Case History Of A Movie

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APR 2 1977

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FEB 091987
JUNU198?

Case History
of a Movie

The grips move the camera:
Head Grip Leo Monlon at left.

BY DORE SCHARY

AS TOLD TO

CHARLES PALMER

RANDOM HOUSE -NEW YORK

CopyrigH&"295P by Loew's Incorporated
First Printing

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in New York
by Random House, Inc., and simultaneously in Toronto, Canada,
by Random House of Canada, Limited.

The author wishes to thank the New York Times Magazine

and The Hollywood Reporter for permission

to use material which appears in the final chapter of this book.

Manufactured in the United States of America
Designer: Ernst Reichl

CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

FOR MIRIAM

GENERAL CONTENTS

FOREWORD, XIX

PART ONE: The Story and the Script, i
PART TWO: Preparation -for Production, 37
PART THREE: Shooting the Picture, 81
PART FOUR: Finishing the Picture, 167
APPENDIX: Crew, Credits and

Cast Of THE NEXT VOICE YOU HEAR, 240

CONTENTS

PART ONE: The Story and the Script

1 MOVIES A collaborative art, 3

2 THE STORY SOURCE, 5

The Germ idea. Studio Story Departments; 'what ele-
ments they seek in a story -for -filming.

3 THE PRODUCER, 11

Who the producer is and 'what he does. Converting a
writable story idea to a filmable idea. "Sure-fire" picture
projects versus gambles. The executive's -function. Buy-
ing the story.

4 PLANNING THE ADAPTATION, 17

Expanding a skeleton "approach" idea into a detailed
treatment. Some philosophy of the film medium, and
what a picture story demands pom the writer.

5 WRITING THE TREATMENT, 22

The story -construction process. Laying out a picture for
controlled-cost production.

6 THE SCREENWRITER AND THE SCRIPT, 27

Converting and expanding a Treatment into a detailed
screenplay; problems and processes. Sideline considera-
tions Legal . . . Censorship . . . foreign Markets.

PART TWO: f reparation for Production

7 CASTING THE PICTURE, 39

New-talent discovery and development. The economic
background of high star salaries. "Marquee draw" Stars
versus new -faces, a. policy decision. Cast "readings" and
tests. Casting the feature parts and

Xli CONTENTS

8 THE ART DIRECTOR, 48

His red job and importance; the "how to do if 9 depart-
ment. The set meeting, Set design the designer's ap-
proach; cost of sets, their "spirit" Other Preparations:
Make-up. Wardrobe and costume design. Publicity plan-
ning; determining the exploitation approach to the pic-
ture.

9 THE PRODUCTION DEPARTMENT, 56

The Unit Manager. A prime cost; the number of days
before the camera. Overhead costs. Breaking down the
script: master scenes . . . sequences. The shooting sched-
ule: reasons for shooting scenes out of story continuity.
The Assistant Director. Footage estimators. The budget
meeting. How pre-production preparation combats soar-
ing costs.

10 THE DIRECTOR PREPARATION WORK, 70

The director's -function; transferring a story -from words
to images. His preparation activities. Cast rehearsals.
Script changes , interpretations, and additions. Directorial
"touches" bits of business. The final reading with the
producer. Green light.

PART THREE: Shooting the Picture

11 THE CAMERA STARTS TURNING, 83

The first morning. How a stage comes up to speed. The
crew members and what they do. Prelimnary set light-
ing. Camera rehearsals. Stand-ins and doubles. The takes
(a master shot). The still cameraman. Lunch break; the
commissary.

12 THE MEN OF THE CREW, 93

Grips, and grip work. Electricians, and some principles
of set lighting. Greensmen, and nursery work. Props
and prop men*

CONTENTS XH1

13 THE CAMERA KEEPS TURNING, 101

First afternoon. A typical dramatic scene. Verbatim
script. The actor's "attitude" and "objective" in the
scene. Movement and physical business. The director's
'work on the set. "Pickup shots" closeups and supple-
mentary angles. "Matching" problems; the Script Super-
visor. Planning tomorrow's work; the Work Order. The
Second Assistant md the "Three O'Clock Report"
Wrapping up the day's work. Night crews.

14 ANOTHER STAGE DAY, in

More on direction; examples of weaving a picture . . .
developing running gags, and character business. The
Eacklot Shops and Services: Carpenter Shop . . . Sign
Shop . . . Paper Props . . . Painters . . . Rubber Room
. . . Plastics . . . "Staff" (Plaster) . . . Modeling (Sculp-
tors) . . . Leather Shop . . . Gun Room . . . Glass
Blower. Miscellaneous Shops in Property Department
and Electrical. "Prop Shop" tricks, gags, and effects;
invention and operation. Stage 'weather: rain and snow.

15 LOCATION SHOOTING, 125

How it differs from working inside the stages. Typical
outdoor scenes; shooting routine. Location lunches. 'Back-
ground action. A night location. The wrap-up.

1 6 INSIDE THE STAGES, 132

Routine and equipment. The sets spotting . . . costs
. . . dressing . . . construction. Extra and atmosphere
players. Problem shots: a corridor scene. The director's
between-shots routine. The sound crew on stage.

17 ILLUSION EXPERTS, 141

Second-unit shooting; stunt work . . . process plates.
Moving backgrounds; rear-projection process. Scenic
backgrounds, painted drops. Fractional backgrounds;
Newcombe process. Montage, and the principle of juxta-

XIV CONTENTS

position. Models and miniatures. Optical effects. The
lab.

1 8 THE LAST DAY, 160

The final rush. Added shots and pickups. The "dailies"
(rushes). Night shooting on a Backlot "standing street"
The last wrap-up.

PART FOUR: Finishing the Picture

19 THE SEVEN MAJOR FINISHING

OPERATIONS, overview, 169

20 CUTTING AND EDITING THE PICTURE, 171

Quarters and tools. Theory of editing^ and some practi-
cal principles. Face and tempo trims . . . overlaps . . .
reaction cutting. Assembling a scene for maximum effect;
a cut-by-cut example. The "first rough-cut"

21 POST-PRODUCTION PHOTOGRAPHY

AND SOUND, 184

Added shots and retakes. "Inserts" Dialogue dubbing
and "looping" Sound effects building effects tracks
from stock . . . a special effects recording session.

22 MUSIC RE-RECORDING "OPTICALS," 195

Background music scoring; certain possibilities and limi-
tations. The composers work. A recording session. Re-
recording: Combining the separate tracks . . . a session
. . . typical problems and answers. Opticals: Cuts, dis-
solves, and fades; the fil?rfs punctuation. With some re-
marks on fundamental film construction.

23 SNEAK PREVIEW, 205

Why preview a picture? The overly "pro" theater. A
really secret preview -for a true cross-section reaction.
The house lights go down; how the makers feel. Spot
audience reactions restlessness, unwelcome laughs, "re-
lief* laughs, no laughs. What constitutes an "audience"?
The reactions: preview cards . . . analyzing the results.

CONTENTS XV

24 "PRINT AND SHIP," 217

The check-up preview. Final changes in the film. De-
partmental wrap-ups. Exploitation planning. Turnover to
New York (distribution headquarters). Sales planning.
The big break the picture gets its key booking. The
producer's own wrap-up.

25 THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE THE MOVIES, 225

ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE 112

Nancy Davis awaits her fate at her audition reading. From left: Director
Bill Wellman, Producer Dore Senary and co-star James Whitmore.

Pre-production cast rehearsal. Director Wellman indicates action for his
stars on the set diagram.

The first scene on the schedule: Joe, young Johnny and Mary Smith at
breakfast.

A painted scenic backing reproduces the location exterior as seen from
Joe Smith's front door.

Assistant cameraman checks focus for a close shot.

Director Wellman gets in close to work out the shading of an intimate
emotional scene.

The locker-room cast work out the scene while the set is being lighted.

Working out the action on a location exterior.

A typical stage crew at work.

Grips move a section of "wild wall" out of camera field.

Associate Art Director Eddie Imazu checks the model of the "Ext. Bran-
nan Back Yard" set.

Electricians handle the lights; grips supply the shade. Head Grip Leo
Monlon at far left; Gaffer Chet Philbrick in center.

Set Decorator Ralph Hurst seems to be in the wrong Prop Room for
The Next Voice.

An actor's-eye view of the stage sound crew: Boom Man Fred Faust and
Mixer Conrad Kahn.

"I cooked up something today. See what you think of it," Dore Senary,
Eddie Imazu and Bill Wellman.

Lunch on location.

The Smith family: Joe, Mary, and young Johnny.

FOREWORD

I have always wanted to do a book which would state realis-
tically and in detail how a motion picture is made. I had
reserved this plan for some time in the future, when other
men will be doing the work I am now doing, and when I
would be able to look back and reflect on the enjoyable
effort of most of my lifetime.

However, the making of the film, The Next Voice You
Hear, was so stimulating that it propelled me into attempt-
ing this job long before I actually had the full time to do it.
Help came along in the form of one Charles Palmer, an ex-
perienced, capable writer who tackles his assignments with
the wide-eyed enthusiasm of an apprentice who has just
sold his first byline to the local gazette. "Cap" (for his
initials) shares my enthusiasm for films, knows his way
around the studios, and has skill and experience with the
printed word. He was willing to take on this collaborative
and "as told to" assignment, and I am delighted he did,
because even though I have not been able to write all of
this book, it is exactly the way I would have wanted to
write it. Cap did most of the putting together of the words
from notes taken at sessions we had during free hours in
the morning, or at night, or on Sundays; from some articles
I had worked on; some speeches I had made; from my own
dictated comments and handwritten scrawls and finally,
from his own keen eye and his own talent.

DORE SCHARY

PART ONE

The Story and the Script

1

We had just previewed a picture out at the pleasant little
Bay Theatre in Pacific Palisades. Afterward the people
from the studio were gathered out front under the lighted
marquee. There was the usual relieved kidding and con-
gratulations and cross-talk that follows a successful showing.
The two new stars who had just been born were the targets
of everyone's friendly curiosity.

But my own eyes drifted to a drab, unobtrusive object
sitting on the curb waiting for a pickup car to take it back
to the studio. It looked like an octagonal galvanized film
can, battered and fringed with the shreds of old shipping
labels, but actually it was a sort of jewel box. In it were the
days and nights, the thought and sweat of a lot of wonder-
ful people; in it were the hopes and fears and perhaps the
careers of those people. There were new homes and the
means for sending boys and girls to college. And in it, too,
were the images which, when threaded through the projec-
tors of the world, would bring entertainment and pleasure,
perhaps a new emotional experience, perhaps even a change
of heart to many millions of people, perhaps to you.

Now and in the foreseeable future, images on films are
going to be a principal influence on our hearts and emotions
and minds. We ought to know more about it. And so I want
to tell you the step-by-step story of exactly how a feature
motion picture is made, from the author's germ idea to the
floodlit premiere.

A CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

The film in that octagonal can happened to be the work-
print of a picture called The Next Voice You Hear. It is
a very simple picture, almost "basic," and all the steps and
functions of film production stand out clearly. By seeing
how this one picture was made we can get a pretty good
idea of how all pictures are made.

More than any other form of art or entertainment, movies
are of the people, by the people and for the people. "Of"
in the sense of being about people, real people, whom au-
diences recognize as true; "for" in the sense that the picture
truly exists only when it is being viewed by the people of
the audience; and "by" in the sense that any one picture is
a sum total of the minds and muscles of a great many con-
tributors.

A painting or a statue or a book is usually a one-man pro-
duction. But a movie script is more like the score of a sym-
phony. The written notes of the symphony mean little
until men play them in concert, and a movie script can be
transferred from the paper to the screen only by the crea-
tive contributions of many hard-working and talented men
and women. The motion picture is the most collaborative
of all the arts.

And this collaboration goes all the way; for a picture
takes on its full dimension only when it is being shown to
an audience. A picture is a chronicle of emotion, and that
emotion is half on the screen and half in the response of
the people who see it, the people who identify themselves
with it as it unfolds. The audience is the Pygmalion which
brings the celluloid Galatea to life.

Therefore, this book is about all of us. We, the makers;
you, the audience.

The starting point of a story, any story, from Humpty
Dumpty to War and Peace, is somebody's idea; a germ idea
which somebody considers promising enough to justify the
effort of filling and fleshing and building it out into a form
ready for the public's judgment. Perhaps you're right to
start the project, perhaps you're wrong; you won't find
out for sure until later. At the idea stage, you think it's good
and you will of necessity go through the same steps with
the same fervor for a great success as for a resounding flop.
Like raising a child.

The germ ideas which grow into motion pictures are
often very simple. Usually they can be expressed in the
length of a telegram. And usually they come from simple
beginnings. The trick is to recognize them.

One noontime in the spring of 1948, in Wilmington,
Delaware, author George Sumner Albee was lunching
with a Dr. Morris. The two men got to chatting about the
state of the world, particularly man's misuse of certain scien-
tific miracles. Something suddenly struck Albee funny;
he grinned and remarked that one of these miracles might
be used to advantage. "You know," he said, "wouldn't it
be something if God would come on the radio and give
people such a bad scare they'd wake up and behave them-
selves!" Morris laughed and, over coffee, the two of them
dreamed up a lot of miracles which might do the waking.
But it wasn't until a few evenings later that Albee recog-

6 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

nized it as the germ idea of a story. He was spending
the evening in New York with his friend Dale Eunson, fic-
tion editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine, and ribbing Eunson
pleasantly about the reluctance of magazines to print stories
with originality. "For instance?" Eunson challenged. Albee
hesitated a second, then remembered the conversation about
God coming on the radio. "We'd use that," said Eunson.
"You write it and we'll buy it." Fortunately, Albee then
caught a cold which sent him to bed for four days and gave
him time to think out the story. The time seems short, but
the germ idea was so lucidly simple and concise that it did
not need complicated plotting, only to be dressed with
incident and circumstance. Albee's literary agent read the
manuscript and said it was so bad she would not even sub-
mit it to the magazine editors. But by now Albee was so
confident that the story said something which needed saying
that he got himself a new agent, breaking a friendship of a
decade in the process, and transmitted the story to Dale
Eunson. Cosmopolitan bought the story the next morning,
and ran it in their issue of August, 1948.

Albee deposited the check, said thanks to various readers
who said pleasant things about the story, and figured that
was probably that. He thought of a film sale, naturally, but
several important incidents of the story such as the sinking
of the continent of Australia presented such obvious tech-
nical difficulties that a movie seemed out of the question.
However, the simple fact of publication of the story had
started certain wheels in motion.

One set of these wheels was housed on the opposite side
of the continent, in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Admin-
istration Building. The studios c.over about seventy-five

THE STORY AND THE SCRIPT 7

acres in Culver City, California, a few miles southwest of
Hollywood on the flatlands down toward the beach. They
don't look particularly romantic: the massed ranks of the
twenty-five stages look more like huge warehouses, their
windowless walls rising like gray stucco cliffs above the
thirteen miles of narrow concrete streets enclosed within
the boundary fences. Around the core of stages are the long
open-shed scene docks, the wooden lofts and corrugated-
iron shacks of the shop colony, a lake-like "tank" where
half of a tramp steamer is moored next to a Roman galley.
The Administration Building, four stories of white con-
crete set in green lawn, is located at the east end of the pro-
duction lot and is known because of its air-conditioning
system as the Iron Lung. In its four hundred offices are
housed the company executives, the lawyers, the several
producers, the writers, and Kenneth MacKenna's Story
Department, to which in June of 1 948 as a matter of every-
day routine came the advance proof of the Cosmopoli-
tan issue containing The Next Voice You Hear. Dorothy
Pratt sifted through the morning's grist on her desk and
.assigned the story to one of the fifteen story analysts in
her department. The analyst drew off a synopsis, put down
a personal opinion, and relayed the file along the corridor
to editor Marjorie Thorson. J

v These synopses are designed to capture the producer's
interest and give him the essential bones of the stories: they
provide the only means by which an executive can even
begin to cover the field in the hours (usually the late night
hours) he can set aside for his reading. When a synopsis
intrigues him he calls for the original book or story or play
and reads it in full. Often our reader's synopsis, particularly

8 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

of a long novel, is better than the original for our purposes;
crisper, the story line cleaner, and the characters standing
out in sharper relief.

Most Metro readers and sub-editors come to the studio
direct from college, where they had majored in literature
and achieved a sufficient fluency in at least one language to
read foreign story material in the original. All of them have
broad human interests and good cultural backgrounds; most
of them have traveled. Readers are paid from sixty-five
dollars to one hundred twenty-five dollars per week, and
in the course of a single year they and their counterparts
in the Loew's offices in New York, Paris and London synop-
size almost twenty-five thousand pieces of material. Since
they read much of it in publishers' advance proofs, they
know long ahead of time how the magazine serials come
out.

Strangely, despite the avalanche of plays and novels and
magazine stories and manuscript "screen originals," it is not
easy to find the thirty to fifty stories on which the studio
must build its year's production. The fact is, when we buy
a story we virtually open up a new business in which we
will invest a capital of from several hundred thousand dol-
lars up to three or four million. Therefore we ask quite a
lot from a story before we buy it.

First of all, a story must be "for us".^it must fit our pro-
gram, permit practical casting, and generally be ready to
go^But it must also havdwide appeal^to all kinds of people,
it must be^adaptable to visual tellings-contain fresh pictorial
elements to satisfy the audience eye, must be built around
strong and intriguing characters (preferably with a good
part for one of our contract stars), permit telling on the
screen in not much more than ninety minutes, be non-topi-

THE STORY AND THE SCRIPT 9

cal enough not to "date" before we get our investment
back. And it must sparkle with enough of that intangible
called showmanship to make millions of people hurry
through their dinners on a rainy night and park too far from
an overcrowded theatre because they just can't wait an-
other day. This is an ideal, I'll admit, but we always try for
the brass ring.

Oddly, the Story Department does not so much buy
stories as "sell" them that is, bring them to the attention
of the studio's producers who must select stories for the
pictures they make. When the synopsis on Next Voice came
down the line, the editors were sufficiently intrigued to
read the whole version; which, since the original was a short
story, was attached in full. When they had read it they
found themselves tantalized, because any story which
caught their interest so sharply would surely have a chance
to catch the interest of the millions outside. But they had to
admit that the conversion of the story to the screen offered
great difficulties, and when the producers who had seen the
synopsis agreed, the story was regretfully shelved.

This took place a month or so before I came into Metro
as head of Production. It happened that I came across Next
Voice independently, in a copy of Cosmopolitan which I
picked up to read on the train coming home from New
York. My reaction was the same as that of the editors: I
loved the idea and didn't know how to do it. When I
checked in at the studio I talked the story over with Ken-
neth MacKenna and we decided to try to buy it anyway,
gambling on the chance that we could find a way to beat
the problem. But the price turned out to be higher than we
thought we should invest on such a long shot, and the proj-
ect went on the shelf the second time, apparently for good,

10 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

That was in September of 1948. I thought of the story
off and on for the next year, with a lack of ideas which
began to grow embarrassing. Then one morning it broke
open.

The term "producer" has many meanings in Hollywood.
I will be talking here about only the real producers, the
men who truly contribute to their pictures and to the in-
dustry, who try to do a job rather than hold one. Even so,
the species has many variations.

\Some producers, like Sam Goldwyn, own their own
studios. Others, like Hal Wallis, are semi-independent, in
that they own their own production companies but use the
physical facilities, distribution services, and often the financ-
ing of the major companies. Most producers, however, are
employees of a large studio who carry the management
responsibility for individual pictures. ^

In essence, a producer is a man who starts with an idea or
hope and ends with a completed picture ready for the
screen. The idea may be an actual germ of a new story, or
it may be the obstinate belief that an existing property like
The Next Voice You Hear can somehow be made into a
successful movie.

The public has heard of a few producers like Selznick,
Zanuck, Goldwyn and DeMille, but except for a lot of bad
jokes they have only the foggiest idea of what a producer
really does. Actually it's not at all mysterious>He's the
"head man" of a given film enterprise. It is the producer who
hires or assigns the writer, the director and the other varied
talent, and, acting as founder and general manager of the
project, guides and co-ordinates these talents until he comes

12 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

out at the far end with a film sufficiently alluring and satis-
fying to a worldwide audience to bring its investment
back with a profit.\Sometimes a less active routine is fol-
lowed, in which case our hero becomes an ex-producer,
often very swiftly. Usually he is a rather positive character
and his pictures will all tend to reflect a "point of view"
which becomes his style. I've noticed a common denomina-
tor in all of the successful producers: they all love the ac-
tual routine of making pictures; in fact, they're usually a
little stagestruck.

Usually, the producer's only hobby is the picture busi-
ness, if only because that's all he has time for. He can never
admit that there is such a word as "final": he is constantly
re-examining everything about his project, eternally looking
for those minor improvements which may add up to make
an adequate picture into a good or great one. Unfortunately,
this process is not self-stopping upon the completion of the
picture, and he is probably a little unhappy about every-
thing he has ever done.

