Movie studio

“ The early runners of the television industry326 came on their knees to Hollywood and begged the movie men to help them. “You’ve got the factories to make the product, we’ll get the outlets to show it,” they said. “Let’s co-operate, and we’ll all grow rich.”
Oh, but the studio heads were too smart for that! They could have held television in the palms of their hands. Instead they jeered: “Who’s going to stay home and watch a little box?” They sneered: “What have you got—women wrestlers and bike races? It’s a fad like Yo-yo. It can’t last. Movies are better than ever.” ”

“ After a roll of negative film has been exposed it is sent to the studio dark room for development. Every precaution is taken, of course, that no ray of light other than that which comes from the ruby lamp shall enter this room where films representing hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of dollars are being developed. ”

“ Therefore, in writing this series, we shall start with an old saw—a warning to amateurs to look before they leap. No industry in the world presents so many angles, varying from technical work in the studio, to the complexities of high finance. If you really wish to break into the movies, go to the studios and see for yourself what you are fitted for. ”

“ On the one hand are countless men and women besieging the studio doors in the hope of starting a [pg 2] career in any one of a thousand capacities, from actress to scenario writer, from director to cameraman. There are people with plots, people with inventions, people with new ideas of every conceivable variety, all clamoring for admission. And, on the other hand, there are the men who manage the movies sending out all manner of exhortations, appeals and supplications to just such people to come and work in their studios. ”

“ The studio manager consults with him as to the expenses of the scenery and the length of time to be spent in making the picture and then summons the technical staff.
The technical staff of a studio is a rather large assembly. There is the art director, who plans the scenery, the technical man who directs the building, the casting director, who selects the actors, the electrician, who assists in working out the lighting effects, the laboratory superintendent, who must supervise the developing of the film, the cutters, who assemble the completed film, and last, but not least, the cameraman. ”

“ DIGGING IN “Well, we’re in the movies—we’re working in the moving pictures.”
“Moving pictures? You’re working in moving pictures? What do you mean, you’re working in moving pictures?”
“We’re working at a place—they call it a studio—acting in little plays—dramas, and comedies—a camera takes pictures while we act, and the pictures are shown in those five- and ten-cent theatres that are all around the town, mostly on Third and Ninth Avenues and Fourteenth Street—such high-class neighborhoods.” ”

“ In most cases he has graduated upon the stage, and has probably passed through all the phases between a touring company and a well-known theatre. As a result of this drilling he will have assumed a wide perspective. Sheer ability will have brought him to the control of the cinema-studio stage, where the work is most exacting, and where there is a very great demand for ingenuity and resource. Having mastered the intricacies and possibilities of the photo-play stage, and what can be done by photography, he will be a thorough master of craft. ”

“ The studio settings in distortion represent the spectacle; they are variations of scenery or “location”; the chase over the roofs is a psychological parallel to the Keystone cops; and the weak moment of this superb picture is that in which the moving picture always fails, in the double revelation at the end, like that of Seven Keys to Baldpate, representing “drama.”
No. The drama film is almost always wrong, the slap-stick almost always right; and it is divinely just that the one great figure of the screen should have risen out of the Keystone studios. ”

“ A few actors, a willing and clever camera man, a stage carpenter, and a scenic artist, comprised the working force. Funny studio! Interesting old workshop! “The Last Leaf’s” ballroom!
The outer doors of the building opened into a broad hall from which on the left as one entered, a door gave into Mr. Dougherty’s office; on the right was another door—the entrance to the bookkeeping department. An old colonial stairway on this same side led up to the projection room and other offices. The spacious hall of the main floor ended with double doors opening into the studio. ”

“ Inside, in two studios where no one ever painted and which led to the real working studio, the finished pictures were exhibited on easels covered with antique textures, and callers gazed with wonder at the collection of properties fit for a theater,—suits of armor, tapestries, old standards hanging from the ceiling, show-cases full of ancient knick-knacks, deep couches with canopies of oriental stuffs supported by lances, century old coffers and open secre [Pg 80] taries shining with the pale gold of their rows of drawers. ”

“ At home he may exploit his ingenuity in making trick films, a most popular feature at the picture palaces, so long as he keeps novelty to the forefront. Trick films, unfortunately, take so long to prepare and demand such care, skill and patience that the largest firms of producers as a rule are not eager to attempt them, because their production disorganises the more regular and profitable work of the studio. ”

“ It is the dearth of studios and the great demand for them that makes the price so high. Those who have had studios some time of course pay very much less, others put up with little holes far too small to paint a picture of any size. Carlo Perugini is painting in the studio of a friend, and that is a strip not large enough for one person. ”

“ Four or five companies working on the big stage these days made things hum like a three-ring circus. From the dressing-rooms a balcony opened that looked down on the studio floor, and here Blanche Sweet could often be seen, her feet poked through the iron rails of the balcony, her elbows resting on the railing, her chin cupped in the hollow of her hands, her eyes bulging as she watched every move the director made. ”

“ Sometimes after the show, I can barely straighten up, or I may be utterly dejected over my inability to say all I should have said. Then I leave the studio, moody and silent.
I never talk to anyone before a show except my director. He understands me and knows how easily I’m thrown. It can be a slight movement from the boom man or a variation in the countdown signal from the floor manager, something unexpected in the action of a camera man or a slight noise somewhere in the studio, and I react as though someone threw a glass of water in my face. ”

