paper snapped on a board on his lap, puts down the number of the scene and adds details of costume—what each sister is wearing, the flowers that one is carrying in her hand, and so on—to have a complete record in case of “retake,” or other scenes that match with this before or after.
“Now we’ll move up on ’em,” says the director. The cameras are moved closer, and the action of the preceding scenes is repeated. This time the cameras are so close that the faces of the actresses will appear large on the screen, with every detail of expression showing. Before the close-ups are begun, the lights are moved up, too, and one of the spot lights switched around more to one side to give anattractive “back lighting” effect on the hair of the sisters, that appears almost like a halo, later, when it is seen on the screen.
Before each scene is taken an assistant holds a slate with the director’s name, the head camera man’s name, and the number of the scene, written on it, in front of the cameras, and the camera men grind a few turns. In this way, the “take” is made.
When the different “takes” are finally matched together in the finished picture these numbers will be cut off, but they are necessary to facilitate the work of identifying the hundreds or even thousands of different shots of which the final picture is composed.
Leaving the great dark “light stage” we pass on into the lot beyond. In front of us is another great stage, but this time open to the sky. Instead of artificial lights, there are great white cloth “reflectors,” to deflect the sunlight on to the scene and intensify the light where under the sun’s direct rays alone there would be shadows.
Sets, actors, camera men and action are all as they were on the other stage, except thatinstead of a profusion of sets we find here only one or two, as not nearly so many scenes are taken here as on the other stage.
Formerly nearly all scenes were taken in sunlight, and studios were built that had no provision for lighting except the sun. But while the film industry was still in its infancy the development of artificial lighting made possible results that could not be secured with sunlight alone, and since that time artificial lighting is used on most motion-picture scenes that represent “interiors.”
About us on the “lot” are other stages, covered with glass, that lets in the sunlight but keeps out the rain, so that work may go on uninterruptedly. On most of these a combination of natural and artificial light is used—electric lights as in the “light stage,” supplemented by daylight.
We pass on to the property houses—great buildings like warehouses ranged one behind the other. In one place we find a room where modeling is going on; skilled artists are making statues that will be used in a picture depicting the life of a sculptor. In another placespecial furniture is being made. One great warehouse-like building is devoted to “flats” and “drops,” of which the differing sets can in part, at least, be built. Then there are the costume rooms, and the “junk” rooms, with knick-knacks of all descriptions.
You’d be amazed to know how many properties are needed in the making of even the simplest motion pictures. Take, for instance, the set that we have already described—an old New England sitting-room. The furniture, the marble-topped table and the what-not with its marble shelves and the chairs and possibly a hair-cloth sofa, were of course obvious. The old prints and lithographs and even the sampler, hardly less so; but in addition to these, think of the ornaments that would have to appear on the what-not shelves and the kind of lamp that would be on the table and what books there would have to be in the bookcase. Without these details, the room would not look natural.
Take a look around the room where you are reading this page. Notice how many little things there are that you would never think ofarranging, if you were to have carpenters and property men reconstruct it for you as a set for a picture. Newspapers—all the hundred and one little things, left here and there, that go to make a home what it is—even to the scratches on the walls, or the corner knocked off one arm of a chair.
Courtesy United Artists Corporation.Douglas Fairbanks as D’Artagnan in “The Three Musketeers.”Here are presented all three basic characteristics of a good story—fascinating characters engaged in stirring action, at an interesting time and place. Note the careful details of costuming, and decorations of the old furniture.
Courtesy United Artists Corporation.
Douglas Fairbanks as D’Artagnan in “The Three Musketeers.”
Here are presented all three basic characteristics of a good story—fascinating characters engaged in stirring action, at an interesting time and place. Note the careful details of costuming, and decorations of the old furniture.
Courtesy United Artists Corporation.Another Scene from “The Three Musketeers.”See how even the flagstones of this narrow alley of Old France have been reproduced with faithful care.
Courtesy United Artists Corporation.
Another Scene from “The Three Musketeers.”
See how even the flagstones of this narrow alley of Old France have been reproduced with faithful care.
The property man of a famous director once told me: “I’ve got the greatest collection of junk in the whole business. Just odds and ends. No one thing in the whole outfit worth anything in itself, but the King (he was referring to the director) would be crazy if he sold it for ten thousand dollars—yes, or twenty-five thousand, either. I tell you, sometimes junk is the most important thing in a picture.”
After a set has been built, it is usually “dressed” by hiring first the furniture from one of the concerns that have grown up for just this purpose—renting furniture, old or new, to motion-picture companies that want to use it for a few weeks. If, in addition to what has been rented, the producing company is able to supply bits of “junk” from its ownproperty room and make the set look more natural, so much the better.
The story is told of one enterprising concern in Los Angeles that started in collecting beer-bottles just after prohibition went into effect. Since the bottles were no longer returnable, they were able to buy them here and there for almost nothing, until they had on hand a tremendous supply. The word went around that such and such a concern was in the market for bottles, and every boy in Los Angeles gathered up what he could find and took them around while the market was still good. People thought they were crazy, and had a good laugh at the movie industry that didn’t know any more than to buy up hundreds and hundreds of old beer-bottles that nobody would ever be able to use again.