I've mentioned that I had not been able to get that Next
Voice story idea out of my mind. It was a superb story
for a magazine; the printed story happens in the reader's
imagination, it plays before your mind's eye and you can
alter the imaginary image to suit your own taste^But a movie
plays before your physical eye, and we can show you only
one picture at a time and that picture must have specific
reality^Those intriguing miracles of Albee's the sinking of
the continent of Australia, the growing of angel's wings
on the atheists, etc. just wouldn't work on the screen.
The sinking of Australia on film would obviously be a
"special effects" miniature sequence, and the actual photo-
graph of feathered wings growing on some of our actors

THE STORY AND THE SCRIPT 13

would just be funny. But above and beyond these matters
of mechanics, I felt very strongly that the God I wor-
ship wouldn't perform this particular kind of miracle; he
wouldn't flaunt his power, he wouldn't humiliate his chil-
dren. I felt that, for film, the story should be built around
a wholly different kind of miracle. I didn't know what
kind.

And there was another problem: a very serious problem
of dramatics. The printed story began with the effect of
God's radio words on the members of one family, but as
the events of the story progressed the first characters were
left behind and new characters were touched on, until at
the end the cast included the population of the world.

In the magazine it was very effective. But we have found
from long experience, some of it unhappy, that the core of
a successful picture is its characters. From beginning to end,
the film must follow the fortunes of one, two or three peo-
ple about whom the audience is sure to feel strongly, and
it's best that the audience be sympathetic, that they love the
people and perhaps identify themselves with them and be
glad when things turn out well for them in the end. In
the words of the old industry bromide, to which you, the
audience, always demands a satisfying answer, "who will
we be rooting for?" Again, I didn't know.

Then one night, a year after the story had been shelved,
a tantalizing shadow of an idea drifted into my mind. I
couldn't pin it down, but the next morning I woke up about
six with the story still in my mind and feeling as though it
were about to break. There seemed to be a clue in a parallel
situation of some years ago when I had read Paul Gallico's
Joe Smith, American and been equally puzzled about how to
convert it into a picture. We had found a way to lick that

14 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

problem; if I could recapture that old thought process per-
haps the same approach would beat this one. I kept thinking
about Joe Smith, Joe Smith . . . We've got to bring this
cosmic thing down to simple terms, a real story about real
people to whom God will seem real. . . .

Then came the break. Why not let God speak on the
radio to Joe Smith himself? Give Joe the same kind of a
wife and son he had in the earlier picture, the same typical
middle-class American environment, the same petty annoy-
ances that would seem so big until something bigger than the
physical world came back into his life. The idea began to
shape itself, to take on color.

What about the problem of the miracles? As so often
happens, the good things in a story come when you have to
go to work and fill in the holes. Here, we'd fill in the hole
with truth, the film-story miracles would be those that had
always been around Joe but which he'd stopped noticing;
the sun and the moon and the rain, and growth, and the
astounding miracle of birth. Automatically, this supplied a
destination for the events in our story; the goal would be
Joe's realization. The action would be the events which
caused Joe ultimately to open his eyes to these miracles and
to learn to create for himself new mkacles of love and kind-
ness and peace.

The producer's best insurance for a long productive
life is a split personality in which the artistic is balanced by
the practical. The concept was now complete, and it had
all the qualities rieeded to make a creditable picture. But,
came the practical question could this picture go out into
the theatres and earn its living?

It would be a gamble, a very long one* It would be a

THE STORY AND THE SCRIPT 15

gamble in money and reputation. We're used to that, but
this gamble went further. Many of us in the industry have
long believed that decent people doing good things could
be made dramatically interesting and exciting, and that the
public would accept such pictures. The commercial failure
of The Next Voice could be a serious setback to that whole
point of view.

Although there is no such thing as a "sure-fire" picture,
a fact which the industry rediscovers expensively at inter-
vals, the outlook for most pictures can be estimated in the
light of our experience with past pictures of the same type
which have done well or done badly. A big western, for
example, is more or less a staple commodity. If your new one
has a fresh approach, a well-constructed story, a competent
director and proven stars, you have a fair basis for esti-
mating whether the proposed budget will be recovered
with a profit. And without profit on some pictures to bal-
ance your losses on others, you and the studio employees
who depend on you for jobs are soon going to be out of
same.

A With The Next Voice, all we had to go on were the
axioms that "message" pictures drive people away from the
theatres, and religion is poison at the box-office. We would
have both. Balancing these considerations was the convic-
tion that we could make a whale of an interesting and
exciting picture; that in the present disturbed state of the
world a lot of people needed the assurance and comfort that
this story could bring, and that if you supply a real need you
usually somehow get compensated for it. Also, any show-
man is bound to have in the back of his mind the tempting
realization that it's often the gambling pictures which make
the smashes: still fresh in my own mind was the success of

1 6 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

Battleground^ the first film to break through the latest of
the recurring taboos against pictures about war.
-jilt's part of the job of an executive to make decisions; he's
supposed to have enough experience and judgment to make
more right ones than wrong ones. And make them he must,
quickly and cleanly, resisting the temptation to draw com-
fort and protection and delay from too much counsel-
ing and temporizing. The next time you envy some highly
paid executive in the steel business or automobile manufac-
turing or the movie industry, you might remember that a
simple little "We'll do it" from him may put in motion the
spending of millions of dollars and risk the security of a lot
of people who depend on his judgment for their daily in-
come. The responsibility can be very heavy. And it gets
lonely out there on the limb.

I laid out in my own mind certain approaches to the proj-
ect which would minimize the gamble, and asked Kenneth
MacKenna to see about buying the picture rights to Mr.
Albee's original story. Our New York office wired that they
could get together with the literary agent on price. Schary
the executive took a deep breath, hoped he was right, and
said to Schary the producer, "We'll do it."

There was a wonderful old vaudeville act in which the solo
actor played several parts, the gimmick being that when
he changed characters he changed hats. The producer in
pictures has a hat rack that will stack up against anybody's,
and probably the hat he uses most often if the one labeled
Salesman.

The author sells the original story once. The producer
sells it many, many times. For example, the fundamental
picture which I had in mind, the approach which might
justify the gamble, would stand or fall on the director. The
slightest touch of staginess would ruin the picture; every
move and word of Joe Smith and everybody around him
would have to be utterly real. And the picture would have
to be pushed through on a shooting schedule so short that
most "quality" directors would consider it impossible. I
wanted Bill Wellman. We had worked together very
happily on Battleground: pictures all the way from Wings
and A Star Is Born proved him a magnificent director of
realism. He's a rabid family man, feels things deeply, and is
completely honest. Billy has great ability and experience in
the business, and is a man of enormous enthusiasm: if he
would catch fire on the idea and agree to gamble his repu-
tation on a short schedule, we'd be well along. I asked him
to come up to the office.

He sat down by the desk, fixed me with a skeptical blue
eye, and the butterflies which always live in producers'

1 8 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

stomachs began to beat their wings. I opened, "Billy, I've
got a notion . . ." and gave him the nub of the idea. For-
tunately, there's a lot of Joe Smith in Wellman's personal
philosophy. He got the idea before I had finished telling it
and characteristically shoved his whole pile of chips out
into the middle of the table. The butterflies took a short
nap.

Now the bare idea would have to be built up into a
rounded story, and then into a detailed screen play which
Wellman could shoot. How would it be done? Well, you
can't pin down the creative process into a step-by-step
routine in the germ stage of a story; you take what your
subconscious flips up to the surface and put the pieces to-
gether. But you do know, from experience, what pieces you
need to put together into a story structure.
v We had the central situation-^"God talks on the radio."
Our theme flowed logically out of that. "If everybody
behaved well toward each other we'd drive out envy, hate
and contempt, and be a lot better off." We had our charac-
ters a father, mother and young son of a typical "Joe
Smith, American" family. Our physical locale flowed nat-
urally from the characters an FHA bungalow with a
mortgage, a neighborhood to suit, an aircraft plant where
Joe worked, and so on. All this was raw material for the
events which would have to be invented to bring the
theme home to the characters and fulfill the purpose of
the story.

We also had our problems. Somehow we had to fill
the hole left by eliminating the sensational miracles of the
printed story. We'd fill it with the "everyday miracles"
which the story would bring our characters to see and
realize. We needed a structure, a physical plan in which

THE STORY AND THE SCRIPT 19

the events of the story would be arranged: Mr. Albee's
printed story had been divided into the seven days of
the Biblical Creation, and the same plan would work out
splendidly for us. But there was still the problem of the
Voice.

People frequently ask, "Why do the movies always
change the stories they buy?" Well, we don't, unless we
have to. We would dearly love to film books and plays and
printed stories exactly as they are; we'd save a great deal of
money in script cost and have some time for golf. But it just
isn't possible. OftentimeSf^inportant segments of the story
which were very effective in the original medium simply
don't come off when you take pictures of them. It isn't quite
true that, "You can't take a picture of a thought," but obvi-
ously the film medium is a visual one. The crux is;Vfilm is
specific; everybody who looks at a screen sees exactly the
same picture and hears exactly the same words;Our dilemma
about how to handle the Voice illustrated one facet of the
problem.

In the printed story, God's Voice spoke and the charac-
ters heard it: you read the words the Voice spoke and you
heard it, too. But you heard it in your imagination, and so
it could be a wonderful Voice that was fitting to the way
you think of God. Your neighbor "heard" an entirely dif-
ferent Voice. But what happens when we carry the same
thing over into the film medium? First, we would have to
hire an actor to impersonate the Voice of God. This would
rightly be considered presumptuous and irreverent. It
would also sound completely phony. Of course, we could
put the actor's voice through filters and reverberation
chambers, underscore it with ethereal music, superimpose
clouds over the radio set and so on through the whole bag

2O CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

of tricks. But we all felt, from our varied religious points
of view, that this picture had no place for tricks or devices.
There was only one logical conclusion to us: we would
never actually hear the Voice.

At first glance it would seem that this pulled the key-
stone out of the whole structure. But again the lash of ne-
cessity compelled new thinking which worked out to the
advantage of the picture. We would capitalize our disad-
vantage by inventing action which would prevent us from
hearing the Voice, and try to make that action so interesting
that the audience would never feel we were ducking the
issue. Of course, we would have to invent a different piece
of voice-blocking action for each one of the seven nights
and here, ready-made, was our "floor plan" the starting
point for our story thinking.

This was in November of 1949. 1 had to go to New York
for the opening of Battleground, and by the time I got back
home the idea was filling out into the shape of a story. The
subconscious had come up with good visual reasons for not
hearing the Voice on the first and second nights, and also on
the last night which, added the fleshing-out process, would
logically take place in a crowded church. The "everyday
miracle" which would pervade the story could be only one
the miracle of birth. Joe's and Mary's baby would be
born on the seventh night, and the birth would contribute
the climax of the picture.

Now, although there was much left to do, the destination
had come out in the clear and the road to it was apparent.
It was time for me to call in a screen writer. For the record,
it should be stated that the writer generally comes on a
project at a much earlier stage. But I earned my living at
the craft for a long time, and on a picture which I produce

THE STORY AND THE SCRIPT 21

personally I can't conscientiously start a writer on salary
until I have set up a story line I know will work. I asked
Milton Beecher, who handles our salaried writers, to check
on the availability of a young man named Charles Schnee.

There is no such thing as a typical screen writer except
in cartoons, but Charlie Schnee is reasonably representative.
Contrary to the cartoons, his coat and trousers usually
match, but he does wear the characteristic horn-rimmed
glasses and goes in for strange shoes. Typically, he got into
the profession of screen writing by accident; he graduated
from Yale Law School in 1939, and while waiting for the
results of his bar exams, wrote a play. I wanted him for this
picture because he's a fellow with great feeling and this
would be a highly emotional story. I have found also that he
stimulates my own thinking in a conference, stirs me up,
and I knew that he was secure enough in his job to call
things as -he saw them rather than accept a bad idea because
the producer thought it was great. Also we had him under
contract and he was approaching the finish of his current
assignment.

Just before Thanksgiving I called Charlie up to the office.
I said, "I've got a notion, see what you think. . . ." and I
told him the idea of God speaking on the radio, the Joe
Smith adaptation, and the scattered pieces which had so far
attached themselves to the story. Charlie wiped away a tear
at the finish, but I wasn't too sold because Charlie's capacity
for feeling deeply sometimes makes him cry at card trick^
I asked him to think about it for the next three days in pa
general way.

He dropped in for a minute or two in mid-week to say

THE STORY AND THE SCRIPT 23

that it felt good and he'd like to take on the assignment.
At the end of the week he came in for a meeting with his
first ideas for building out the story.

It was pretty well established by now that the emotional
line of the story would be fear, mortal fear which would key
the reawakening of our characters to the freedom from fear
which awaits them in God. So Charlie's ideas tended to dem-
onstrate that theme. He had thought of Johnny, the young
son, becoming frightened and running away. In a search for
conflict and a means for causing fear in Joe, he had thought
of the factory foreman character, Mr. Brannan. He was
exploring the idea of a fear that Mary's pregnancy would
end in trouble (which later turned out as the false-labor
incident), and he wondered about the notion of bringing
in a temptation for Joe, which later developed into the bar
sequence. Between us, we now had the incidents for each
of the seven nights which would prevent the actual hearing
of the Voice. Lucy Ballentine, my top secretarial assistant,
brought her book into the office and we dictated the first
approach to what the Voice would say each night.

A week later Charlie came out to the house in the eve-
ning. The projectionist ran off the 1941 Joe Smith, Ameri-
can to refresh us on the characters and circumstances. Mrs.
Schary urged Jill, Joy and Jeb off to bed, Lucy got out her
book, and we started pinning down the story. A columnist
later said the story was written in three hours. It was dic-
tated in three hours; there's a vast difference.

When a writer spends several weeks on an assignment
without turning in a page and then sets the whole story
down on paper in a few days, he is not necessarily guilty
of high-priced loafing. And often when a writer says, "It's
all finished except for the writing," he is not trying to be

24 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

funny. The whole story or play or picture has been worked
out in his mind and needs only to be copied down on the
paper.

This one evening at the house was simply the crystalliza-
tion of a year's thinking, some of it conscious and a lot of it
that wonderful free ride which the subconscious mind gives
to a project which locks its interest. But the final dictation
went with the smoothness that often blesses the truly simple
story; we filled our need for some physical manifestation
of God's power with the idea of the on-cue rainstorm, and
at one o'clock in the morning Lucy closed her book. We
sat around for a while in the den, with that pleasantly
drained feeling which follows a tense run, talked a little
about the casting of the picture, and then Charlie started
along home. I went out to his car with him and as I walked
back toward the house I looked up at the stars and had the
odd feeling that I knew them better than when I'd come
home a few short hours ago.

Two days later, over lunch in my suite at the studio
(it was frankfurters and baked beans, the luxury in this
business is fabulous) , Bill Wellman, Charlie and I read the
thirty typed pages of yellow paper which made up the
story treatment. We agreed that it would work. Bill began
to see what he could do with it in the way of directorial
touches, and went out on the limb with a guarantee that it
could be shot on a schedule so short as to be considered
fantastic. The treatment was sufficiently detailed for Charlie
to figure he could cut the time for writing the screen play
down to four weeks.

It's one thing to prepare a picture, and another to per-
suade the authorities to place it on the schedule. But Schary
the producer put the case to Schary the executive in coura-

THE STORY AND THE SCRIPT 25

geous man-to-man fashion, no holds barred, and came out
with the green light. I notified the Production Department
that we could be ready to go around March first, and to set
the picture up on their schedules.

Ostensibly because the project was a dangerous gamble,
but actually because the lot of us saw a chance to have
some professional fun, Next Voice became a test case for
reducing some of the high costs which have plagued the
industry in recent years.^ou can cut costs in one of two
general ways. One way is to reduce arbitrarily all expendi-
tures, using less of everything, including talent. The other
way is to substitute thought for moneyHDften the pleasant
result of the latter is that the goading of your ingenuity
and imagination make the picture not only cheaper but
better. If what happens between two people in a scene is
strong enough you can play it in front of a board fence,
and if you can't use money for an eye-filling set you can
go to work and build up the emotional content of the
scene.

The Next Voice was already committed to simple locales
and action. And although Charlie would write in enough
sets for visual variety^rfie would make sure that each set
backed enough of the action to buy its way into the picture.^
For example, we wouldn't plan a zoo-yard traveling shot
along a factory corridor when we could have Joe make the
same plot points while he changed his shoes in a corner
of a locker room. However, if our story had actually con-
tained important plot action that had to be played in the
expensive travel shot to put over an essential point, we'd
line it up cheerfully and without stinting. It's all a question
of values.

For certain functional purposes a silk handkerchief

2 6 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

doesn't deliver any more value than a cotton one. What
we wanted to get rid of here was waste and extravagance,
to apportion our available money to expenditures which
would go all the way through to the screen and deliver
full value to the audience.

6

Charlie Schnee took the thirty yellow pages home to con-
vert our treatment into a screen play.

The treatment, as you have seen, is simply a rough sketch
of the proposed picture: most screen originals which we
buy for filming are in treatment form. Screen writers are
constantly being asked by outside writers just how a treat-
ment should be set up, what is the proper typographical
format, how many pages should it run, and so on. The fact
is, there is no formiyou simply tell the story; who the char-
acters are, what they want, what's blocking the way, and
how they go about achieving their goalXThe proper length
is the fewest number of pages needed to make the essence
of the story clear and interesting and tabling out unmis-
takably the essential "kernel of appealy which is going to
make those millions of people hurry to the theatre to see
this particular picture. And it's expected thai the action
will be "in the medium," thought out with an eye to how
it will look and sound on the screen^ and practical to
shoot.

From the physical side, Charlie's job was now to convert
thirty pages of close-typed prose into approximately one
hundred "sides" of screen play, expressed in dialogue and
instructions. The job would call not only for creative writ-
ing talent, but for a technique equivalent to that possessed
by an architect, attorney, or other professional practitioner.

Up to this stage of a picture, some of the participants

28 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

may have been able to complete their statements with a
wave of the hand and "You see what I mean." But there
would now be no room for vagueness.
; The screen writer's first step is to reach an explicit crys-
tallization in his mind as to which character is the lead, just
what the story is about, and exactly where it is going. With
this as a backbone he now goes through his material, dis-
carding whatever does not sharply develop the characters
and move the story along the straight line to its goal, and
relating everything else to that line.

He must^nvent threads of action and reaction and "busi-
ness" to visualize those thoughts^of which we can't take
pictures and to give his characters the stuff of life, then
-weave these threads in and out of the scenes, embroidering
the straightforward progress of the plot, so that scenes
take on relationship to each other and eventually weave
into a pattern of over-all unity. He must find ways to in-
troduce his important people characteristically and memo-
rably without being obvious about it.

He must invent brief transitions to take the place of
lengthy dull sequences, and many points must be "planted."
For some reason, certain actions are funnier, more dramatic,
or whatever, if the way has been subtly prepared so that the
unexpected seems logical. In Next Voice the laugh when the
motorcycle cop catches Joe slamming back out of his drive-
way into the street is much bigger because we've already
seen Joe back out too fast before (the "plant") and we
know sometime he's going to get caught at it. And the
plant was kept from being obvious by being made funny
in itself, when Joe backed out almost into another driver and
the two yelled insults at each other like good American
motorists.

THE STORY AND THE SCRIPT , 29

Everything the screen writer does he must test against
two standards: the words "simple" and "inevitable/' He
must find economical scenes to visualize what the original
author nonchalantly disposed of with the impractical word
"gradually." He must, particularly, distill and distill and
combine and combine, until each scene of his final script has
brevity and power and quickness^telling whole pages of
dialogue in a single momentary exchangeXThe continuity
of his piece must be on the screen, not on the sound track,
if it's fully to utilize the power of the medium, and every-
thing that happens must be arranged in a logical sequence
of cause and effect so that at any point in the script he can
say, "Given these people, under these pressures, what is
happening here is inevitable."

The writer may put a job through several versions, each
one somewhat clearer and more refined, more of its non-
essentials stripped away. And the point at which he knows
his work is finished is the point at which he gets no credit
for what he has done, when the piece has been refined down
to such inevitable simplicity that the onlookers' reaction
is, "It was a soft job only one way he could possibly write
it."

The Next Voice job was more rugged than some be-
cause it would depend for a lot of its impact on intriguing
bits of circumstance and character action. That sort of thing
is harder to get hold of than the "plotty" picture where
clearly definable good guys slug it out with equally un-
mistakable bad guys for the grazing rights, West Side beer
monopoly, atom-plane plans, or the love of a good woman.
This story would happen inside peoples' minds and hearts.
On the other hand, our existing story treatment was more
than usually detailed and there were fewer holes.

30 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

Charlie decided to work at home rather than at the studio,
and he handed in the first third of the screen play at the end
of the first week. We worked on some changes, but I told
him I liked the approach and to keep on going as he was
headed. He turned in the second third eight days later, and
after a few more sessions the whole ninety-five pages
went down to the mimeographs in Edith FarrelPs Script
Department three days under his four-week deadline.