“ As they were not artists nor even art students, the first thing to do was, naturally, to take a studio. There they lived principally on tea—did ingenious things with chintz and packing-cases, and discussed methods of making a livelihood, such as cinema acting, photography, hat-making, house decoration, confectionery—they could both make peppermint creams—book-binding, the forcing of early rhubarb, with mushrooms as a side-line, the opening of a tea shop, and other avocations. ”

“ The film author’s place is in the studio; he should be the silent witness of every scene; he should be thoroughly conversant with such technical progress as has been made and is being made in the way of illumination and psychic photography. But he dare never forget that a film work is not the work of an individual.
An author has to have, if success is to crown his efforts, a great store of general information, a store such as reaches far out beyond the studio. He should have a general but clear idea as to what it costs to mount a film. ”

“ During the summer months as many as six different companies will be working in as many different corners of Europe, acting plays in the open air for the picture palaces. Even the interiors in Gaumont films are often real and not merely constructed for the occasion. As a rule the studio is used only during the winter when the climatic conditions are unfavourable for outdoor work. ”

“ Masterpieces are coming not through spending millions on supes, and “real” temples, and forts; but rather by writing a scenario particularly adapted to film-production, hiring and training actors that know how to act for the camera, preferably those without bad stage habits to unlearn, cutting out all unreal scenery, costume and make-up and keeping everything as simple and as close to the actual as possible. The best movie play I ever saw was in a ten-cent theatre in St. ”

“ The American stage, like that of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, had regarded the picture play with disdain, and had ridiculed the possibility of its ever becoming a spirited competitor to their particular interests. To-day the American stage is engaged in a struggle for supremacy with the moving-picture theatre. The American picture producers erected huge studio-theatres, with every convenience, capable of producing any type of play demanded, and giving the author greater opportunity for effect than ever the legitimate stage could hope to offer. ”

“ The studio was a capacious one, arranged in compromise between Flick’s yearning for splendor and Tootles [22] ’ feeling for the decorative in art. At first glance, it looked like a theatrical storehouse, from which parentage most of its furnishings had found their way, so that one versed in dramatic necrology would have fancied himself on the reef of last season’s plays. The studio was lit by two windows on the street and a great, slanting skylight overhead. ”

“ It is so pleasant to labor when we are surrounded by beauty and convenience, that painters find a large and handsome studio to be an addition to the happiness of their lives, and they usually dream of it, and plan it, several years before the dream is realized.
Only a few days ago I was talking on this very subject with an intellectual friend who is not an artist, and who maintained that the love of fine studios is in great part a mere illusion. ”

“ Since I wrote you last, an awful lot has happened at the Studio in Washington, D. C. You know out where they make the Movies, the place we make them is called the Studio. We are a great deal alike in lots of respects. We make what we think will be two kinds of Pictures, Comedy and Drama, or sad ones. Now you take the Capitol at Washington, that’s the biggest Studio in the World. We call ours, Pictures, when they are turned out. They call theirs Laws, or Bills. It’s all the same thing. We often make what we think is Drama, but when [Pg 324] it is shown it is received by the audience as Comedy. ”

“ Don’t go very often. More in Lillian than one suspects.”
Mr. Cohan gave himself time to digest Mr. Rennie’s outburst, and then went on with the rehearsal.
* * * * *
Inevitable the parting of the ways. Though the last word as to modern equipment, the new studio merely chilled. That atmosphere of an old manse that had prevailed at 11 East Fourteenth Street, did not abide in the concrete and perfect plumbing and office-like dressing rooms at East 175th Street. The last word in motion picture studios brought Biograph no luck. ”

“ There are two other parts of the motion picture industry, just as big, and just as important, as production.
One of them is selling or renting the films to the theater-owners who project them on the screens of their movie-palaces the world over. This is known as the distributing end of the business. There are great nation-wide organizations, sometimes embracing a number of associated producing companies, that are formed for the purpose of carrying it on. ”

“ The majority of American directors whose work has been considered in this book know just how to achieve proper balance in their pictures. They know where the work of the author ends and that of the scenic artist begins. No director worthy of serious consideration in an American studio today permits his dramatic scenes to be sacrificed to make way for masterpieces of pictorial background. ”

“ On entering the studio of a modern successful artist one has to pinch oneself to make sure one is not in a bric-à-brac establishment where spoils from all the curiosity shops in Europe have been tumbled together in view of a quick sale. There is none of the impressive space and concentration of purpose that one felt in the old ascetic studio with its hard north light, its aged painting table, its few seriously thought-out pictures, and its shoals of preparatory drawings and sketches. ”

“ But they all came from one throat, and my work is completed along this line—Will you please lock up the films, the phonograph, and my records in your film vault, until I send for them; through Mr. Holloway?”
The criminologist arose and walked into the deserted studio, from whence the company had long since departed for belated slumbers. He picked up three bricks which lay in a corner of the big studio, and placed them gently into his grip. The manager and the camera man observed this with blank amazement, as he locked it and put the key into his pocket. ”

“ In order that the writer or painter may not be disturbed by the sound of a piano, the composers' studios are as isolated as possible. All the studios have open fireplaces and pleasant verandahs and are furnished simply but always attractively. Each studio has been planned for its own particular site. Some are hidden in the woods, some command views of Monadnock or East Mountain, and some long vistas through the trees.
In order that the working day may be long and uninterrupted, at noon a basket lunch is left at each studio. Dinner is the time for relaxation and social intercourse. ”