CHAPTER V
MAKING A MOTION PICTURE
OnceI 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, designingthe “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. Everybodyhas 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 orthat, 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, youcan realize how important it is to have some one check up on all the details.
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.”
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.”
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.
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 wasconcerned—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 apart 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 currentthat 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 thesatisfaction 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 moreinterested 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 ofhow 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.