Screen writers sooner or later become resigned to the
fact that the appearance of their first draft is greeted with,
'Tine. Now we've got something to change." Which is
healthy, within reasonable limits, because every specialist
who applies his particular talent to a picture ought to "plus"
it. Wellman and I had some changes; Billy in particular had
a number of improvements later on. There were no deep
structural alterations. But before the script could be stamped
"completed" and shoved out into the stream, it had to be
scrutinized by three highly specialized departments.

While everyone else is striving to make a film authentic
in every tiny detail, Ruth de Saxe and her girls in th^ Legal
Research Department are inching methodically through the
script and planting therein a score of intentional inaccura-
cies. There is a mistaken idea that the appearance of one's
face, name, property, telephone number, or whatever, on a
theatre screen automatically entitles one after a few legal
preliminaries to a life-long pension in compensation for
this invasion of privacy. Hence, Ruth tries to make sure
that "any similarity to actual persons ... is purely coin-
cidental."

For instance, the script gave the name "Fred Brannan" to
Joe's boss, a crotchety old man and an atheist. We checked

THE STORY AND THE SCRIPT 3!

Douglas Aircraft, where the sequence would be photo-
graphed, and found that while there were some fifty
employees named "Brannon" or "Brannan" or "Brannen"
in their three local plants, none was employed as a foreman,
either on the active or inactive list. An Atlas Aircraft Com-
pany was found to be in legal existence, so we changed ours
to Ajax and made employees' badges accordingly, filling
the extras' badges with names like "Dibson" which did not
appear in any Los Angeles directories or reference books.
Then, though we cleared the name "HOPSY TOPSY" for
the repaint job on a rented Good Humor ice-cream
truck, its chimes gave trouble: the Music Department
okayed Good Humor's "Little Brown Jug" as in public
domain, but reminded us that any accompanying chords
or noodles would constitute an "arrangement," probably
protected by copyright. And the radio call letters KIH
which we thought we had invented turned out to be in use
by an Alaskan Coastal Harbor Station; the FCC finally
cleared the letters KWTA.

Though we would often like to use actual brand names
of various products to help project an atmosphere of
reality, manufacturers resent our giving a "plug" to a com-
petitor's product and theatregoers wonder if we are being
paid for the ad. Legal's list of brand names which sound
authentic but do not exist include such seemingly familiar
products as Lubeck Beer, Templeton Cigarettes, Solax film,
Barkwell Dog Food, and Chickering Tires. We recently
had to throw away a wonderful whisky label because a
real distiller liked our brand name and started using it.

There was a breakfast cereal in the Next Voice open-
ing scene which went through various stages from JOYS
to CHEERS, GUSTOS, ZESTS, TREATS and GLEES, Th$ Patent

32 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

Office^reported every name but GLEES to be registered for
use as an actual trademark. I'll never forget the reaction
of the team to that last suggestion. Charlie Schnee frowned,
I swallowed hard, and Wellman cut loose with a yelp of
pure outrage, "GLEES! What kind of a kid would eat GLEES! "
Everybody finally got together on HAPPIES, and Props
started making up the dummy boxes. Props also made up
the metal badge for the motorcycle officer, but only after
Legal had insisted on changing the lettering "Los Angeles"
to "LA" to guard against the badge getting out of the
studio into the hands of some unscrupulous person who
might open up his own police business on the strength of
it.

H To the Censorship Department, Next Voice was a brand-
new kind of problem. They have well-established standards
for judging Esther Williams bathing suits and Lana Turner
love scenes (this is generally considered by others on the
lot to be pleasant work) , but there were no precedents for
our pregnancy angle. Yet when a vital plot point requires
that your heroine have a baby seven days from your open-
ing scene, you just can't tiptoe through the tulips. There
was also a serious question about the reaction by religious
groups to our lack of formality in speaking about God.

We put both matters up to Joseph Breen, who administers
the self -policing code of the industry. He saw nothing vital
that would be offensive, if filmed with honest intent and in
good taste. But he did go on record with warnings that local
censorship boards in various parts of the country would
object to certain specific items. So we changed the words
"jerk" and "lousy," skirted specific verbal reference to
"pains," and made some other unimportant changes.

THE STORY AND THE SCRIPT 33

But it was also suggested that we eliminate Mary's cur-
tain line, when she leaves the hospital after the false labor:
"I feel like such a fool, leaving here just as big as when I
came in." We felt that line was so human and so characteris-
tic and entirely decent in its spirit that we decided to
risk trouble with local censorship boards and leave it in.
Any power of censorship has serious implications to the
whole idea of individual freedom. As a practical matter,
we bow to it a good share of the time, to prevent local
tampering with our pictures, but occasions arise when you
have to say, "This is the way it's got to be," and battle it

This credo cracked into an all-or-nothing test when we
sent the script down to Bob Vogel's International De-
partment. Bob broke down the script with the knowledge
that it might be translated into twenty-eight languages for
distribution in fifty-six foreign countries.* One of his twin
responsibilities is to make the action intelligible to people
unfamiliar with many American customs. * For instance, al-
though foreign audiences would never understand the fine
points of the baseball sequences in last year's Stratton Story ,
Bob had to make sure they would always know at least
whether our hero was doing fine or in danger. For another
instance, he asked us to change the word "tabloid" in our
script, since in Britain that is a copyrighted word which
means not a newspaper, but a certain brand of pill. But a
more serious problem is^worldwide censorshipXHe is con-
cerned with a maze of moral, religious, political, and no-
body-knows-why taboos which overflow the eight type-
written volumes on his desk.>-

Ordinarily, Vogel works up a list of changes which may

34 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

render certain objectionable bits of the picture acceptable
to various of the foreign markets. Sometimes we can amend
the American version so that it will be acceptable elsewhere;
sometimes we will shoot a given scene two ways. Obviously,
we have to re-shoot any printed material which we want a
foreign audience to read, which is why you usually see a
book or a piece of music in close-up "insert" with little or
no background.

But the foreign censorship problem on Next Voice went
far beyond the stage of minor changes. Bob had our London
office check the script with the authorities in England, the
market which would account for most of our foreign gross,
and got back the informal advice that we were, in effect,
dead. In justice, it must be admitted that the whole tempo
of British life is on a more formal basis than ours, and the
informal, intimate acceptance by Joe and Mary and Johnny
of God as a part of everyday life and conversation seemed
to them sacrilegious. Against this view there would be no
hope of compromise through "protection" shots, because
the objection went to the core of the whole story, the
characters, the theme, and the atmosphere.

This was serious. Despite the difficulty in bringing our
earnings back to this country, the British gross has in the
past usually represented our full profit on a picture. And
so we could either drop the project, or we could reinforce
our determination to drive the picture through under such
economical procedures that we would have a chance to
recover our investment from the domestic market alone.
We decided to take our chance on the domestic gross.

On February 2nd the script covers were changed from
"temporary" blue to "hit the road" yellow. There would be
changes, on the usual vari-colored revisibn pages >

THE STORY AND THE SCRIPT 35

the only way to freeze a script is to freeze your mind but
the changes from here on would not affect the production
flow. The Accounting Department assigned Production
Number 1488, and the trim little messenger girls spread
out from the Script Department with the 115 mimeo-
graphed copies of the screenplay which would automati-
cally set in motion the complicated machinery of producing
a movie.

PART TWO

Preparation for Production

7

The distribution of the yellow-covered scripts placed the
picture officially in the hands of the Production lot. But
there were still some limbs to be crawled out on over on
the Executive side. The riskiest limb involved a policy deci-
sion on casting would we cast Joe and Mary with stars or
unknowns?

Sixty percent of all movie tickets are bought "to see my
favorite star." Even adult moviegoers of real discrimination
deduce from the name of the star what general type of
film an unfamiliar title probably represents. For good or
ill, the demand of the American public has brought the star
system into being. A young extra gets a few feet of film in
Pilot No. $, people write in to ask his name, we give him a
bit or two and the mail increases, and Peter Lawf ord moves
from obscurity toward the star list.

Contrary to a general impression, we do not have the
power to pick up just anybody from a gas pump or perfume
counter and make him or her into a star. Of course we can
teach a girl to act, to dress, and all the rest of it, but if she
didn't happen to be born with that indefinable twist of
personality which "jumps off the screen and takes hold of
you," nothing we can do will make the public buy tickets
to a picture mostly because she's in it.

Since 1924 when Loew's bought the Goldwyn plant and
engaged Mr. Mayer to manage their Metro production
company, M-G-M has followed the policy of growing its

40 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

own stars from seed rather than buying them after they
have hit. Today blonde, crisp Lucille Ryman is the gateway
to tomorrow's star material. To her office come tips, photos,
recommendations, and applications from literally every-
where including a crop of letters from lame-duck senators
after each election. She even holds open auditions, and a
youngster who shows any promise of having that person-
ality spark will be turned over to dramatic coach Lillian
Burns for development. The newcomer will be coached
in drama, voice, dancing,^ deportment, eurythmics,^ dress,
makeup, manners, and personal conduct, and when she is
adjudged ready the studio will risk fifteen hundred dollars
or more on a screen test. Only a fortunate few of these kids
break through and become known, because that personality
spark is rare. Nevertheless, this department has brought
along such engaging and profitable stars as Elizabeth Tay-
lor, Lana Turner, Kathryn Grayson, June Allyson, Esther
Williams, Van Johnson, Dean Stockwell, Ava Gardner and
Janet Leigh. A manufacturing business would probably
call this their New Product Development division, and
while it is expensive it protects future earnings.

You may think this odd at first glance, but our problem
on Next Voice had very little to do with the fact that the
casting of recognized stars would add twenty-five percent
to the cost of the picture. Stars are a very practical form of
insurance; they protect our investment in a film, a fact
which accounts for some of the seemingly ridiculous sala-
ries. This certainly demands a "for instance," so let's look
into our casting of Jimmy Stewart in The Stratton Story.

Let's say that Stewart's price for the picture was some^
where around $200,000. He would be tied up for a term

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 4!

of some ten weeks, and while he would be at the studio ten
hours a day for six days each week and would spend most
of his evenings for two or three months studying the part,
the pay check still represented a lot of money. Stewart
wasn't on our contract list. Nevertheless, we were suffi-
ciently sure of making a profit on his cost that we hired
him to come to the lot.

Now then suppose we had had under contract a man
named Bill Jones. Suppose he was James Stewart's identical
twin in appearance, and just as good an actor. And now
suppose further that he would work for nothing, absolutely
free. Instead of saving that $200,000, the studio would
have lost a hatful of money on the deal. That's the star sys-
tem in action. Mostly you buy a ticket to a picture because
you like the answer to the question, "Who's in it?" The
simple placing of the name James Stewart in newspaper
advertising and on theatre marquees would sell so many
more tickets than the identical picture starring Bill Jones
that we would recover Jim's salary and have a substantial
profit left over. An economist would probably class a star
as a form of natural monopoly.

A certain few critics seem convinced that the presence of
a star automatically insures a banal film, while an unknown
actor guarantees freshness. Of course any such generaliza-
tion is silly. Unknown Vivien Leigh added freshness to
Gone With the Wind, but Gable's presence certainly
didn't hurt it artistically, and his star draw added millions
of dollars to the gross. As great a property as Father of the
Bride is greater because of Spencer Tracy. Stars and un-
knowns are good or bad at their craft as individuals,
not by class. If I feel that the star is suited to the part and

42 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

the story, I see nothing ignoble or inartistic in letting his
popularity increase the number of people who see my pic-
ture.

But Next Voice felt as though it might be outside the
standard rules. Maybe we had such a strong and novel story
that we could arouse the public's want-to-see on the angle
of "What's it about?" rather than "Who's in it?" We would
certainly have a more believable picture. We all tend to
applaud the naturalness of foreign films because the faces
are unfamiliar and we therefore accept them as the true
characters. In Next Voice, known stars would impress you
as familiar people in a change of costume, whereas you'd
tend to accept competent unknowns as Joe and Mary them-
selves. This picture could fall flat unless its audience be-
lieved it utterly. It was certainly a case where we must cast
the story, not story the cast.

That night out at the house when we had dictated the
story, I realized that I had been subconsciously seeing all
the action in terms of one particular young actor, James
Whitmore. If you were to pass Jim on the street and won-
der who he was, you would guess him as an aircraft worker
long before you'd think him an actor. I had seen him first
on the stage in Command Decision. He had been noticed
within the industry as the dogged, laconic top sergeant in
Battleground (later he was nominated for the "best sup-
porting actor" Oscar on the strength of it). Since then he
had portrayed a sixty-year-old Civil War prisoner in The
Outriders and a hunchbacked crook in The Asphalt Jungle.
But the public had not yet hung a tag on him.

That same night after we'd finished dictating, Mrs.
Schary had suggested Nancy Davis to play Mary. This idea
took a bit of getting used to: this would be an exacting star

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 43

role and Nancy had had only three small parts in pictures,
and all of them had been on the "society" side rather than
a middle-class wife and mother. But in her favor was the
fact that her looks and manner and inner self were "nice"
rather than cover-girl glamorous. And she was an actress
by profession rather than by accident.

Incidentally, both Jim and Nancy are representative of
the new generation in screen acting. Both of them set about
Becoming actors with the same earnest intent and prepara-
tion with which they would have embarked upon the pro-
fession of medicine or law. Jim's father is a member of the
Buffalo City Planning Commission; Nancy's father is a Chi-
cago brain surgeon and her mother was a successful actress.
Jim graduated from Yale in 1942 and, after seeing action
with the Marines in the South Pacific, studied in the Ameri-
can Theatre Wing and the Actor's Studio under the noted
director Elia Kazan. Nancy majored in drama at Smith Col-
lege, spent her summer vacations doing stock, and after
graduation did supporting parts on the New York stage.

These are highly intelligent, well-bred young people
who have approached the acting profession with the respect
it deserves and intend to make it their life's work. We're
getting more and more of them these days, and pictures
will be the better for them.

Artistically, my heart was set on Jim for Next Voice, and
I certainly wanted to test Nancy. But practically, I wanted
some expert advice before risking a decision. Without nam-
ing the actors I was considering, I told the Next Voice story
to several people whose judgment I valued.

When I threw the Next Voice story at Billy Grady, head
of the Casting Department, and asked him who he'd put in
the lead, he snapped back, "Jim Whitmore. You'd be crazy

44 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

to think of anybody else." Bill Wellman, who had directed
Whitmore in Battleground and would have to direct him in
this picture, felt the same way. So did the veteran executive
Eddie Mannix. Mr. Mayer said, and meant it, "I don't care
what the picture costs, it's a story you've got to tell. Joe
Smith should be an unfamiliar face." Equally comforting
was the vote for Whitmore from slight, unassuming talent
executive Benny Thau, whose record in terms of casting
and handling stars lends great weight to his recommenda-
tions. It was settled. Joe Smith would be Jim Whitmore.

But Nancy was still a question. Before gambling the cost
of a screen test for the part even the greatest stars are
usually tested for each new role Wellman and I invited
Nancy to the office to "read" for the part. I remember
coming out of the office and seeing her waiting next to Jim
on one of the straight chairs in the anteroom, her fingers
clasped tight in her lap to conceal the turbulent emotions
which her enormous brown eyes betrayed.

There was a lot at stake for her. She was on contract
with us, but that merely means money for awhile; it does
not of itself put you on the screen. Just a few weeks before,
Nancy had tested for her big chance, the feminine lead op-
posite Gary Grant in Crisis. The test was excellent. But the
producer and the director both felt that Paula Raymond
was better for the part. In a case where the men intimately
concerned feel very strongly about a point, I try to remem-
ber how I felt when an executive could twist my picture
away from my conception, and unless I'm absolutely sure
they're seriously wrong I let their decision hold. When
Nancy's hopes were dashed she was devastated, naturally
enough. I had talked to her as best I could, telling her that
this was show business and there would be more disappoint-

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 45

ments ahead, perhaps worse ones; that if her courage wasn't
strong enough to lick this disappointment it might be best
to go back home now. Her courage had been equal to that
challenge. And now here she was again. For a second I
hated my job as I realized that in a few minutes I might
have to find the words to tell her she wouldn't do.

But everybody seemed very easy and casual as we came
into the airy conference room and grouped down at one
end of the long table. We opened up the scripts and they
began reading the lines aloud. We had planned to have Jim
and Nancy read just the breakfast scene which opens the
picture and two or three assorted emotional excerpts that
come later on. But Bill and I got so absorbed in the way
these two superb young people began making the story
live and breathe that we decided not to stop them and the
reading went on uninterrupted for an hour until we came
to the words, "The End." None of us said anything for a
minute or two; we couldn't. Then Bill broke it up with (I
had been reading the other parts), "We're sorry, Schary,
but you won't do." Somebody asked what date to set the
screen test for Nancy. The question struck us funny. After
a reading like this, a test would just be a waste of every-
body's time.

Fortunately for our nervous systems, the rest of the cast-
ing went along in a more routine fashion. The script had
gone to Leonard Murphy and Jimmy Broderick, one of
the teams in the downstairs casting office, and Leonard had
broken it down into a list of the several feature, minor and
bit parts which the action required, marking against each
the type and the price he would probably have to pay.

Incidentally, only the key supporting parts were to be
cast now, before the shooting started. It may seem risky to

46 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

put a picture into work with only the star and feature peo-
ple actually set, but it is so difficult to forecast the exact date
on which a minor player will be wanted that, to avoid con-
flict in the player's schedule between this job and jobs at
other studios, minor parts are usually cast only a day or so
ahead of the actual appearance.

If you were to be called in to be interviewed for one of
these parts, you would find Leonard's quarters a tiny room
near the street just big enough for his desk and two arm-
chairs (actor and agent) not marked by Oriental splendor.
Since just a few spoken lines, even a look or a single bit of
business can get a laugh or make a moment that audiences
remember, Leonard's memory has to be a mental card file
of faces, forms, voices, mannerisms, and special aptitudes,
indexed with names and salary rates. The illustrated Players
Directory sits on his desk, of course, but he keeps his mental
file constantly re-stocked by viewing most of .the films
produced here and abroad, including the clunkers, all of
the visiting stage attractions, most of the hopeful little-
theatre shows, the ice shows and all other events where tal-
ent might crop up.

For the part of young Johnny Smith, Leonard brought
three boys up to the conference room and it looked as
though we had hit the jackpot with the first boy inter-
viewed. He was a nice manly youngster, and when I asked
him, "What do you make of the story, Bobby?" he showed
a very clear understanding. He read a couple of scenes with
his "father," Jim Whitmore, including one very demanding
emotional scene where he worries about his mother "Can
women die from having babies?" He did beautifully. We
sent him out to the anteroom, but since the other two boys
were already on hand it seemed needlessly cruel to deny

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 47

them the satisfaction of having had a chance, so they were
called in one by one. The second boy confirmed our opin-
ion: he had a nice appealing quality, but he was babyish,
and, as Bill expressed it, "People wouldn't believe that he
would have the thoughts Johnny has." Then the third boy
came in. We were polite as he started to read, then suddenly
the atmosphere went tight. Wellman could barely wait un-
til the door had closed behind the boy before he went into
a rave which expressed the feelings of all of us: "Did you
see him when he worried about his mother! " His name was
Gary Gray. There was no need to ask for opinions. I told
Leonard to sign the boy for the part and also see about put-
ting him under contract to the studio, and to try to find
some small parts in other pictures for the other two boys.

Leonard said, "Now you see why we never stop look-
ing."

8

The distribution of the "okay scripts" set wheels in motion
in varied departments all over the seventy-five acres. Now
the heads of the key departments came together for the
official kick-oif, the first of a series of meetings. Called a
"set meeting/' it took place in the sunny high-ceilinged oi>
fice of art director Cedric Gibbons.

The word "art" is really a misnomer. An art director in
films is much more than a lovely person in charge of color
schemes; he is a sort of dramatic engineering designed
Basically, the job of Japanese-American Eddie Imazu, the
associate art director to whom Gibbons assigned direct re-
sponsibility for Next Voice, is to design the setSf But many
scenes are not shot on stage sets, and still they must be
planned by somebody. And the designer cannot even begin
td\lay out the walls of his stage sets until he knows exactly
what dramatic action those walls must permit,-\and from
what camera angles the action will be shot. And since prob-
lems like these must often be worked out long before a
director checks in on a picture, Art is really the "How-
to-do-it" department.

Eddie was assigned to the project on January 2 3rd. In
the days before the "set meeting" he got together his "set
breakdown," going through the script scene by scene and
making notations of all locales mentioned and the number
of scenes to be played in each. Beside each locale he had
listed his preliminary recommendation as-^o whether we

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 49

should construct a set for it inside a sound stage, shoot it on
an off-the-lot location with existing scenery and buildings,
use outdoor buildings on the studio's own back lot, resort
to miniature work, stock shots, rear-projection "process,"
Newcombe process, or any one of several combinations
thereof which I'll describe later. With location man Charlie
Coleman and a still cameraman, he had scouted various lo-
cations for certain sequences, and then taken Wellman out
to view the locations which looked best in the stills.