Then one of the producing companies wanted a batch of bottles for some bar-room scene and found that they didn’t happen to have any on the lot. They went to the big property concern that they usually traded with, only to find that they, too, didn’t happen to have any beer-bottles. So they went to the concern thathad been buying them all up at junk prices.
Certainly they could have some bottles—all they wanted! They would be thirty cents a week each, and a dollar apiece for any that were broken or not returned. Take it or leave it!
The corner on old beer-bottles had suddenly become profitable. The producing company tried to get bottles elsewhere and beat the monopoly—but time was pressing. When the overhead of a single company is running at hundreds of dollars a day, a property man will not be forgiven if he holds up the whole production while he scours the city to save money on beer-bottles. The price was paid.
But let us get on with our tour of the studio. We have not yet come to one of the most important places of all—the laboratory where the film is developed.
The laboratory work of many producing companies is not done on the lot at all, but is sent away to one of the big commercial laboratories that does work for many different companies. But several of the larger producers have their own laboratory plants.
In the laboratory we visit first the developing-room, feeling our way cautiously into the dark around many corners that cut off every possible ray of light from outside. Walking on wet slats we reach at last the chamber in the middle of what seems to be an almost impenetrable labyrinth, and in the dim red light can barely make out the vats where the strips of celluloid, wound back and forth on wooden hand-racks, are being dipped into the developer.
Nowadays many of the laboratories are equipped with complicated developing machines, that combine all the processes of developing, washing, “fixing,” and drying in one. Where prints, made from the original negative, are being developed, tinting is added. The undeveloped film, tightly wound in small rolls, is threaded through one end of the developing machine in the dark-room; it travels over little cog-wheels that mesh into the holes at the edges of the film, and goes down into a long upright tube filled with developer. Coming back out of this, still on the cogs, it travels next down into a tube of clear waterfor washing. Then down into another tube containing “hypo,” and up again for another tube and second washing. Then, still winding along on the little cogs it travels through a partition and out into a light room, where it passes through an airshaft for drying, across an open space for inspection, and is finally wound into as tight a roll as it started from in its undeveloped state.
In the printing-room, still in the dim red light, we see half a dozen printing-machines at work, with raw film and negative feeding together past the aperture where the single flash of white light makes the exposure that leaves the negative image upon the print.
Next, in daylight once more, we see the great revolving racks of the drying-room used for film developed by the hand process—with hundreds of feet of the celluloid ribbon wrapped around and around great wooden drums.
In the assembling-room we find girls at work winding up strips of film and cementing or patching the ends of the film together to make a continuous reel.
Another room is more interesting still. Thisroom is dark once more, with a row of high-speed projection machines along one side and a blank wall on the other. Here the finished film, colored and patched, receives its final inspection. Against the white wall four or five pictures are flickering simultaneously. Since the projection machines are only a few feet away from the white surface that acts as a screen, each picture measures only two or three feet long and two-thirds as much in height. In one picture we may see a jungle scene; alongside it a reel of titles is being flashed through, one after another; next to this again is the “rush stuff” for a news reel with the president shaking hands so fast it looks as if he had St. Vitus dance; next comes a beautifully colored scenic, and at the end of the row the dramatic climax of a “society film,” rushing along at nearly double its normal theater speed.
Leaving the laboratory, we pass down a street, bordered on one side by a row of little boxlike offices that are used by the directors of the different companies; opposite, in a similar row of offices, the scenario writers are housed.The end of the street brings us back once more to the building that houses the administrative offices through which we came when we entered.
If we had time we could visit the menagerie that lies at the rear of the studio proper, and that makes even the line-up of a circus tent look tame. Or, we could spend a day watching the company shooting the storm scene at the back edge of the lot, where the customary old airplane propeller has been mounted on a solid block with a motor attached and backed up alongside the scenes to furnish a gale of wind.
But we have already seen enough for an introduction.
To make a six-reel picture takes from three or four weeks to twice as many months and costs all the way from ten or fifteen thousand dollars to half a million, and sometimes even a million. You can imagine the investment required where a producing organization is running ten or a dozen companies at once, each turning out pictures at top speed.
Only the other day one of the Hollywoodstudios changed hands at the sale price of three-quarters of a million dollars. Some are worth twice that amount.
But it is not the size of the investment that counts. It is the quality of the finished product. That is the thing we want to look farther into.
Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.Filming an Old Engineer on a Fast-Moving Locomotive.Notice how close director and assistant director are to the line of the “camera angle.” The director using a small megaphone to overcome the noise of the train and the rushing air.
Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.
Filming an Old Engineer on a Fast-Moving Locomotive.
Notice how close director and assistant director are to the line of the “camera angle.” The director using a small megaphone to overcome the noise of the train and the rushing air.
Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.Another Railroad Scene.The umbrella put up to shade the company gives an idea of the length of time often necessary to take even the simplest scenes. Hours, possibly, were spent at this one spot.
Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.
Another Railroad Scene.
The umbrella put up to shade the company gives an idea of the length of time often necessary to take even the simplest scenes. Hours, possibly, were spent at this one spot.