At the meeting, Eddie turned in some very rough
sketches of the stage sets which would have to be provided
to mount the film script as it now stood, plus a prelimi-
nary set budget. At this point, it looked as though the
story would need about forty sets, none very elaborate and
twelve of them either on location or on the back lot, at a
cost of around $35,000 for design and construction.

Even on a big glamour musical, the designer starts think-
ing about his sets in terms of their "spirit" long before he
creates their actual appearance. On Next Voice the spirit
of the sets would help tell the story. The house tells us what
kind of people Joe and Mary are before we even see them.
The mood of the two cocktail bar sets is particularly vital
to the mood of the scenes they enclose, for bar number one
is smart and sleek, making logical Joe's temptation, and bar
number two, making natural his repentance and shame, is
subtly dingy and sordid. Later Eddie's draftsman, himself
an architect by training, would take the scratch-pad designs
and run them out into construction blueprints, inching
through the vast catalogs of stock units in storage from past
pictures to see what existing material he could utilize.

Joe's two-bedroom house would have to be all new
construction, because it must match the existing dwelling

jO CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

which had been chosen for the outdoor location. But both
of the bar sets could use stock, if shuffled about in a new
arrangement and given flak with a little new work. The
hospital corridor could be moved in from a scene dock
and reassembled practically intact, with a saving of several
thousand dollars over all-new construction and no loss of
pictorial effect. Often Eddie will have a sketch artist paint
color visualizations of the sets for the director, and some-
times where physical action is involved he will have an
artist develop a series of continuity sketches, like comic-
strips. But Wellman can visualize blueprints for himself and
has clear ideas of exactly how he is going to play the action.
Eddie's efforts crystallized in the form of blueprints for
the construction department, where skilled prop makers
began bringing them to life in the form of tabletop model
sets.

For Jack Dawn, one-time film cowboy who introduced
sculptor's methods to makeup (many wounded veterans
thank Jack for the cleverly fitted "skin-pieces" which con-
ceal their disfigurements) Next Voice would be a walk-
through; there was nothing in it like the leprechauns in
Three Wise Fools whose great ears must flap on cue. Jack
is accustomed to challenges such as that of the director who
demanded a hitherto unheard-of effect in a Gene Lockhart
scene as Gene lay unconscious amid flames, the audience
must see a blister actually rising on his cheek.

It was a make-up apprentice who came up with the solu-
tion for that one: he mashed an Alka Seltzer tablet into
powder, sealed the powder under a thin rubber blister
cemented to Gene's cheek, and then injected water at

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 51

the proper moment with a hypodermic needle. Audiences
screamed.

Dawn's guiding principle is that all make-up must seem
like no make-up, and our desire for absolute realism in Next
Voice resulted in the decision to use no make-up at all on
anybody, not even the stars. Hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff
gave Nancy a simple bob which, like Mary Smith, she
would wash and set herself, and, except for Nancy's normal
lipstick, that was that.

Three different people in Sam Kress' camphor-smelling
domain broke the Next Voice script down into "wardrobe
* plots," in which each costume to be worn by each player
became known as a "change" and christened with a num-
ber. Costumes, of course, must do much more than merely
glamorize the physical attributes of the actors. The suntans
and Marine windbreaker which Jim would wear at the Air-
craft plant would build out the audience's knowledge of his
character one more veteran using up his Service clothes
and the slightly ill-fitting blue serge suit made him obvi-
ously the kind of a fellow who owned one good suit and
wore it to church and lodge meeting.

Wardrobe man Bob Streeter would select the "charac-
ter" clothes for Jim and the other men in the cast from the
vast stock in the fourteen wardrobe rooms scattered over
the three lots. Male actors are expected to supply their
own "modern" clothes, unless a scene involves a risk of spill-
ing, burning or other damage in which event we protect
against damage by making several "doubles" of the cos-
tume or if the director demands something special which
the actor would not ordinarily own. Streeter had to buy

52 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

Jim's Sunday blue suit, and after it was altered (with expert
inexpertness) he sent it to the laundry and then did some
sandpapering to age it, and had Jim wear it around the lot
a few days.

Rhea Meunier and stylist Ida Loewen were accumulating
the women's wardrobe in much the same manner, and the
costumes were gradually being built into "lines." Each
change, from head to foot, including all visible accessories,
would be kept together on a hanger as a numbered unit, and
strung along a bar set aside for each player.

The wardrobe people? can turn up such items as three-
legged trousers, Roman armor or a Coronation gown with-
out the lift of an eyebrow, but they gulped once or twice
before they swallowed one Next Voice problem. Probably
never had a movie shown, in scene after scene, a leading
lady whom the plot required to be only a week away from
her baby's birth. The result was a selection of three care-
fully fitted pads of varying prominence, and one of the
odder studio sights must have been Wellman, father of six,
and I, father of three, arguing like a pair of hens in this new
Battle of the Bulge. Over this unusual foundation the fitters
built Nancy's simple wardrobe.

Standard procedure might have been to have Nancy's
clothes created by one of the famous designers, such as
Helen Rose, whose work adds markedly to the allure of
period, musical and glamour pictures. But we checked Nan-
cy's costuming garment by garment to protect the realistic
atmosphere we had in mind, and Ida Loewen bought every
piece of Nancy's wardrobe in local stores at the $12.95
sort of price which Mary Smith would have paid. She did,
however, add an occasional bit of embroidery or a bow,
such as a Mary with good taste would have done, and of

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 53

course all the clothes were fitted with the usual extraordi-
nary care. Each tiny frame of film is magnified up to sixty
thousand times when it appears on the screen, and the slight-
est imperfection in the fitting would billow out to make
Nancy look messy on the screen as Mary Smith would
never have looked in life. The camera and projector com-
bine to make a merciless lie detector.

It was about this time that the stars had their first actual
working contact with the picture. They came to Wardrobe
for final fittings, and reported to Stage 2 for camera tests
on the costuming. One purpose of the tests was to check
our handling of the pregnancy problem with the Breen Of-
fice. But equally important was to find out what the camera
and projector thought of our judgment, and, as always, the
tests proved their worth: a checkered blouse proved so
"busy" that it would have stolen any scene in which it ap-
peared, and a robe moved in such an odd way that it made
Nancy seem to be hopping as she walked.

While all this was going on, the merchandising side of
the studio organization was also coming up to speed. The
best picture in the world is of no eif ect unless a lot of peo-
ple see it, and people will come to see it only if they know
about it. Therefore, as soon as his staff had had time to read
the script, Howard Strickling brought his publicity and
exploitation people over to the office for the setup meeting.
I thought as I looked around the table how disappointed a
cartoonist might be, for all of these "press agents" were
quiet, competent people without a plaid suit in the lot, here
simply because they were experts at reporting, and planting
items with the press, art, or advertising.

Since the competition of many good films for the movie-

54 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

goers' attention is too rugged to let us depend on the "bet-
ter mousetrap" theory of merchandising, it is the job of
these men to so gather and disseminate information about
each picture that it achieves maximum "penetration'^
which simply means that as many people as possible are
made conscious of the title and stars and then expand this
penetration into a maximum want-to-see.

The assembly settled into quick agreement on two
points: Next Voice might turn out to be a very good pic-
ture, but it would certainly be very tough to sell. There
were none of the standard "handles" on the picture; no fa-
mous stars, no spectacle, no sex draw, no high action, no
glamorous sets or musical numbers or clothes and the
story nub of God speaking to people on the radio was one
which good taste would forbid our using in advertising.
Good taste would also forbid our resorting to the stock
approaches or distorted selling angles such as, "Who was
the woman who came into his life as the world rocked"
in a "searing drama of a man's temptation and a woman's
desperation." The picture would have to be presented to
the public straightforwardly for exactly what it was.

With that challenge the ideas began to flow, ideas for
magazine articles, art layouts in the picture magazines,
advertising slogan lines, exploitation gadgets such as card-
board phonograph records, and so on far into the after-
noon. But at the end it still looked as though we might find
ourselves testing the old better-mousetrap theory before
we got through, which would put it squarely up to direc-
tor Wellman.

Jim Merrick, a deft young Englishman who had worked
comfortably with publicity-shunning Wellman on Battle-
ground, was assigned as the "unit man" on Next Voice.

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 55

He kept in touch with Bill, the stars and the various de-
partments to garner items of news about the picture which
the planters could feed the trade papers. And he spent a
good deal of time in his room on the third floor of the
white-columned Publicity Building laying out his "still
plot" of plantable pictures which the still photographer
should pick up during production, and writing his Cam-
paign Book. This would outline possible stories, art layouts,
radio tie-ins and other exploitation devices to be "sold"
to the four hundred thirty-five accredited columnists, fan-
magazine writers, and other outlets. Whose co-operation,
we hoped, would help make the public curious about those
five words five words on whose fate would rest the stu-
dio's investment and the hopes of many people, The Next
Voice You Hear.

9

Efficiency experts trained in other industries are usually
baffled when they try to fit the making of a movie to their
standard rules. The fact is, a movie is essentially a hand-
craft operation, a one-of-a-kind custom job but it must
be made on a factory basis, with production-line econo-
mies, if we're to hold the price down within reach of most
of the people. The job is to do this without losing the pic-
ture's individuality.

The economic pressures are very great. Some pictures
succumb to the system and emerge as factory products.
Other pictures come off the line vital and fresh, their in-
dividuality unimpaired. The difference lies in the creators.
As with books, paintings or plays, all the films can't be
good; there aren't enough good creators. But the intentions
are good: nobody in Hollywood ever started out with the
intention of making a bad picture. Within the limits of his
circumstances and abilities he did the best he could.

A business theorist would probably chart the picture-
making process in terms of two teams. The custom side
of the picture is developed by the creative team the pro-
ducer, writer, director, actors, cameraman and art director.
Those manufacturing operations which are more or less the
same for all pictures construction, set operation, company
management, etc. make up the duties of the Production
Department.

Production Department has full responsibility for

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 57

the physical progress and cost of the picture from the time
the final script is okayed? Cost hounds, expediters, anglers,
worriers, valiant warriors for the sacred schedule, Jo
Cohn's young men are often met by the query, "Do you
want it good or do you want it Tuesday?" and are the
apocryphal authors of the classic reply, "A tree is a tree and
a rock is a rock, shoot it in Griffith Park."

Production's direct representative on the Next Voice
company would be Ruby Rosenberg, the Unit Manager.
Now, in the two-story white wooden barracks which
houses the Department, he had finished hi^Sequence Break-
down^and was trying to put together that series of com-
promises known as the^ Shooting Scheduler And while the
Schedule might not make particularly romantic reading, it
would be the key to success or failure of the whole enter-
prise as an economic unit of production.

Not everybody realizes that the cost of a movie is not
primarily made up of physical items such as sets and cos-
tumes, nor even less tangible charges such as story cost and
script preparation) The prime cost of a motion picture is
time -time in production, from the start of photography
to its finish. The British call it "days on the floor." True,
several expensive people draw salaries during the prepara-
tory period of a picture, but there are only a few of them
and they are using only office rooms and other inexpensive
facilities. And while there is still important work to be done
after photography is finished, again the number of people
involved and the facilities are comparatively inexpensive.
Lately you may have seen references in the news to short-
ened shooting schedules. That is because thd number of
days in production controls the really heavy cost items
such as actors' salaries, wages and salaries for the large

58 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

stage and technical crews, and a very considerable charge
for overhead. ^

The word^ "overhead" has come to be a bad word, but
overhead expense is a natural and inescapable part of any
operation where one man plans the work of others and
where the work involves any use of property. Take our
Wardrobe Department, for example: we could charge Next
Voice directly with the outright cost of the costumes we
buy especially for the film, and salaries for the wardrobe
man and woman who actually "work" the picture. But the
picture must somehow also pay its share of maintaining the
studio's stock of costumes, owning the buildings in which
they are stored, and compensate Sam Kress and others for
their management work. ^That, and a share of similar costs
for other departments whose work helps make the picture,
goes into overhead*

At M-G-M overhead also includes such^ direct picture
costs as stage rental^ (an independent producer would have
paid a rental lot at least two thousand dollars a day for the
stages tied up by Next Voice). It includes the* electric cur-
rent for the lighting (a single set for an Esther Williams
Technicolor picture may use more current than a city the
size of Tacoma). Such service departments asr^ Legal Re-
search, International, Censorship, Casting and Library are
paid for by overhead, as well as the use of vital back-lot
facilities such as the Sign Shop and Gun Room, and general
studio services such as trucking and messengers and hospi-
tal personnel. And finally it must include the indirect over-
head chargeable to any business operation such as interest,
insurance, taxes, pension provisions, research, inventory
write-offs, and compensation for executive management.,
Incidentally, all of the studios have made substantial re-

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 59

ductions in their overhead load in the last two or three
years, and the situation is healthier than it has been for a
long time.

Despite the economy, however, visitors to the stages al-
ways go away shaking their heads over the apparent lavish-
ness, particularly at the large number of people who seem
to be just standing about. Again, much of this is tied to the
high cost per shooting day of a company. Take the hypo-
thetical case of a dental specialist who might be kept on the
set to fix young Gary Gray's lost baby tooth and who can
send him back to work an hour earlier than had we had to
send the boy to a dentist oif the lot. If the stand-by dentist
performed only that one brief job for a whole month's pay,
the saved hour of shooting time could have shown the stu-
dio a profit of several hundred percent on his salary.

The Next Voice company would not be nearly as ex-
pensive as some, but it could easily run to fifteen thousand
dollars per day, and even more on an outside location day
with a heavy list of extras. If for some reason such as bad
weather, the illness of a star, or whatever, shooting had to
be suspended, much of that cost would go right on. And
so in planning his shooting schedule, Rosenberg knew that
once the cameras began to turn it would be his responsi-
bility to see that nothing stopped production or slowed it
down. Everything and everybody must be ready when
needed and no alibis would be accepted.

The Next Voice happened to be divided into 172 scenes.
But a shooting script which would reach the screen in ex-
actly the same length might contain up to 500 scene num-
bers, if the writer and producer felt it necessary to write
out each camera angle in advance. Bu^most directors jus-
tifiably consider the handling of the camera as in their

60 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

province,-* and Bill Wellman's manipulation of the action
would be far more effective than what we might suggest.
Also, working so intimately with Bill on Battleground had
given me a good notion of the way he would break up his
scenes, and had reassured me that he didn't go in for a lot
of needless setups. So our screenplay was written in a com-
paratively small number of -toaster scenes ?in which the ac-
tion ran uninterrupted for as long as five or six pages. When
Ruby Rosenberg made his initial breakdown, he grouped
the scenes into eighty short sequences, each sequence link-
ing a series of scenes which occurred in one set in one more
or less continuous progression.

^ Now Ruby began to work out his shooting schedule by
putting these eighty sequences "on the board." To each
sequence he allotted a long narrow celluloid strip which
he coded with letters or numbers in appropriate squares to
indicate the set, the season, whether day or night, interior
or exterior, reminders of any special music, sound, special
effects (rain), vehicles, animals, props and any special re-
minders. He finished by noting which actors would work
in the sequence, the number of pages of script represented,
and an estimate of how many days or fractional days the
sequence would require for shooting. When these strips
were laid side by side in a slotted board, all the jigsaw
pieces which made up the total production puzzle stood
out clearly in a sort of visible index. ""1 s

As Ruby sorted these strips around in endless trial com-
binations, it became clear why the scenes of a movie are
usually shot-^out of continuity,^ process which results
in such incongruities as Mary having her baby several days
before she is photographed hurrying to the hospital. Mov-
ing the company from one set to another, which involves

PREPARATION FOR -PRODUCTION 6 1

relighting, and particularly moving from one building to
another uses up time and hence costs money.

Therefore, in theory, Ruby would like to* shoot all the
sequences occurring in any given set in one continuous
session. But this is extreme and seldom comes to pass, be-
cause directors know that actors cannot catch the real spirit
of scenes which are shot ridiculously far out of continuity.

On the other hand, screen actors draw their pay from
the first day they work to the last, even though they may
be idle several days in between. So Ruby shuffled his cellu-
loid strips back and forth to compress the engagement of
the more expensive supporting actors into the shortest prac-
tical compass of days from call to .dismissal.

A lot of other considerations affected the grouping. Our
boy, Gary, would have to go to school a certain number
of hours each day, and each day's agenda must therefore
include some scenes in which he would not appear. The
locker room and cocktail bar sets were ordered to be built
a few days ahead of schedule, so we could switch to them
if Gary or Nancy got sick. Our off-lot location day at a
school had to be set for the February 2 2nd holiday, rain
or shine. ("Let it rain," said Wellman; "real kids go to
school in the rain.") The Douglas Aircraft location had to
be fixed for Saturday, the 25th, when most of the plant
would be cleared for the holiday and two beautiful bomb-
ers would hit the head of the assembly line side by side and
make a wonderful background. If we tried to shoot the
average picture in its strict story continuity, we'd have
to charge you twice as much for your ticket. And you
wouldn't come to our show.

^Shooting schedule^ for feature-length pictures vary all
the way from seven or eight days for the quickies to two

6 2 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

and three months, sometimes more, for the epics. Back in
the plush days, important pictures were figured to use one
shooting day for each minute of screen footage. Since the
shrinkage in foreign grosses and other factors started the
economy wave, all studios have shortened the schedules of
all pictures, which is healthy, but a schedule of thirty to
thirty-five days for a quality dramatic picture is still con-
sidered fast shooting. However, even that schedule would
be too long for the money we could afford to invest in the
uncertain Next Voice. Ruby crossed his fingers and mimeo-
graphed a schedule which called for twenty-two shooting
days.

Wellman scanned the schedule with that skeptical blue
eye and nodded grimly, "I'll make it." The Production fel-
lows figured they'd probably get licked, but it would be a
big thing in town if they got away with it. And I felt se-
cretly that if the twenty-two days stretched to twenty-
four or five, it would be all right with me.

Production's representative on the set is the "^Assistant
Director, ^recognizable by the harassed and preoccupied
expression which comes from trying continually to keep
three moves ahead of his director. Ours was a slim, black-
haired 4 young man named Joel Freeman who had started
with M-G-M as a messenger and come up through the
more or less standard route of production-office clerk,
company script clerk, and second assistant director. This
would be his initial job as a "first." The short shooting
schedule would put a stiff responsibility on him, but we
figured that his ambition to make good on the opportunity
would supply the drive to keep him alert ancl jumping dur-
ing those three weeks of fifteen-hour days.

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 63

The title of Assistant Director does not describe his job
too well nowadays. He has come to be more of an arranger
and expediter:! his primary responsibility is to make sure
that everything and everybody needed during the produc-
tion will be on hand in the right place at the right time and
in the proper conditionMt was a "first" who thought of
throwing the box lunch sandwiches on the water off Cata-
lina when a famous director demanded sea gulls in his shot,
and who, when the gulls swooped down in a beautiful line
from left to right, was typically rewarded with, "We're
losing 'em against the sails. Send 'em in the other way!"

However, the assistant does have the directorial respon-
sibility of arranging background and atmospheric action.
In Next Voice when you see Joe Smith and his friends
coming out of the bowling alley, you'll see a couple of
passers-by walk in. It was Joel's job to decide from the
script that this secondary action was necessary to add va-
lidity to the scene, and to requisition the extras. When the
scene was shot he cued them in at the proper moment.

ThisT background function\can become quite complex,
and it did later on in one sequence where, on a Saturday
afternoon in the plot, Joe walked across the park from his
house to Mr. Brannan's. Joel worked up unobtrusive action
to background Joe all the way across, from ball-laying
to car washing to the Good Humor wagon with crowding
kids. Joel's script breakdown listed our probable require-
ments of bit players and extras in each scene, and this data
went, along with Rosenberg's schedule, to the Estimating
Department.

Another kind of estimate had already been made in a
script-lined upstairs cubbyhole by Lauren Amell and Hon-

64 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

ore Janney. They are-footage estimators^; and they "time
out" each script to figure how many minutes the finished
movie will play on the screen.

Every picture has a certain running length which is right
for its particular set of values and appeals. I think we ought
to determine that length fairly closely in the preparatory
stage rather than in the preview theatre, and then shoot just
about the footage we'll actually use in the release. If a story
comes along that I think will hold up for three hours on
the screen, I'll fight to make it in that length. But often
there's a tendency to allot a picture more time than its au-
dience will think it's worth. To some extent I'm voicing a
personal phobia here; I feel that most of us are apt to tell
a story or a joke at too much length, so that it begins to
drag, and I'm always trying to see where we can cut pic-
tures without loss. Each picture is its own problem. Gone
With the Wind didn't have a wasted foot of film, for me.
But I've seen one-hour pictures that were sixty minutes too
long.

Commercially, particularly in Ifese -days- of high costs
and double features, only a very occasional sure-smash epic
like Annie Get Your Gun can command a running time
of more than ninety minutes, but plenty of lesser pictures
have gone all the way to preview at two hours or more,
and not merely in the dear dead past. I expect any picture
to be trimmed a few minutes in cutting, if only for pace.
But since it may be cheaper by several hundred thousands
of dollars to throw away thirty pages of script than thirty
minutes of expensively filmed drama, these pre-shooting
footage estimates make very useful reading.

Amell and Mrs. Janney work independently, "playing"
the picture in their minds scene by scene against the stop

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 65

watch, then checking their results against each other. They
know from long experience the tempos and ways of work-
ing of most of our directors and stars, and they can pretty
well gauge the pace at which the film will move. "With
Wallace Beery/' Amell remembers, "you'd have to figure
time for him to hitch up his pants and spit before a speech."
You might expect that musical numbers and dance rou-
tines would be impossible to estimate in advance, since
they're seldom worked out in detail much before shooting,
but AmelTs simple approach is, "How long could I sit still
for this routine in a theatre?" He finds that he tends to get
the twitches long before many writers. The estimate on
the Next Voice script was 7,685 feet, which would run
just about eighty-five minutes. After the picture had gone
through all the changes, and shooting had been completed
and the first editing done, the footage of the "first cut" ran
7,630 feet. The estimators had missed the boat by almost
forty seconds.

One by one the fiscal forecasts resulting from the various
departmental breakdowns channeled over into the pine-
paneled room in the Production Building where Joe Finn
and his assistants were working out th^final budget^ on the
picture. Physically, the budget would emerge about the
shape of a Saturday Evening Post or Collier's, but any fic-
tion it contained would be strictly unintentional. Thirty-
seven main cost elements were listed on the summary sheet,
ending with the item which Joe considers his personal
enemy, Miscellaneous. The word had gone around that this
picture was to be a test case, and the departments had taken
it as a challenge: everybody had used their heads to save
their wallets, and the final figure was very encouraging,

66 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

Nevertheless, the erasers were in plain sight at the second
of the major conferences, the Budget Meeting in the office
of Production Manager Walter Strohm. He served as chair-
man, -with watchdog Jo Cohn flanking him, and sitting
on the leather couches or propped back in straight chairs
against the wall were the representatives of the major con-
trollable budget items sets, casting, wardrobe and the
men who would make the picture, Bill Wellman, his cam-
eraman Bill Mellor, and their assistants.

In the middle of the budget was an eleven-page section
which highlighted these controllable expense items. Each
sequence was listed, with its set, estimated shooting time,
the number of bits and extras and the prices Leonard Mur-
phy expected to pay them. Walter took these up one by
one, and the sound of hatchets was heard in the land. Could
this set be eliminated and the action played in another?
Could this scene be played at night so we could kill some
of the expensive detail on the set and eliminate a painted
backing? Did we need sixty kids in the school exterior or
could Wellman angle his action to get his effect with less?
Do we need so many different radio announcers, or could
the family always listen to one or two favorites? We've
figured $200 for the doctor bit in the hospital, haven't we
anyone in stock? Since we don't actually use the bowling
alley attached to the cocktail bar, can't we just suggest
it with shadows and sound? In the montage where Joe is
looking for runaway Johnny, the cutter won't use all eight
spots listed, so why shoot them? Let's kill the gas station,
which we'd have to build, and pick up the standing theatre
foyer on Lot 2 some night when we're working over there
anyway. . . .

Refreshingly, these meetings show some accent on add-

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 67

ing budget as well as slashing it, when the additions may
pay off on the screen. In the locker-room scene, goes the
talk, hadn't we better boost the estimated prices for the
bit voices; we'll need good character men, not just extras
. . . better use a stunt driver for Joe's "near miss" don't
take any chances, use stunt drivers in both cars.

As is inevitable when creative minds focus on the bits
and pieces of a screenplay, new ideas crop up to improve
the picture. Let's use well-known radio announcers, some-
one suggests, they'll add a plus. . . . There's no value in
just a guy walking through the background, make him a
letter-carrier ... a couple of those school kids ought to
be Negroes, but let's just take them for granted in the
crowd and don't feature them. . . . And how about hav-
ing some of the kids dressed in those cowboy outfits?
"What are all these background people going to be doing
in the second saloon?" asked Wellman. "Take them out;
now that God's on the radio nobody's going to the saloons
and there's just this one girl sitting at the long shadowy bar,
it'll be a wonderful lonesome feeling." When the meeting
broke up it looked like a standoff; we'd added about as
much money as we had taken out, but the picture had come
a few steps upward and the plans were more crystallized
in everybody's mind.

It isn't giving away any secret to jump ahead a few
months and admit that Next Voice was brought in at a very
satisfactory over-all cost figure. But it should also be ad-
mitted that on this particular film certain essential charges
which would loom large on most cost sheets were either
absent entirely or ridiculously low, and they could have
boosted our cost by $250,000 or more. We paid no big
stars' fees, and stories which can attract people to theatres

68 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

without stars are not plentiful enough to fill any studio's
production program. Since I draw my own salary for ex-
ecutive duties, this picture did not have to pay a producer's
fee, and there was a lesser saving on the writing budget.

But these latter savings can be repeated in many circum-
stances: in fact, M-G-M and other studios are going in
more and more heavily for double-duty deals where one
qualified man acts as a writer-producer, writer-director,
or perhaps all three. Moreover, all studios have made sub-
stantial cuts in their overhead personnel; all have shifted
many contract people over to a free-lance basis where they
are paid only when working. We are being tougher about
our story buys, taking on only those stories which we know
in advance how we'll make, and thus reducing our aban-
donment rate. By turning out more features per year with
the same facilities and contract people, we are dividing our
overhead into more units and putting less of an overhead
burden on each picture.

Economy involves a lot more than merely firing people.
In fact, one of our most promising aspects is the plan on
which Studio Manager Bill Spencer is working to smooth
out this notorious feast-or-famine operation into a reason-
ably continuous flow of work, whereby we hope to have
five pictures in production as a steady thing and thus pro-
vide a reasonably constant income to a solid core of our
people.

I have a strong belief, and the Next Voice cost sheet
bears it out, that the three lines of attack which are going
to bring our soaring costs under control are these: Clear,
direct, straight thinking; creative discipline; and exhaustive
pre-production preparation of every picture. Of course,
all three can sing their heads off and never be heard unless

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 69

they're backed with talent. And the most exhaustive prep-
aration of a production is not much good if it's done by
rote, dutifully there has to be a real enthusiasm on the
lot. On Next Voice, all these factors worked together. It's
unfair to single out any one, but perhaps the most informa-
tive was the pre-production woodshedding through which
Bill Wellman put the project.

10

Bill Wellman is a turbulent character in suntan pants and a
windbreaker, with rumpled gray hair, the unselfconscious-
ness of a four-year-old child, and a charm that reaches out
and grabs you by the heart. His lean face manages to be
both boyish and satanic at the same time; he has a husky
voice, a cowboy's walk, a headlong directness, a terrible
memory for names, a dislike of being indoors, a fabulous
history, and a complete knowledge of how to make pic-
tures.

A sure way to embarrass Bill is to start talking about his
hits. At the first mention of Wings, Nothing Sacred or A
Star Is Born, Billy will squirm and switch the conversation
to one of his flops. He says the only profit for a director
lies in "figuring out why I loused something up."

A famous member of the craft once described the direc-
tor's function as "realizing on the screen all the values in-
herent in the script." Billy does this on the run, keeps right
on driving and comes out with a picture nine feet tall.

The script told the Story of The Next Voice in words.
Bill would have to tell it through a lens, with visual images
on a screen. Although a script is usually complete as to dia-
logue, the writer would stack up a clutter of pages ceiling
high if he attempted to describe inVdetail all the actions and
reactions of the scenes, -^he light and shade,^he nuances of
attitudes,^the bits of "business, 5 ^ all that goes into giving his
characters the stuff of life that will make those characters

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION Jl

into people.^And while these things will exist in a good
script by suggestion or implication, their accomplishment
in screen terms is i province of the directory

Every single one of the ideas and bits and details which
give sparkle to a picture has to be thought of by somebody.
You can think of them on the set during production with
the crew standing idle and the overhead ticking like a plati-
num taxi meter. Or you can think of them ahead of time,
shooting the picture in your mind before you turn a crank,
and meet most of the emergencies before they happen. Of
course, some of the best things in the picture will be born
on the set, in the heat of action, when the director actually
sees and hears his live people working in and out of real
walls and props and furnishings. Those improvements are
usually worth all the time they take and a lot more; they
make a better picture and a better picture sells more tickets.
But the point is, on-set delays should be reserved for im-
provements, not to fill holes or repair errors which should
have been uncovered in a dry run.

Bill had studied the Next Voice story in his office and at
home, and had thought about it and talked about it until
the film had already begun to exist in his mind, cut by cut.
The routine preparation was already under way: Imazu,
Freeman, Rosenberg and the others were continually in
and out of Bill's office on the business of checking sets, ap-
proving wardrobe, selecting locations, assigning personnel,
and so on. But not until very recently has it been at all com-
mon practice to let the actors in on our secret, to hold cast
rehearsals before actually going on stage.

I had experimented with^pre-production cast readings
and rehearsalsjwhile I was at RKO. It seemed only sensible
that the directors and actors should work out their funda-

72 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

mental understandings before their deliberations involved
the overhead of an expensive crew. Bill had used the
advance-rehearsal technique with considerable success on
Battleground, so we decided to repeat it here.

Wellman's office is a sunny third-floor corner in the
modernistic Directors' Building, in the middle of the pro-
duction lot. Jim Whitmore was there in the khaki pants and
plaid shirt he was breaking in for the locker-room scenes;
Nancy was there with her shoes off as is her habit; Bill was
behind his desk slipping his horn-rimmed glasses on and off
as he peered at the script, and he was 'flanked by sunburnt
cameraman Bill Mellor and assistant director Joel Freeman.

On the wall beside Wellman's desk was an enlarged floor
plan of Joe Smith's house set in which most of the action
would take place. Clearly marked on it were the positions
of all windows, important articles of furniture, the doors
and which way they opened, andf 'wild" wallsfwhich could
-be quickly removed to permit a switch in camera angl^ Art
directors usually figure on two wild walls for each room,
but Bill usually ends up with four.

In form, thesff* rehearsals were merely a sort of extended
"reading," with frequent breaks for comments, queries,
reminders and discussions\It was not merely a rehearsal
for the two actors. Wellman and Mellor were working out
their own jobs in terms of specific setups and action and
camera moves, and Joel Freeman was unearthing many
items which would have to be arranged for as the produc-
tion progressed.

Out of the reading came a number of script changes.
Some were merely changes in dialogue lines which lay
poorly on the actor's tongue or could be improved or
dropped. Originally when Mary came home from the

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 73

hospital after the false labor young Johnny was to ask,
"Where's the baby?" But Bill thought the boy would be
old enough to know the essential facts of life and he feared
the original line might get an unwanted audience laugh, so
now Johnny would simply look at his mother and she
would quietly say, "There's been a slight change of plans,
Johnny. ..." A speech of Mr. Brannan's referred to
"Proverbs 6, VI" and Bill had Joel check with a minister
to see into exactly what words a man like Brannan would
translate those numerals. Often in a script a character's at-
titude has to be indicated by a speech. Now the unnecessary
talk could be killed and replaced by the more probable
glance or significant pantomime.

Even though the script had been worked over until it
was in pretty tight shape, some of these changes were really
important. Originally, when Mary was at the hospital with
her false labor, Joe had gone in from the corridor to a
semi-private room where two other women were helping
her pack. They came out and down the corridor for Mary's
line, "I feel like such a fool, leaving here as big as when I
came in," and then went to the lobby for the business of
paying the bill. These scenes wouldn't "come up" in re-
hearsal, wouldn't play with the simple, alive straightfor-
wardness of the scenes up to that point. The upshot was
that we killed the scenes in the room and the lobby, and
had Mary speak her two lines of apology when she came
out of a door with her suitcase into the corridor to join
Joe. Not only was the new action much more clean and
dramatic Ruby cut three-quarters of a day out of his
shooting schedule, Joel dropped two extras and the recep-
tionist bit from his cast list, and Eddie Imazu canceled one
|6oo $nd one f uoo set

74 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

As expected, the rehearsals uncovered a lot of bridges
which could be crossed more cheaply before we came to
them. "This business where the cop stops Joe at night,"
queried Wellman, "can we shoot it on the back lot, have
we got a good street that fits the action? . . . We'll want
all the kids to start running at once. Joel, arrange for some-
body to ring the school bell for a cue. . . . Rembrandt"
meaning Mellor "how about a long shot of the boy
walking away from the car and getting lost in the crowd
of youngsters going into the school? . . . This insert
where Joe's foot steps gingerly on the starter pedal, pick
it up when we're working on the process stage with the
split-up car."

And then there was the big rainstorm, when God's voice
on the radio said, "Must I send another forty days and
nights of rain," and a few moments later rain would begin
to fall, motivating the first real fear. At first thought
you might group Joe, Mary and the boy in a tight three-
shot near the radio, and background them with a window
against which the raindrops would be seen. Bill knew in
advance that the effect would not come off. The whole
grouping would look contrived rather than natural; he
would have to force a way of pulling the lace curtain away
from the window, and he would not be able to move his
camera sufficiently close to the glass to see the raindrops
without being obvious and, worse, losing the all-important
emotional reaction of the characters. Had that kind of
problem waited for settlement until we were on set, either
a great deal of expensive time would have been wasted, or
we would have settled quickly for a bad compromise and
lost a tremendously affecting moment of the picture.

The mimeographed pages of Bill's script were filling up

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 75

with scrawled notations; reminders of opportunities, pit-
falls, attitudes, and bits of business. Bill is one of the great
directors of the industry, but has never gotten the public
recognition which his work deserves. I think these scrawls
explain why. Many of the bits of business with which di-
rector Ernst Lubitsch fleshed his wonderful pictures were
noticeable; they stood out in bas-relief from the planes of
the story as distinctive twists of action, recognizable as the
"Lubitsch touch." Many of Wellman's touches are equally
great, I think, but they are almost invariably bits of char-
acter action or reaction so natural and logical that they
become indigenous to the character^They're so blended
into the pattern of the whole that the audience tends to feel
them rather than give them conscious notice, with the re-
sult that the approval goes to the picture as a whole or,
when an occasional bit does catch notice, to the actor in
whose characterization it is displayed. Bill must know this,
but he keeps on throwing the business to his actors and
turning out consistently great pictures. ^

As IVe said, these bits are natural. They're warm, and
they "tell" a character in action rather than words, but you
have to know a good deal about pictures and something
about art to realize the true bigness of these seemingly triv-
ial things. For example, Bill needed some intimate action
between Joe and Mary to put a warm personal feeling on
the finish of the picture. Every married couple probably
has some insignificant gesture that is meaningful only to
themselves, so here it would be a way that Joe has of tick-
ling Mary's ear and to which she would respond. Bill uses
it three times to build the intimacy between Joe and Mary,
reverses it once (when Mary pulls away instead of re-
sponding, we're told more dramatically than in words that

7 6 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

there's trouble), and at the end when Mary is wheeled out
of the delivery room, her unconscious response supplies
the emotional climax of the film.

Joe's car trouble when he left for work on the morning
of the first day would be funny, and of course his leaving
on the second day must top it. Out of that need came the
marvelous bit of pantomime where young Johnny sits at
the breakfast table and, in ridiculous synchronization with
the sounds floating in from the unseen garage, mimics the
troubles which we know off -scene Joe is undergoing in
starting his engine. In another instance, toward the end of
the picture Joe wants to say grace at dinner. Suddenly we
know a lot more about Joe and Mary from the simple fact
that Joe stumbles momentarily in the blessing, and Mary
is able to prompt him.

Some of the inventions were purely mechanical. A mo-
ment of intimacy between husband and wife wouldn't play
while Johnny was in the scene, so Bill cleared the deck and
got a free laugh by having Joe send the boy to the window
to keep watch for gabby Aunt Ethel. Other bits were me-
chanical, but had a spiritual result. Of the scene after Bran-
nan's workshop where Johnny comes to understand his
father's being afraid, Bill said, "The boy must be older
than his father here," and he staged the position of the two
actors so that Joe is lower than his son, looking up.

Of course it's essential that actors come on set with their
lines memorized, but that is a matter of professional me-
chanics. Out of these pre-production rehearsals Jim and
Nancy learned more than the lines, more than even the in-
ner meaning of the lines^they got an understanding of
who they were and why they did the actions in the play,
and how they felt about things/^hey had to learn to as-

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 77

sume their new personalities. As Jim Whitmore, a blown-
out tire might mean only an inconvenience as Joe Smith,
the blowout would be a dismaying sound, a signal of a real
financial blow that Joe would hate to have to tell Mary
about. And as a result of going back and forth through the
script, reading with Wellman and broadening their com-
prehension as they heard his comments, they finally got
that invaluable insight, the feeling of the whole.

Nancy was spending much of her time away from the
studio with a close friend of hers who was soon going to
have a baby, noting every characteristic movement and
emotion. The set of the Joe Smith home on Stage 18 was
completed a few days ahead of production, and Jim and
Nancy moved in to do their rehearsing in the actual sur-
roundings. "This way it gets to be my own house," said
Jim. "Now I can get up out of a chair and swing toward
a door without having to sneak a look at where I'm going."

By Monday, February 20, the preparatory activities all
over the studio were hitting their peak. On Stage 18,
set decorator Ralph Hurst was putting the final lived-in
touches on the living-room set, and I grinned as I saw him
put a burned-out light bulb in the bowl on the buffet. Fd
never thought of it before, but there must be one in every
home in America.

In the locker-room set adjacent, painters were brushing
the wooden I-beams into the appearance of steel; another
painter was "dirtying" the big washstand, and a plumber
was busily damaging a practical pipe so that the water
would come out in the "trickle" which would justify Fred-
die Dibson's complaint. Greensmen were laying lawn and
installing slunibbery on the floor around the front of the

7 8 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

Smith house, carpenters were stringing out the pre-fabri-
cated units for the cocktail-bar set. Out front, Joel was
checking the instant-starting gadget which Joe would pull
when he lifted the hood on his beat-up 1937 Plymouth. The
wardrobe lines were filling up; Ruby Rosenberg was send-
ing his first call sheet to Mimeo. Even the older hands had
that tight feeling you always seem to get just before the
kickoff. Up in my office we held the final reading.

The night before, I had gone over the whole script once
again looking for spots we could improve. I wanted to ex-
pand the radio speaker's announcement in the church on
the last night, to try to get a feeling of universal brother-
hood, a feeling that all over the world all kinds of people
were doing exactly the same thing at the same instant, lis-
tening to the Voice of their Creator. Bill bought it and
made a note to take advantage of the extra footage for
a succession of cutaway bits of character business, quick
flashes of interesting people ending with Joe and Mary.
We made a final decision on separating our sequences with
the old-fashioned title-cards, The First Day, and so on, the
lettering to be superimposed over the most beautiful cloud
shots we could find.

Then came the reading. Good as they had been weeks
ago when we cast them, now with their new understanding
of the play and their roles Jim and Nancy were different
people. Actually, they had become Joe and Mary Smith
and once or twice as I listened to the reading I felt embar-
rassed at having intruded on the privacy of these people.
We picked up some more changes, of course; we'd keep
on distilling and refining and improving until the man from
the lab came and took the work print away from us, but it
was ready to go.

PREPARATION FOR PRODUCTION 79

I said, "Good-bye, God bless, it's your ball, nine o'clock
tomorrow," and they went out.

I doubt if Jim and Nancy and Gary slept too well that
night. I know I didn't. And we had plenty of company.
In thirty-odd homes from Inglewood to Brentwood, from
apartments to bungalows to estates, men and women whose
faces would never be seen by an audience were trying to
get to sleep against the incessant question which buzzed
endlessly against their brains, "Have I missed anything?"

PART THREE

Shooting the Picture

11

You need more than talent to get along in the picture busi-
ness; you need either an alarm clock or insomnia. It's a
business mostly of early rising.

Across the top of Ruby's yellow work order for Tues-
day, February 2ist, ran the phrase START PRODUCTION.
Just below it was a crew call for eight A.M., but the big
shadowy stage had started picking up speed an hour before
that. Joel Freeman was prowling the set to make sure that
everything was ready for the scheduled scenes, plus
any and all unexpected curves. Set dressers were pull-
ing the green dust covers off the furnishings and running a
vacuum cleaner over the living-room rug. A truck backed
in through the big main door, and the $30,000 camera was
unloaded and set up on its rubber-tired dolly. The fog
drifted in through the door and the air in the stage was
raw, but down in the far corner a work light popping
up from behind two black flats promised that there would
soon be hot coffee.

Bill Wellman strode in about seven-thirty; yellow-
covered script rolled up under one arm, black tin
dinner-pail hanging from the other. He swapped pleasant
insults with some of the crew who had worked with him
on previous pictures, lit his pipe, and went over to lay out
the first setup with cameraman Bill Mellor. A sound man
gave him a "good morning" and kept on tying the micro-
phone to the end of his boom. By now the electricians and

84 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

grips had checked in, opened their big green stage boxes
and begun laying out their equipment. Back by the big
door the wardrobe people opened the stars' portable dress-
ing-rooms and racked up "Change No. i."

For the next few weeks, only the Publicity Department
and the front office would recognize the project as The
Next Voice You Hear. Mostly it would be called "the
Wellman company" sometimes a producer resents being
the forgotten man, but during the shooting phase of a pic-
ture it's proper that the director carries the flag and many
of the shop and service people would know the picture
only by the number 1488 which they would pencil on their
job cards.

From its heavy wooden floor to its high flat roof, an ac-
tive sound stage looks like an impossible conglomeration
of clutter. The weird patchwork of floor coverings left
over from forgotten kitchens and courtyards is laced with
writhing thumb-thick cables, forested with platforms and
brackets, studded with a dozen varieties of lights from
broads to brutes. Over on one side are grouped the green
prop, wagon, paint wagon, and the big wooden stage boxes.
Above the braced flats which form the sets, big black lamps
stare down from the chain-hung scaffolding. These lights
have seen everything at one time or another, but at the
moment they are staring down at Joe Smith's simple five-
room bungalow. From up there, the roofless set looks like
a model house in Life. In the "practical" set kitchen, prop-
man Jimmy Luttrell is squeezing orange juice for the coming
scene, and will start coffee as soon as the plumber connects
up the gas range.

With Mellor and gaffer Chet Philbrick-^the gaffer is

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 85

foreman of the electricians; and expert at arranging his
equipment to get exactly the lighting effects his cameraman
demands Wellman has been pacing out the physical move-
ments he plans for the opening scene. He decides to angle
his master shot from the position of the back door, shooting
between the gas range and the refrigerator to "hold" the
far wall of the kitchen full width from sink to breakfast
nook. Leo Monlon's grips pull out the back-door wild
wall and start laying the aluminum track on which the
camera dolly will roll in and out as the scene progresses.
With the general layout established, gaffer Philbrick sends
three of his eleven electricians up into the scaffolding and
the rest on the floor equipment. They start roughing in the
lighting.

Wellman worries, "If we light this with bright sunlight
coming in the window, we'll have to wait for sun tomorrow
on location when we shoot the boy going to school'* It's
a point- the sun is sluggish on February mornings in Cali-
fornia. But this breakfast is the first scene of the picture and
Bill wants brilliant high-key lighting to set a happy mood
in the opening. We'll risk it. Philbrick signals his men to hit
the "outdoors" beyond the kitchen windows with the big
arcs whose blue-white light simulates daylight.

"Let's have tne cast," says Bill. Joel turns toward the
portable dressing-rooms and calls for Jim and Nancy.
They've come into the stage as unobtrusively as any mem-
bers of the crew, and now they walk across the floor to the
set, Jim in his work clothes and Mary with her pregnancy
pad under the red-checkered blouse and blue skirt. Well-
man says, "Mary, you'll be sitting at the table cutting off the
box-tops. Joe's squeezing the last of the oranges. What's

86 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

your first line?" And with no more ceremony than that,
our epic is on its way. The big 3 K-ton doors rumble closed.
The time is eight-thirty.

Some directors direct very exhaustively. George Cukor,
for example, works at very high pitch and lays out each
line and minutest bit of action for his actors in great detail.
Others, like Richard Thorpe, seem hardly to direct at all,
watching quietly as the actors work up the scene. Wellman
is in between. He will dictate exactly what he wants in the
way of physical movement and business, but he expects the
actors to develop the emotional content of the scene in
the way they feel right for their characters. There's no
"method," really; each director's way of working reflects
his own personality. Bill's volatile, headlong manner charges
his actors with his own enthusiasm.

But this first breakfast scene is a challenge to Wellman
and his actors alike. As with any scene which holds audience
interest, it must be "theater." But that foundational quality
of distillation, of projection, must be completely overlaid
and absorbed by an atmosphere of seemingly artless, un-
rehearsed realism. A very good actor once said, "It's easy
to pick up a gun convincingly, very tough to pick up a
pencil." Our audiences wouldn't know how to pick up a
gun, but they would be experts in how an American family
eats breakfast, and this scene would be in trouble at the
faintest hint of staginess, self-consciousness, or elocutionary
dialogue.

On the first couple of run-throughs Bill was interested
only in working out the movement and business, and the
over-all tempo; figuring just when Mary will start buttering
her bread to have it ready when Joe must take it away from
her, what action will pull Joe away from the table to clear

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 87

the way for the entrance of "the small businessman" from
his newspaper route, and so on. Bill wants to inject some
freshness in young Johnny's entrance, and a running gag is
born. The youngster will stampede in at a headlong pace
and slide to a stop. . . . Also, he'll scoot underneath the
table and bob up on the far side to dig avidly into his break-
fast. By now Mellor knows just about what he'll want in
the way of lighting, and Philbrick is working it up. "Kill
this junior. Let's get a thousand- watt key light in here. . . .
The midget's a little bit hot, add a single net . . Take the
full flood up in the air and let's keep it soft on the girl. ..."
This scene will run a long three minutes and twenty sec-
onds and is loaded with intricate cross-timings, but the me-
chanics start rounding into form after two or three runs
and Bill begins to work up his reactions and character busi-
ness. When young Johnny boyishly loads his cereal with
sugar, Joe and Mary will notice it and exchange an intimate
grin. "You're being too nice, Mary. When Joe pulls the
bread away from you, you're burned. Get in some light
and shade, so when you do smile at him it will mean some-
thing. . . . Look over at that bread as if it were gold." A
little later in the scene when Joe picks up his lunch pail,
he guesses what is in it and says, "Darling, until you have
eaten a cold hamburger sandwich you'll never know how
much I love you," but something's a little wrong. Bill tries
to figure what. "Mary, you're going to your reaction before
the business. If you smile on 'cold hamburger,' what'll you
have left when he tickles your ear?" Later: "On the line t
'how much I love you/ " Bill says, "This is the litde moment
we'll stop for." And, "Don't look up at her, Joe, just keep
on shoveling in food we want business going on all the
time, everything piling up on everything, so you don't

88 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

seem to be reading dialogue." Mellor is riding the camera
dolly now, his eye to the finder, and signaling for the grips
to push him in and out. Strips of black tape go on the floor
to mark the positions where the camera will stop.

Bill says, "Now I'm beginning to get a little of what I
want the hurry of breakfast when a man has to get off to
work and the kid's going to school." He goes over to the
camera and hunches forward on the bucket seat, his eye to
the finder as he runs the scene again and shapes it for com-
position. Finally, it works out to where he knows it will
play the way he wants it to. Joel calls for the second team.
The actors walk off the set and the stand-ins walk in.

-Stand-ins, by the way, are not doubles in the sense that
they resemble their principals. ^There's a general resem-
blance in build and coloring, but that's usually as far as it
goes. A single stand-in may work for many different prin-
cipals: Jim Whitmore and the late Frank Morgan are to-
tally different in looks, but old-timer Jack Harris used to
represent Morgan and is now standing in for Whitmore.
^A "double" is usually hired only for stunt workX-Harry
Woolman would double for Jim in the scene where the car
must race backwards out of the driveway but most dou-
bling is photographed in long-shot and whatever resem-
blance is needed can be handled by wardrobe and makeup.

Stand-ins are not used merely to give the stars a life of
ease; in fact, we supply stand-ins for lesser players. If the
actor were to finish his rehearsal and then have to stand
about for those endless minutes while the lighting is ad-
justed and the camera moves perfected, he would be tired
and stale when he went into the take and the tiredness
w*>uld show.

At niae-twenty-seven Mellor had his lighting up to the

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 89

point where he needed a minute or two for final polish with
the principals, and Joel called in the first team. A grip dulled
down a faucet which was bouncing a hot spot of light into
the camera lens, and the standby painter did a similar serv-
ice on a door jamb which worked like a mirror when
the door swung open. Mellor called, "Okay, Bill," and
walked off. Wellman came back in, camera operator Neal
Beckner climbed into the camera seat, Joel called, "Quiet,
fellows," and the chips went down on the table.

Bill put the scene through one final rehearsal. There were
still some minor rough spots, but the scene was shaking
down into that headlong overlapping tempo he was after,
and he decided to try for a take. Camera and Sound checked
their film loads, the prop man checked his orange juice
and cereal box, and the gaffer signaled his boys to hit their
lights. The big arcs in the background sizzled and fluttered
for a moment as they caught. Neal racked over the camera
and shifted his eyes from the lens to the side-mounted
finder^Matty stepped on the dolly with his hand at the dial
which would alter the focus as the rig moved in. "Let's have
it quiet," called Joel. "This is a take," and the conversa-
tionalists faded slightly. Fred Faust, standing on the boom
which he would crank and twist in and out during the
scene to keep his microphone on top of the dialogue, took
Bill's go-ahead nod and called, "Turn 'em," over his shoul-
der. From the rear of the crew, mixer Conrad Kahn called
back, "Turning," and thumbed down the fateful red button
cwgjmjspund panel.^/

>flThis button controls a sort of electrical octopus. The
one push starts the sound-film recorder, starts the syn-
chronized camera motor, shuts off the noisy ventilating
fans, cuts off the stage telephone bell, starts the flashing

90 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

red light and buzzer outside the stage door, and when the
separate strips of film in the camera and recorder have
revved up to synchronized operating speed, it fogs sync
marks into both strips. In about three seconds it reports
success on all these enterprises in the form of a modest
buzz.

Connie called, "Speed," and the big stage at last became

dead quiet. King Baggot, Jr., poked his scene-chalked

slate in front of the lens momentarily. Bill hunched

forward and called, "Action." Mary started slitting the

cereal box, and The Next Voice You Hear was on the road.

On take one Johnny walked through an overlooked hot

spot near the stove. Juicers killed a junior and put a silk

on one of the broads.* Prop man Jimmy LuttreU adjusted

the orange juice and put a new cereal box on the table. On

take two Mary bumped into the chair too soon. Jimmy

fixed the orange juice and cereal box again. On take three

Johnny fluffed his lines about the compass. Phil polished

his lighting a little, Neal warned Joe that he went out of

camera when he leaned back, and Jimmy took care of his

orange juice and cereal box. On each take the crews had

smoothed up their handlings a little more, and the actors

kept on getting more easy and natural. "Let's try one more,"

said Bill. "A little more tempo in the eating."

"That's the one" said Bill as Mary made her final turn
from the window. "Print four and hold two. Any prob-
lems?"

Connie the mixer walked in to worry about the noise of
plates and spoons over the dialogue, but Bill figured that

* Translation: Electrical technicians extinguished a miniature spotlight
and Irang a diffusion fabric over the aperture of an oblong incandescent

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 91

it was natural eating sound. "I never heard of people eating
off blotters/' Script Supervisor Bill Hole had noticed that
Joe said damn when he spilled some milk, but his lips were
off camera and the word was sufficiently clear of other
dialogue so that we could paint it out of the track. Still man
Eddie Hubbell lugged in his heavy camera to get his public-
ity stills, the first of several hundred pictures he would snap,
and held his ground until he had picked up file-stills of the
set and wardrobes; they would be invaluable in the event
.of re-takes.

Bill lined up the first of his close shots and Mellor began
setting up the lighting. Joe and Mary, reverting tempo-
rarily to their status as Jim Whitmore and Nancy Davis,
walked off set to their portables and Gary Gray trudged
across the stage to his canvas-flat school. The time was
ten o'clock" For the next three working hours we would
shoot parts of the same master scene in thirteen assorted
close angles. When these were cut in, probably about thirty
seconds of what we had done so far would appear on the
' screen. Jimmy Luttrell would squeeze oranges in his sleep
that night. ^

The company broke for lunch about twelve-fifteen. The
standby car, a long bkck Chrysler limousine, was waiting
at the door, but the sun was out now, the erstwhile empty
streets were suddenly colorfully busy, and it was a pleasant
walk down through the stages.

Nancy lunched at the commissary with a magazine
writer, who didn't know about the ten takes of orange
juice and cereal and bread and butter and who formed the
mistaken conclusion that Nancy eats like a bird. She does,
but it's an eagle.

The commissary is a sunny high-ceilinged restaurant in

92 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

which Publicity, Camera, Makeup, Writers and many of
the other departments have long tables of their own,
and smaller tables are scattered about. Lunch prices run
from 50^ for a salad ("five kinds of lettuce," says Skelton)
to $1.05 for a complete lunch of soup, entree and dessert,
with plenty of extra coffee and candid advice from the
pleasant middle-aged waitresses. Studio policeman Rob
Roy, a diffident ex- wrestler who unobtrusively guards the
door, knows practically every one of the 3,500 employ-
ees by name and what time they usually come down to
lunch.

12

Back at Stage 1 8 Bill Wellman has robbed the prop wagon
of some of the breakfast eggs and bacon and is calmly
scrambling a lunch on the practical gas range in the kitchen
set for himself and cameraman Mellor. Outside, propped
against the walls in the sun, lounges the lunch-pail con-
tingent. Jim Whitmore is a sandwich-thermos-apple guy,
but mostly these men are members of the mechanical crews
attached to the shooting company: grips, electricians and
greensmen.

In looks they're a typical slice of American craftsmen,
except that they seem easier in manner and somehow more
"individual." Standard dress seems to be slacks or work
pants, with an open-neck sport shirt or T-shirt. The ages
run mostly between thirty-five and the late fifties, with an
accent on the elder bracket, and most of them have worked
at this one studio ten years or more, including old-timers
who stood a few yards from this very spot a quarter cen-
tury ago during the merger ceremonies and wondered
whether the new company would make the grade. This is a
business where the years of personal experience have a cash
value: many an on-set emergency is averted by an older man
who can remember "that John Gilbert deal in the schooner
cabin seems to me we bounced the light around the corner
off a mirror."

These men draw hourly pay rates higher than for similar
work outside, on the union philosophy that movie employ-

94 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

meat is "day call" work and hence sporadic. True, the cas-
uals who come into the studio only on temporary calls do
badly for annual income, but these regulars whom the
studio tries to keep busy as its "hard core" of steady em-
ployees mostly take in around $100 a week for a minimum
of forty weeks per year (overtime may boost this to
$150 and more when companies are shooting). The weekly
$208.25 of the key grips and gaffers puts them in the
$10,000 executive class. Whether we can maintain these
standards when we encounter the full force of television
competition and divorcement of our theatres, nobody can
say.

But I can say that these men contribute a kind of work
which has vanished from too many American industries
cheerful, willing, alert work by men who seem to feel them-
selves personally responsible for the entire project, who
look around for things that need to be done and "jump to
it" without orders, men who are crack at their jobs and
casually proud of it. This spirit is not confined to the major
studios. I have seen the same jump and zest in quickie com-
panies on Poverty Row. The wellspring of this old-fash-
ioned spirit might well be looked into by industries which
are suffering from low worker productivity.

Many of the several hundred men in Frank Barnes y \jrip
Department lio their work behind the scenes. They do the
sewing and placing of all canvas, from the huge painted
backings which reproduce exteriors inside the stages, to
"tarping in" acres of outdoor sets when a director wants
to shoot night scenes in the straight-rate daylight hours.
Grips also hang those miles of open scaffolding for lighting
platforms around the perimeter of all sets.

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 95

But the glamour boys of the department are the "com-
pany grips" like Leo Monlon's gang on Next Voice. They
operate the setsTTheir badge is the wide leather belt slung
low over the hips, from which depend gloves, hammer and
rolls, of tape and wire; over a sturdy apron whose pock-
ets contain pliers, cutters, screw-drivers, knives, crescent
wrenches, steel tape, chalk, assorted nails, cigarettes and
Chiclets.

4 Grips are the company handymen. Jurisdiction over a
physical set passes from the construction unions to the grips
as soon as the camera grinds its first frame, and from then
on they move the walls and take care of set alterations.
Taking orders from the cameraman, they place all shade,
diffusion and reflectors; they lay the camera track for
moving shots, and manage all propulsion of the camera.^
This latter function occasionally enlists a boatman or heli-
copter pilot, but most of the men came into the department
from the labor gang, most of them with past experience
"on the outside" in carpentry, plumbing, painting, and
other trades.

T Company electricians are artists with strong backs. It's
the job of silver-haired, stocky Chet Philbrick to deliver
whatever lighting effects his cameraman instructs, and to
do it fast, because lighting the sets takes up more of that
precious production time than any other company opera-
tion.

A Lighting a movie-Hs a science which goes far beyond
merely "fixing it so you can see the people." It even carries
an important share of the actual story-telling, b}^ silently
keying the mood of a scene^implying the time of dayland
state of the weather^subtiy accenting objects the audience

96 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

should notice, restoring youth to aging stars and, particu-
larly, creating the illusion of a third dimension in what
otherwise would be a two-dimensional medium. ^

If you hold your finger directly under a light, you'll
notice it seems flat: now move your finger beside the light,
and see how the side shadow brings out its roundness. The
motion-picture screen is an absolutely flat surface, and the
picture itself gains the illusion of depth and roundness and
contour because of the skillful and artistic placing of light
and shadow. Look at the back walls in the next movie you
see, and notice the deliberate designs of shadows thereon.
Those background shadows separate the background from
the foreground, they seem to push out foreground objects
to compel the illusion of depth. You can notice the lack
of this separation lighting in most of today's live-show
television. Home-movie cameramen take notice.

Hobbyists might also profit from another studio practice.
Studio crews light for "positions": that is, they place equip-
ment to illuminate each of the actors in a scene for each
position in which he stays put for any length of time. In
practice, the experienced director plans the scene to keep
the number of these positions within reasonA But each
position must be lit so that*it looks like a portrait, and
a scene with four actors, each with three moves, really
amounts to lighting twelve painstaking portrait sittings^
And the real object of all this care is to make sure that the
lighting and photography will not be noticed, that all the
audience's attention will go to the actors.

The lighting in a scene begins with the^fkey ligh^fthe
apparent source of whatever light illuminates the scenes
It may foe the son or moon through a window, a light fixture
o&dte'wal! or ceiling or table, a cigarette lighter in the hand,

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 97

or whatever, but everything is built from there to give the
impression that all the enormous amount of light which
must flood the scene for good photography at the rate of
twenty-four exposures per second comes from that key
source. The juicers have a language all their own, and
some of it makes wonderful hearing: "Feed that broad
through the door. Tip it up so it doesn't hit the jamb, full
flood. . . . Try a single silk, bring the top door down a
little and gobo the baby spot. . . . Take all the junk off that
junior in the hall; gimme a little shaft of light out through
the door. ... I want to just miss the seat of this chair. . . .
Some light is leaking over the door. . . . Swing the one with
the snoot for a little backlight on Mary it's too hot
we'll have to net her down, a drip net if we can get away
with it. ... We can use a baby on a stick over here. . . .
Okay, that's it, save 'em." Philbrick can grow lyric as he
describes the lighting of a scene involving blowy fog at
night under a lonely street lamp in the snow.

His hour of trial, however, comes when his men must
hit or kill twenty huge arcs in absolute synchronism as an
actor blows out a candle or something. Every juicer in
town saw Warner Brothers' June Bride, but not many of
them joined in the roars of laughter when Robert Mont-
gomery trotted about a room snapping out lamp after lamp
and Bette Davis followed after him switching them on
again.

Some of the electricians' work is brutally hard, particu-
larly that phase of the rigging crews known as "hauling
iron." This is the job which comes after the grips have hung
the scaffolding, of sweating half-ton arc lights and festoons
of heavy cables up above the set with block and falls. The
crew call for a rigging job often coincides with an epidemic

98 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

of vague illness which decimates the available electricians,
an epidemic which miraculously clears up when the set is
"lined" and ready for operation. Chet's assistant, Howard
Roberts, whose job carries the odd title of Best Boy, is
expert at diagnosing such ailments. Over the years Chet
and Howard have become adept at handling anything, from
fire in the cables to rigging a three-hundred-pound drunk
down a vertical ladder from a sixty-foot high catwalk.
Incidentally, drunkenness and derelictions of duty are dealt
with within the union itself, with discipline more severe
than any employer would dare enforce. Of course, dis-
cipline does have its limits. After all, since heated air is al-
ways going to rise toward the roof, the cliffhangers tending
the high arcs are occasionally going to fall asleep and let
their funny papers sail down into the middle of tense
emotional scenes. One gaffer kept this situation under con-
trol for some years with a sling-shot, but this method is
not*now considered enlightened management practice.

Anything that grows from earth is the concern of Walter
Fabel's-^Greens" department, "from the thousands of plant
varieties on his twenty acres of glass, slat and open ground
nurseries, Walter can supply in a matter of minutes anything
from an Egyptian date palm to a vine orchid or an acre of
growing wheat.

Like the studio lumberyard which keeps its new stock
in the open and padlocks beaten-up wood that anyone else
would burn, FabePs most carefully guarded plants are such
weedy items as the marsh grass and dandelions toward
which art directors' fancies always seem to turn in January.
Every studio has a standing order for several truck loads
each morning of fresh-cut leafy shrubs and tree branches,
SOIBC of them for nailing to plaster boughs in the fabricat-

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 99

ing of trees, but more to be fastened on brackets in front
of stage lights to cast the vague leafy shadows which un-
obtrusively mark depth on the background.

Most of the greensmen's work on sets is finished before
shooting starts, and the men are wonderful on the tiny de-
tails which add up to reality. "A little weed here, a tuft of
grass growing up between the planks of the board walks,
the stuff a little greener around the bottom of a watering
trough where the ground would get damp," says Fabel,
"audiences don't consciously notice those things, but they
make a lot of difference." The potato hills of the vegetable
gardens in King Solomon's Mines are twice the normal
height so that they will cast the shadows by which they
will make their presence known.

It's the duty of prop man Jimmy Luttrell, last seen
squeezing orange juice, to think of, procure, keep ready,
and guard from theft the multitude of portable items which
appear in a film. "All the departments have their grief and
responsibility," says Jimmy, u but we got all this junk,
too."

Jimmy's pre-production breakdown of hand props listed
not only what the script came right out and called for, but
whatever else a director like Billy Wellman might think of
when he read it. A scene calls for a basket but, Jimmy
thinks, "Bill might decide to use a satchel." In addition to
the oranges and cereal boxes, Jimmy's breakdown listed
such items as a newsboy's bag, potato peelings, dry ice (for
silent steam in tea kettle), mud (to track into house), hymn
books, and lunch boxes. Jimmy takes a craftsman's pride at
never being caught short of any prop, no matter how ex-
otic, whether the script lists it or not. The two large green-
painted chests on set which hold his personal packrat's

100 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

paradise contain four thousand different items ranging
from alarm clocks to zwieback. If Jimmy lacks an item,
he will adapt something else to the purpose: a peppermint
Lifesaver once made a convincing bunion plaster, and a
cake of Parowax cut up into camera-proof "ice cubes."

Jimmy is expected to set all clocks which appear in
scenes, to tuck in any heroines who appear in bedroom
scenes, and to "age" the newness out of practically every
prop that appears in the picture. For the aircraft factory
scene in Next Voice Jimmy had to buy fifty lunch boxes.
While he was brooding about how to go about aging all
these shiny new creations, one of the fellows displayed the
battered specimen he had been carrying to work the last
dozen years and kidded, "Wanna swap even?" That he did.
The word zoomed around the back lot, and in two hours
Jimmy had the town's best collection of veteran lunch
boxes. Including Wellman's.

Jimmy's nemesis is the screen writer who blithely types
such phrases as, "Father begins to carve the turkey." To a
prop man, this means that he must have on set at nine
A.M. at least a half-dozen whole fresh-roasted turkeys
(with provision to keep same steaming) so that Father
can sink his knife into virgin skin in each of the possibly
numerous takes. Once when a screen writer treated his
characters to a fish dinner and the scene ran into unex-
pected difficulties, Jimmy ran out of complete fish and had
to sew the severed portions back together for the final take.
Which is why you don't see many eating scenes in low-
budget pictures, unless, of course, it is something simple like
orange juice and cold cereal.

The lunch break ended at one-fifteen and most every-
body was back on deck a few minutes before that.

13

It was about half-past three when the final pickup on the
second kitchen scene went into the can. Joel called, "We're
in the wrong set, boys," and the company moved around
to INT. JOHNNY'S BEDROOM. In the mimeographed script,
the scene read like this:

MARY, JOHNNY Interior Johnny's room, night 22

At a small desk-table, Johnny in pajamas and robe struggles
with his homework. We hear o.s. sound of radio, -faintly.

JOHNNY (mumbling)

Bring down the nine another nine!
He chews his pencil. The offstage sound of the radio stops
abruptly. Mary becomes aware of the silence, puzzles about
it briefly, goes back to the homework. The door opens.
Joe stands in the doorway. He seems mldly disturbed, rubs
the back of his neck with his palm.

MARY

What is it, Joe?
Joe just shakes his head.

MARY

Finish the dishes?

JOE

Huh? Oh, sure yeah . . .

MARY

You're not listening to the radio what's wrong?

JOE

Kind of a funny thing on the radio they announced it was

exactly eight-thirty . . .

JOHNNY

Garry Gavery the Golden- Voiced Gooci ...

102 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

MARY

Quiet, Johnny.

JOE

Yeah. They announced it. Then there was kind of an odd

empty sound. Then a voice said, "This is God. I will be with

you for the next few days."
Joe finishes with a wonder in his voice.

MARY

What?

JOE (puzzled) A voice said, "This is God. I will be with you for
the next few days."
MARY (a moment) Then what happened?

JOE

Nothing happened the program came back on. ...

MARY

Maybe it was just the introduction . . .

JOE

No because when the program did come on again, Garry

Gavery was smack in the middle of his first song.

Mary thinks hard for a moment, comes up with an answer.
MARY

It must be one of those Mystery Voice shows you have to
guess whose voice . . .
JOE

But they never do that unless they tell you all about the
prizes. . . .

MARY

Or maybe one of those Orson Welles things . . .

JOHNNY

I got it! It was little Eddie Boyle! He's always trying to be

a radio ham maybe he cut in ...

JOE

Well, if that isn't the silliest . . . Would Eddie Boyle's voice

sound like God?

JOHNNY

I don't know. I never heard God.

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 103

MARY (to Johnny)

That's not very nice, Johnny. Go to bed.

JOE

Yeah . . .

(He turns, exits to living room)

Mary looks after Joe a moment , then turns to Johnny.

MARY

Go ahead, Johnny. Get undressed.
She turns, follows Joe out and closes the door.

DISSOLVE TO:

Good acting is not spontaneous, though it must always
seem to be. The lines of dialogue in the script are only the
surface shell of a scene, and a competent actor immediately
digs under them to find his "attitude" and his objective.
Joe's attitude would be puzzled. Also he'd be ninety-nine
percent skeptical about the voice being God's but that
one percent trace would be enough to plant the fear which
must start to grow tomorrow, Young Johnny is skeptical
and "So what?" Mary, too, is puzzled. But there is a little
more stirring of fear deep within her which she smothers
under her instinctive woman's reaction, "Keep the home
going." The over-all mood of the scene would be subdued,
and the two adults would underplay.

On the first run-through, Wellman and the actors began
converting these intangibles into physical business, for the
actor's horror is a scene which requires him just to stand
there, in the professional phrase, "with egg on his face."
This need of physical business accounts for a good deal of
the cigarette lighting and drink lifting in movies, these be-
ing the first devices the uninventive director seems to think
of when his actors are standing like shop-window manne-
quins as they bat lines back and forth. The basic business

104 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

was built into this scene right at the beginning, with
Johnny bending over his homework at the desk, Mary
mending as she watches, and the two of them pricking up
their ears when the radio fades down and looking toward
the door when Joe enters. Later, at Joe's "this is God" line,
Johnny would look up and Mary lay down her mending,
and the emotional tension would be so tight from there on
that nothing more would be needed.
^ If good acting must seem spontaneous, good direction
must seem like no direction at all. ^Bill's whole effort is to
wipe away all trace of his own participation so that the
eventual scene looks as though a roving camera had poked
in and caught the people unaware. A typical instruction
from him is, "You're anticipating Mary's interruption
the audience will think you're turning because the director
told you to."

But there is no question as to who is in charge on a Well-
man set. Volatile, explosive, outspoken, thin and hard as
a coil of wire, his mobile left eyebrow often cocked in
amusement or indignation, he gives the impression that he
knows exactly what he wants and is most certainly going
to get it. This is wonderful for the cast and crew. It's an
awful feeling on a set where the people are uncertain, but
there's none of it around a Wellman company; everybody
rocks along at full gait in the cheerful confidence that papa
knows best. Sometimes I think Bill is the most completely
natural and uninhibited human being in the universe; at
others I wonder if he isn't really the most canny of poseurs,
with every explosion and change in temperature expertly
calculated. One thing I am sure of, nothing he does is for
personal vanity, not ever; it's all for the picture. He cajoles
and builes and flatters and curses and babies and drives his

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 105

cast like a master psychologist, and they love him and re-
sent him and give him twice what they've got. But I do
know of one moment when Bill is absolutely himself, with-
out calculation, and that's when he hunches over the cam-
era operator as a scene is going into the can: mouth open,
tongue licking, body twisting and eyes tortured, he's pull-
ing what he wants out of his people by sheer, mystic power
of will.

Bill okayed the master shot on the third take, and the
crew shifted into second gear for that tedious phase of the
movie-maker's job, getting the "pickups." Though an au-
dience should never realize it, a scene like this one in John-
ny's bedroom, not particularly lengthy, will reach the
screen as a composite of clips shot from several varying
distances and angles. The purpose isn't merely to give vari-
ety; most of the pickups are close shots of one or two peo-
ple which the cutter inserts into the longer-distance master
to satisfy the audience's curiosity as to characters' reactions
and emotions, and to put over important plot points.
<The pickup shots use a good deal of time, often more
time than is needed to shoot the master, and hence they
account for a good deal of the cost of a pictureXThe next
time you see a B picture on the lower half of a double bill,
it might be interesting to note the paucity of close shots,
the small number of bit scenes and flashes, "establishment
shots" of exteriors, reverse angles, and "geography" long
shots. s fJSfote also the bits of awkwardness and unnatural
, action which one or two more takes might have smoothed
out. The real reason why poor quality is undesirable is that
it calls attention to itself, whereas good quality lets die au-
dience enjoy the play and the pkyers to the full withoirt
mechanical distraction,

106 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

Bill wanted five pickups on this scene to supplement
2 2 A, the full shot master which was already in the can.
228 was a medium close shot of Joe as he entered the
bedroom door, to catch his puzzled uncertainty. 22C was
a face closeup of Joe. In 22D, the side wall came out
and the camera favored Mary, shooting across young
Johnny at the desk, to catch her growing worry. 22E
was the same except that it was a closeup of Mary alone,
with Joe and Johnny delivering their lines from outside
the camera field. 22p came in close on young Johnny at
his desk to pick up his reaction to Joe's first report of the
Voice saying this is God, and to emphasize his climax line
of the scene, "I don't know. I never heard God." The cut-
ter would not use all the footage in these; in fact, each shot
duplicated basic action in another, but he would have an
ample selection. And the scene would be protected in case
we changed our minds or preview audiences later on dis-
agreed with our judgment as to what was important.

Since the whole bedroom had already been master-
lighted for all the positions, these pickups went rapidly.
Chet killed the big overhead lights except those which lit
the particular position being picked up, and floor lights
were quickly brought in and adjusted. The stand-ins did
their stints, Matty held his tape measure impersonally in
the stars' faces as Chet cuddled his light-meter in their ears,
and one by one the shots were ready to work up.

Every pickup shot involves some questions about
"matching." Obviously, when the final film makes an in-
stantaneous cut from a long shot to the same actor in
closeup, the actor must be doing exactly the same thing in
both shots even though they may have been photographed

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 1 07

several hours apart. It is the actor's obligation, and one that
calls for extraordinary skill, to recreate his posture, facial
expression, pace, intonation, and inner emotion exactly. But
many questions also arise as to items of fact, and these go to
the Script Supervisor.

-jThe script supervisor ibn Next Voice was a slight, dark-
haired young man with a stop-watch dangling from a cord
around his neck and a leather-bound script hooked in the
crook of his elbow. His name is Bill Hole, and he is in
charge of not getting letters that is, he is responsible for
preventing noticeable boners such as the milk bottle which
fills and empties by magic from cut to cut, the dress which
changes its pattern, the clock which gains an hour between
reverse angles of the same scene, the glance to the left
which sees something to the right, the feet which walk out
of a doorway in slippers and enter the next room in shoes
all those pitfalls which threaten when action is shot out
of straight continuity.

Hole blocks off these unhappy occurrences by a process
of uncannilyMletailed observation of everything that hap-
pens on every take,^penciling the salient points thereof on
his script for later reference so that he can pass along the
reminder, "You had your hand in your pocket before you
reached for die door," or, "You pointed your index finger
toward Johnny's paper when he said Another nine" or,
"Johnny's hair was hanging down over his forehead in the
long shot." He also serves as a dialogue director, to the ex-
tent of prompting the actors in rehearsing, and he checks
all dialogue in the takes. As a sort of camera historian he
keeps a record of the lens through which each take was
photographed, a diagram of where the sidelines fell on the

108 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

set in each shot, plus the footages exposed. And his minute-
by-minute log of the day's progress includes some fascinat-
ing indications of where the time and money go.

He makes $125 a week, works six long days a week
when "in production," usually spends some evening time
keeping his complex records up to date, and goes to sleep
with the invariable question, "Did I miss anything?" Two
seconds of inattention at the wrong time can cost the worth
of a yacht in retakes. But since it's his job to watch Bill
Wellman's every move and read his reasoning, f o diagram
the physical movement in each scene and the camera han-
dling thereof, Bill Hole is in an ideal spot to learn the art
of directing, and he may some time get his chance through
the intermediate steps of second assistant director ($140),
assistant ($262), and unit manager ($300).

While the earlier pickup shots were being ground out,
Ruby Rosenberg had come up to the stage from the Pro-
duction Office and was huddling around the telephone pul-
pit and the high stage desk with the two assistant directors.
The day was far enough along now so that they could de-
cide what scenes could be set up for tomorrow. They went
over the schedule and script to list what people and facili-
ties would be required. Then Ruby took the information
back to his cubbyhole and typed up the yellow sheets of
tomorrow's work order which, listing the scenes to be shot
and the sets to be used, would notify each department what
time to report, with what equipment, and what it must be
prepared to do. ,

Ex studio schoolteacher Fletcher Clark, the second as-
sistant, used the same information to get out The Three-
e'dock-Report the mimeographed white sheets which
woiP is^t the actors, stand-ins and doubles, type and nmsx-

SHOOTING THE PICTURE IOp

her of extras to be called for tomorrow, together with the
wardrobe changes they should wear and the numbers of
the s'cenes they should study. A copy of it would go by
teletype to Central Casting to line up the extras. Ruby had
been in a meeting at eleven A.M. with the unit managers
and art directors of all the other shooting companies, so
he knew that his plans would not trip over anybody
else's. These particular orders were mostly routine contin-
uations of today's work, except for changes of wardrobe,
and instructions to Electrical to prepare a "Scissors" for
the lightning effect.

Wellman called "Print that one" on the final pickup a
few minutes before six. The three actors went to their port-
ables, thankful that they didn't have to take off makeup and
unglue hair pieces; electricians and grips began gathering
up their scattered equipment and organizing it for the next
day, Bob Streeter and Florance Hackett picked up the
wardrobe changes and returned them to the costume lines
for overnight freshening, Jimmy Luttrell gave away his
leftover oranges and locked up his working props in the
stage box, Camera and Sound wrapped up their equipment
and checked back to their headquarters, the assistant direc-
tors began telephoning tomorrow's calls to the actors listed
on the "three-o'clock," and Wellman took five minutes to
lay out the morning's first setup with Mellor before he
picked up his lunch pail and headed down the dark studio
street for home.

The log credited the day's work with four scenes, shot
in twenty-one camera setups. Bill had crossed off eight
pages of his script; Mellor had exposed 4,690 feet of film,
of which 500 feet would appear on the screen for a ranning
taste of five and oae~half minutes. This would be consici-

110 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

ered fast work on anybody's lot, but it was particularly
fast for what we hoped would be a quality picture. Bill was
shaking down the cast and crew into a tight, hot unit. It
began to look as though we might make the twenty-two
day shooting schedule.

The night crews of two or three men each came up from
Grips and Greens to put back the wandering wild walls as
they were positioned on the set blueprint, and freshen the
shrubbery around the front "exterior" of the house. A
painter squinted around the walls to touch up any spot a
lamp might have scraped or a boom dented. Along about
nine they packed up, shut oif the high stage lights, and trun-
dled their carts of materials and tools back to where they
came from.

The big door yawned open and the busy stage slept, vast
and shadowy and cavernous. The magic was wrapped up
for the night.

14

By Friday, when the company moved into the locker-room
set, it had shaken down into a comfortable unit, knit to-
gether into a "we" morale by mutual liking and an accu-
mulation of private jokes. For Jeff Corey and big Tom
d'Andrea, Joe's factory pals, today was the first work day.
But like most Hollywood supporting and character play-
ers, they settled into place and became part of the company
in a matter of minutes.

There is a playwrighting axiom to the effect that any line
should do one of three things: advance the plot, develop
character, or get a laugh "laugh" in the sense of any de-
sired audience emotion. In movies, where we must present
the equivalent of a novel or a play in around ninety min-
utes, we must try to make each line and bit do all three jobs
at once. And so, since the dialogue would take care of ad-
vancing the plot, Wellman kept digging for chances to flesh
out the characters and build the laughs.

The script had given the irascible foreman, Mr. Brannan,
a running line which he used frequently when his men were 7 ^
dallying in the locker room: "An honest day's work for an
honest dollar." On the first appearance of the line, Wellman
kept the camera on Brannan, to get the line established. But
the next time the line came in he wanted it to perform that
triple duty, and he cast about for some hearer's reaction to
which he could cut. Sardonic Tom d'Andrea would be a
good bet. What would be Tom's reaction to the line? He'd

1 12 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

be fed up, hating this slavedriver and thinking, "Every day
it's the same old stuff." Fine. But by what bit of physical
business would Tom make his unspoken thoughts visible?

In the answer is the clue to how the great running gags
and bits of business come into being. Bill's simple but very
funny and characterful answer was to have Tom's mouth
do a different pantomime imitation of the words whenever
Brannan spoke the phrase. It's always a chuckle on the
screen, and the time Brannan almost catches him it's a sure
roar.

Bill would invariably phone me, as the producer, after
he had shot one of these inventions and say, "I cooked up
something today, I don't know if it's going to work." Al-
most always I'd like what he'd done; his inventiveness, gov-
erned by his instinctive taste and discrimination, was the
primary quality for which I'd wanted him on the picture.
But in this business, when a man's stuff is perfect it's often
a sign that he's playing everything too safe, not taking
enough swings at the chancy ones. So if I disagreed with
something, all I had to do was begin, "Well, Billy, I'm not
so sure . . ." and he would instinctively know just what
bit had bothered me, because, although he might have re-
sisted his subconscious feeling, it had bothered him, too.

Another effective running gag got in by accident. "You
three men are standing around too long," Bill worried to-
ward the finish of a scene. So he had Joe and Jeff try pick-
ing up their tool trays and walking out of the locker room
while Tom was still speaking his curtain line.

It solved the spot problem, but Wellman's directorial eye
kept going and he saw what he could build out of it. "Hey,
that eaaa be good, Tom," he said. "You're always walking
out i)elpid the others saying something funny and they're

Nancy Davis awaits her fate at her audition reading. From left: Director
Bill Wellman, Producer Dore Senary and co-star 'James Whitmore.

Pre-production cast rehearsal. Director Wellman indicates action for his

stars on the set diagram.

The first scene on the schedule: Joe, young Johnny and Mary Smith at

breakfast.

painted scenic backing reproduces the location exterior as seen from

Joe Smith's front door.

Assistant cameraman checks focus for a close shot.

Set Decorator Ralph Hurst seems ro be in the wrong Prop Room for

The Next Voice.

An actor' s-eye view of the stage sound crew: Boom Man Fred Faust and

Mixer Conrad Kahn.

"I cooked up something today. See what you think of it.' 1 Dore Senary,

Eddie Imazu and Bill Wellman.

Lunch on location.

The Smith family: Joe, Mary, and young Johnny.

SHOOTING THE PICTURE

paying no attention to you." Typical of Wellman's touches,
there was nothing gaggy about it; it probably happens
every day in every factory in the country.

As a matter of fact, the locker-room set and factory rou-
tine was not as out of place on a movie lot as you might
think. Like a self-contained city, the studio has its own in-
dustrial section, appropriately located down by the railroad
track in a conglomerate array of Topsyish structures col-
lectively known as the back lot. Most of the shops are small,
preminiscent of the cottage crafts of medieval times, but the
uncannily skilled artisans who work in them turn out a
greater variety of stranger items in smaller quantities and
in faster time than any other group on earth. Quite liter-
ally, they will make anything or a photogenic facsimile
thereof.

At first glance, everything seems quite normal. The
plumbing shop is a plumbing shop. The hardware shop
contains a lot of everyday hardware to offset the great
castle drawbridge hinges now on the bench. The brightly
lit carpenter shop is spotted with standard woodworking
machines, smells of sawdust and varnish, and could be mak-
ing furniture or prefab housing. But then your eyes drift
to a group of gentlemen methodically sawing up brand-
new automobile bodies like slices of bread Suddenly you
notice that most of die nails have two heads, one above the
other. But just as someone explains it's only because they
pull out with less damage when sets are struck, somebody
else mentions that the man was in about renting the sn#ke 5
and you are back again in a world where it seems logical
when people complain, "It's driving me normal/' ThL is
only the begioiim

f Of Cf

la a color-slopped upstairs sign shop, Chris Smith and

H4 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

his artists will letter free-hand anything from the signboard
for a 1492 Spanish inn sign to Happy 4th of July on
thirty-six young ladies' stomachs.

Jack Pollyea's fabulously cluttered paper props store-
room smells like a second-hand book store and supplies the
company prop men with menus and mortgages, labels and
licenses, posters and programs, stamps and scorecards and
everything else on paper, plus undertakers'-convention
badges on silk and Coolidge buttons on celluloid. Jack's
packrat proclivities he embarrasses his wife whenever
they go out in public by stealing anything with printing on
it_have enriched all of his twenty filing categories except
one, the Bond-and-Currency drawer.

Bob Tittle's paint department keeps $50,000 worth of
paint on hand, uses five times that much annually, and
spends upwards of $2,000 a day for labor alone. No cot-
tage craft this, with gang pushers spotting their brush
crews all over the studios, painting whole buildings and
sets big and small. But in no other industry would a painter
make zebras out of donkeys in the morning, and paddle a
raft around a huge indoor tank in the afternoon spilling
just enough bottled household bluing to tint the water the
proper Technicolor blue for Esther Williams. If he uses
more than one quart of bluing to the 800,000 gallons of
water, the girls in the swimming ballet will emerge with
blue hair. He found this out.

A man can achieve studio fame more quickly in the paint
department than anywhere else. There is a legendary char-
acter named Spraygun Miller: when he sprays a wall he
sprays everything on it, even a sweater. Cheerful Frank
Wesselhoff, the standby painter on Next Voice, was re-
cently spraying shrubbery to a Technicolor green and for-

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 115

got to shut off the sprayer as he turned away, with the
result that he painted a foot-wide stripe across the director,
cameraman and crew. Later on in Next Voice Wellman
asked Frank to spray the hands of a cop black to look like
gloves, but Frank demurred, "I don't paint people on pur-
pose. I only paint people by accident." And it was a painter
from another studio entirely who went down to Balboa in
advance of his company and spent two days doing a mem-
orable aging job on the wrong yacht.

But despite all the ribbing, it was Frank, the brim of his
battered canvas hat pushed up in front and brushes sticking
out of every pocket of his splattered white pants, whose
skill and watercolors aged down the shoes of the too-trim
workers on the Douglas location, who quickly "made" a
piece of patterned wallpaper that couldn't be told from the
torn original, and who knew how to "bring down" the sun-
reflecting rear of a location house with alcohol and dry
colors which would dry instantly without shine. In the
paint shop itself, other skillful men brush the convincing
color surface on such unorthodox items as breakaway pies
and polo mallets of foam rubber, twelve full-size plastic
harps, and a full-size plaster dinosaur.

Many of these breakaways, gags, and imitations come
from Lee Crawford's rubber room. His boys made the gi-
gantic ears and tusks which transformed an Indian elephant
into his African cousin for King Solomon's Mines, and the
rubber steering wheels to protect race-driver Gable in To
Please a Lady. In this same shop, George Lofgren has devel-
oped a way to transfer any real animal fur surface from its
original stiff hide to stretchable rubber film, very useful
for the mechanical animals we must use in process-screen
closeups. George goes down to Mexico shortly to get the

Il6 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

hide of a fighting bull which he will mechanize for some
of the close shots in Quo Vadis.

There are two special achievements down on this part of
the lot at the moment. One is a completely new kind of
foam rubber, wjiich can be colored right in the mix, cast
in molds to any shape, and will float. They're using it for
the beautiful array of Technicolor sea plants through whose
waving fronds Miss Williams and her girls will swim in a
Pagan Love Song ballet.*

The other item is a way of using a plastic called laminae
with glass fiber to make feather-light and practical repro-
ductions of all sorts of things, from ornamental castle doors
and ship masts to carved mantels and flexible tree bark. We
expect this to replace the plaster work which has been in-
valuable to us for so many years. The plastic will take
color in the mix so that a dent doesn't require repainting,
and is waterproof for exterior use. Take one of those tall
columns which grace the entrance to a Roman temple or
a Southern mansion. In marble it would weigh many tons.
Plaster brings the weight down to the couple of tons which
we can handle, but the new plastic column weighs fifty
pounds and can be put in place by one man. Like so much
of the inventiveness here on the back lot, it lets us bring
you authentic sights which you would never otherwise see.

Paradoxically, the plaster-shop crew is busier than ever.
Their work is called "Staff " for some long-forgotten rea-
son, and propped against the walls to dry in the sun outside
their white-powdered building are all sorts of objects you
would never expect to see made of plaster. Staff's bread-

* Miss Williams pokes a shivery toe in the water before she goes in aH
over, just Ike anybody else. Her durable underwater coiffure is sprayed
with Plastk Wipe-On, more usually applied to linoleum.

SHOOTING THE PICTURE II 7

and-butter work, cast up ahead of rime and stacked in the
warehouse, are the big square panels of all manner of brick-
work and stonework, field boulders, roof slates, skyscraper
limestone, and carved "wooden" paneling. When the paint-
ers finish off the surfaces, these panels will be completely
convincing even to the close up naked eye, though their
joints are cut deeper than true to cast those essential shad-
ows for the camera. Ray Davies and his men are currently
rushing out 300 classic miniature buildings and statues for
Nero's spectacular burning of Rome in Quo Vadis. Rome
may not have been built in a day originally, but Staff will
rebuild it, with carefully researched authenticity, in about
three weeks.

Adjoining the Staff shop, the high glassy space which
looks amazingly like a sculptor's studio is a sculptor's stu-
dio. In it, Henry Greutert and his men model the hundreds
of needed objects which cannot be conveniently cast from
an original. Into this classification fall many objects the
private sculptors never even heard of. The contours for a
mechanical horse, for instance, those hinges for the castle
drawbridge, the lacy ironwork of a New Orleans balcony,
wooden Indians, and the backbone of a half-eaten fish.

In all these back-lot shops the fantastic versatility has to
be coupled with a speed which craftsmen in any other in-
dustry would consider ridiculous; it keeps reminding me of
a wonderful bit of understatement in a production manual
which read: "Since in the motion-picture business, lack of
time is mostly the case." If you remember the huge statue
of the buffalo at the World's Fair in Meet Me in St. Louis,
you'll be interested to know that Henry modeled the
twelve-inch original, set up the twenty-foot-high skeleton-
like armature, slapped on nobody knows how many tons of

Il8 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

clay, and had the gigantic piece ready for the truck in ten
days from the date of the Art Director's requisition.

Partitioned off in a corner of Stage 10 is the leather shop.
Burly Lee Lampkin, craggy and aproned like Longfellow's
village blacksmith, was once a harness-maker for Buffalo
Bill Cody. He felt as though he were repeating himself this
year when he tooled the leather and chased the silver
mountings for the boots and saddles and belts and scabbards
in Annie Get Your Gun. Hanging on the musty shop walls
are all manner of weird contraptions. There is the con-
cealed piano wire harness which protected Kim when he
slipped from the mountain cliff, the "hunchback" which
Jim Whitmore wore in Asphalt Jungle, and the dress shoes
weighted with eighteen pounds of lead in each sole which
frustrated Spencer Tracy in the riotous dream sequence of
Father of the Bride.

Lainpkin's tools cost over $7,000 and include forty-one
different kinds of scissors. These tools wear rapidly, and
once every few weeks Lee bundles them up, throws in all
his scrap ends of leather and patterns, and pays the express
on them to a destination in Nebraska which he happened
across while doing another picture some years ago Eoys*
Town. Lee makes no fuss about it. I found it out by acci-
dent. Just as I found out about budgeteer Joe Finn's hobby
of raising money to combat juvenile delinquency by light-
ing school playgrounds at night. And about Charlie
Cochrane, chief of tabulating, whose record of boys' work
includes training the first blind boy to become an Eagle
Scout. And about Saul Scher of Sound Effects, who
badgers every star and location manager in town to get
die foreign envelopes from their fan mail for his "Stamps

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 119

for the Wounded" collectors in the veterans' hospitals. And
a lot more.

The white-haired gunsmith who literally holds the fort
upstairs over the construction office is Lee Constable, and
the 1,500 weapons in his gun room trace the progress of
warfare from tomorrow's rocket pistol back to French
arquebuses and Indian blowguns. Lee is whittling out the
stock for a flintlock derringer at the moment, and complain-
ing that things have been quiet around the place since
Annie went away.

Lee and powder-man Andy Parks had a field day devis-
ing and operating the "gags" meaning mechanical gadgets
or methods, not necessarily funny to help 30,000,000
theatregoers accept the illusion that Betty Hutton was the
greatest markswoman of all time. Since film audiences al-
ways suspect trickery, often wrongly, you can't nowadays
fire the gun in a closeup and cut away to a diif erent shot
of the target being shattered; gun and target must appear
simultaneously in the same picture. So Miss Hutton's deadly
accuracy was dubbed in by a professional marksman stand-
ing just off the sidelines with a compressed air gun, or by
an electrical connection between Betty's trigger and an ex-
plosive squib implanted in the target, or other means.

There was typical Yankee ingenuity in the scene of Betty
shooting up the Technicolor glass balls which the Indians
threw in the air. The balls, filled with photographers' flash
powder and colored pigment, were built on the principle
of wartime hand grenades, and the Indians pulled out the
pins but held down the levers until time to throw the balls
in the air, where they would explode a couple of seconds

120 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

after being tossed upwards. One Indian did not remember
about holding down the lever and will never trust a white
man again.

In an annex off the rubber room works slight, hard-bit-
ten, razor-minded Max Geuppinger. Holder of a university
doctorate in optics, astronomer, chemist, physicist, elec-
tronic expert (for relaxation, he makes Geiger counters),
Jack of many trades and master of all, Max is referred to,
purely for a simplified handle, as the Glassblower. Did you
happen to see the man-size transparent malted milk mixer
in which Yellow Cab Man Skelton got trapped? Max made
it. No one has ever really seen himself until he has stood in
front of one of Max's "surface mirrors," which carry the
silvering on the front face of the glass. And no wintry ex-
terior set is complete without a few blown-glass icicles;
when they're artistically frosted with acid, and water is
dripping through the pinholes at the pointed ends, they
look realer than real And they don't melt under the hot
lights.

These shops are only the beginning. Of course, if you're
really interested in seeing how much and what varied work
goes into the making of a picture, you can visit the glazier,
a file shop, a pattern shop, and a big sandblasting shed where
men clean rust and paint from all sorts of objects. The
heavy planks which line its walls soon become smooth as
driftwood, and are frequently used on beach sets for just
that effect. And that's far from all.

Ed Willis' huge prop warehouse contains an upholstery
shop, a drapery sewing room, a cabinet shop for making
furniture, and an artificial flower shop. Again, only arrifi-

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 121

cial flowers will hold their looks and shape under the mer-
ciless beating of Technicolor lights.

In Lou Kolb's electrical department there is a full-fledged
foundry, a tin shop, machine shop, plating room, electri-
cal repair division, welding shed, blacksmith shop, and an
amazing precision-machine room for electronic and cam-
era fittings where an ordinary watchmaker would seem as
heavy handed as a sledge artist. When the director of Ah,
Wilderness! demanded a brand-new Stanley steamer for
Wallace Beery to drive proudly out of a salesroom, and the
few antique models still available in the old car museums
were too obviously antique, Kolb's metal workers turned
out a custom job that Mr. Stanley could have been proud
of. Practical, too, even though the puffing exhaust steam
was actually ejected by a device originally built to blow
smoke rings.

This reincarnated automobile had a further distinction;
it was one of the few studio contraptions with which Jack
Gaylord had nothing to do. Gaylord heads the collec-
tion of cottage crafts known collectively as prop shop. The
shop makes anything, but Jack is the individual who usually
figures how. A square-built and unassuming man with a
tilted hat and tinted glasses (he nearly lost his eyes in a fog
experiment), his wartime contributions included the pin-
board method of making the relief maps which gave pilots
a visualization of their air targets in a matter of hours rather
than months.

Back in 1935, seeking a material for a mechanized tarpon
which would "fight" the hook in Captains Courageous, he
invented himself into a collaboration with Goodyear and
helped develop what has since become famous as foam rub-

122 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

V

ber. (He claims that the new f oamlike rubber now floating
in the Esther Williams tank is even better.)

But most of his work is the routine legerdemain of stag-
ing illusion, and his answers to complex prop problems are
usually ridiculously simple. To make the symbolic geranium
wilt as you watched it in The Good Earth, he merely in-
jected water into the stem of a real geranium, kept it frozen
until the camera began to turn, then hit it with a beam of
infra-red heat.

And then there's mud. Real earth mud is heavy, settles
too quickly, and takes too long to put back "as was" for
repeated takes. So Jack's notes classify three assorted muds
as follows: "Heavy, to drive through; raw oatmeal and wa-
ter, colored with burnt umber or dirt. Thin; cornstarch
and water, colored with burnt sugar. Mud to hit people
in the face should usually be made from chocolate." Most
fogs are atomized Nujol. To make the low clinging vari-
ety, for example, the Nujol is sprayed through a dry-ice
cooling-box out over wetted ground. Jack and the boys
put a good deal of time working the reality into the earth-
quakes of San Francisco and Green Dolphin Street. But
that mechanized tarpon turned out too real for its own
good, and probably for the health of the gullible shark
off Catalina who found himself suddenly trying to digest
$3000 worth of Gaylordian electrical apparatus.

It is hard to tell where Gaylord leaves off and the operat-
ing men pick up, men like Vic Millar and Walter Brown and
George Lofgren. But they are the last ones to worry about
it, because the inventing and making and operating are
often inextricably mixed up. Officially, these fellows oper-
ate all moving props, from mechanized bedbugs to the full-
sized practical train over on Lot 3, and they produce all

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 123

rain and snow and the other tangible changes in stage
weather known as "effects."

Rain is real water, falling in drops of adjustable size and
frequency from rain-heads on as many as thirty overhead
pipe lines. The reason rain seldom photographs well in
home cameras, by the way, is that it must be backlit, so that
the rain falls between the camera and some sort of high-
lighted background.

Snow has changed a lot over the last few years. The old
reliable cornflakes are more or less out of favor, since what
they do to dialogue when actors walk around on them
shouldn't happen to a sound man. Ground-up chicken
feathers make the most convincing fall, but they are apt
to start " falling" upside down in the least little draft and
they infest a^tage forever after, like lint. We probably came
closest to wintry reality in Battleground, which was as
snowy a picture as you can get without starring penguins.
In the first place, the entire enormous Stage 15 was kept
very cold and damp so that the breath of the soldiprs would
show. Most of the snow on the background earth and in
drifts was white gypsum plaster fresh from the bag. Close
to camera and in contact with the actors, the snow was
produced by Mr. Britt's secret formula so perfectly that it
actually felt damp on the skin, slid off slick surfaces like
rubber and clung to wool, and even tread down and
crunched as the men walked on it. The blizzardy realism
of ice projected from a shredder into the blast of a wind
machine provided the material for the snowball sequence.
But most of the falling snow was Foamite fire-extinguish-
ing liquid which was shot out at the top of the stage from
special atomizing blowers. This, incidentally, gave rise to
one of those persistent minor problems of realism. The fall-

124 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

ing snow would naturally pile up on stones, tree branches,
and other cold objects. But this Foamite snow also wanted
to pile up on the men's helmets, where real snow would
be melted by body heat So the helmets were coated with
chemicals to dissolve the Foamite back into its original liq-
uid state and the realistic "melting" which resulted was
an unexpected bonus.

Just before a recent Christmas we sent a crew to a down-
town hospital to shoot some scenes for the March of Dimes
trailer. The cameraman couldn't get a satisfactory reflec-
tion of the patient's face in the tiny rear-view automobile
mirror with which the iron lungs were equipped. So he sent
out to the prop shop. The boys developed the special fit-
tings for a big mirror which worked fine, but there was an
unexpected aftermath. The patient was overjoyed with his
new breadth of view almost to the point of tears, and the
word of the new mirror spread to the other patients like
wildfire. The result was that the boys in the shops worked
all night for the two nights before Christmas on their own
time to make up forty-eight of these mirrors (Gaylord
typically added some ingenious clips on the reverse side
to hold a magazine in reading position) and on Christmas
morning each patient in the hospital was equipped.

Every foreman on the back lot figures that he has the
best crew in the business. He seldom gives orders; the men
know what is needed and go about it. As Vic Millar said,
after completing one particularly rugged assignment, "The
boys knew we'd all do it together or we'd all go down in a
heap."

15

Monday, the Wellman company went out on location.

The Bennett company was on location in Africa, Potter
in England, and the Saville second unit was on its way back
from India. But we went to 4233 Lebourget Street, a half
mile outside the studio fence.

Near or far, the Production Department shudders at all
locations. They lose that tight control they have inside the
studio and put themselves at the mercy of weather, bad
light, volunteer actors who pop up from nowhere into the
middle of scenes, and a fabulous variety of unwanted sound
effects over the dialogue. On a single afternoon, mixer
Connie Kahn encountered dogs, birds, cement mixers, tele-
phone bells, loud radios, children fighting, the exhaust from
a cleaner's shop, a lawnmower, and, one that had us mysti-
fied for an hour, a little boy with bells on his shoes.

But the weather was wonderful, the bright sun and
cloudless sky which electricians call "grip weather," be-
cause most of the lighting is handled with shades and
reflectors.

Nevertheless, the electricians clocked into the studio in
the pre-dawn fog right along with the grips and prop men
and the others. They loaded their clutter of equipment and
rumbled away on the trucks about seven o'clock. The sev-
enty extras and day pkyers who would represent Joe
Smith's neighbors formed a motley procession up the stu-
dio street to the buses and were on their way a little after

126 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

eight. When they reached the location they found the erst-
while quiet residential street already jammed with the char-
acteristic assortment of vehicles: the big green stake-bodied
trucks from which the equipment was being unloaded, the
long black staff limousines, the crew buses, and such less
usual vehicles as spotless aluminum toilet trailers for extras
and crew, dressing-room trailers for the principals, a sta-
tion wagon with the portable sound recorder, and the snack
wagon of an outside concessionaire.

Most of the real residents were standing in their door-
ways and in knots on the sidewalk watching the sights.
Probably they were somewhat relieved; a month ago when
two of the long black limousines had pulled up and a dozen
quiet men got out and stared intently at the houses, some-
body had called the police.

Already, at eight-fifteen, set decorators had cleaned out
the "Smith" garage, a drapery man had hung the curtains
from Stage 18 in the Smith house front windows, a greens-
man had adjusted the shrubbery to match that on the stage,
and Wellman had put his first shot in the can, the "geogra-
phy" long shot of Joe's house which opens the picture.
Much of Wellman's and Mellor's routine was the same as
you had seen inside the stage.

For others, working outdoors made quite a difference,
Joel had to boom his instructions for the background ac-
tion over the portable electric megaphone. Philbrick's^Iec-
tricians had to lay long cables up the gutters from the
big green generator truck parked around the block out of
scmnd range (arcs use direct current, seldom available from
city lines, and lights are needed to provide the artificial
"filF Eght which softens the contrasting shadows on the
aide of actors' faces away from the sun) ^The grips had set

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 127

up foil-faced reflectors to bounce the sunlight in desired
directions, and they would set up various kinds of diffusion
and shade to soften the flat, sharp "newsreel" lighting of
the sun when the camera went in close. Over in the station
wagon, Connie Kahn and his recordist hugged earphones
to their heads, fighting the constant succession of extrane-
ous sounds. Regular city traffic policemen, working for us
on their days off, were posted around the perimeter: they
own their own uniforms, and we supply them with rented
motorcycles which are painted in the official city black-
and-white but bear private license plates.

At eight-twenty unit manager Ruby, his professional
pessimism finally overcome, phoned the Production office
to cancel out the cover-set arrangement which would have
used these extras inside a studio stage had the weather
crossed him up.

At eight-twenty-five Bill Wellman okayed the shot of
Joe coining home from his day's work and turning on the
lawn sprinklers; the early morning shadows still were long
enough to photograph like late afternoon. While prop men
dried off the sprinkled sidewalks with blow-torches, Mel-
lor's men moved the camera back across the street to get
the shot of Joe racing his car backward out of his driveway
into a near collision. That went in on Take i, and after a
change of wardrobe we got the "reformed" slow back-
out for the fourth day. Then Whitmore and young Gary
gave way to the stunt drivers, and we got the scene on
the second day where irritated Joe roars his car out of the
driveway into the waiting arms of George Chandler, the
motorcycle cop.

George, by the way, has worked in every Wellman pic-
ture since A Star h Born, and when he signed on for this

128 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

part a month ago he rented a motorcycle and had been
learning to stunt it with the proper verve ever since. The
scream now heard was from Chandler when he found that
stunt rider Jack Semple was going to ride the near-miss,
and Chandler would merely do the nice safe acting in the
dialogue shots which followed.

The screams worked, because after the closeup where
Joe got the ticket and raced out of the scene, Chandler got
to turn on his siren and ride the pursuit in person.

Bill and the camera and the crew moved up the street,
grabbing one setup after another, and by eleven-fifty-five
they finished the very funny scenes between Joe and the
cop and knocked off for lunch.

Lunch was the typical location layout. Trucks from Brit-
tingham's had rolled in shortly before noon, and the cater-
er's men had set up long tables and benches. Wellman and
the staff parked at a table over near the camera, where
Mellor had commandeered a camera umbrella, to lay plans
for the afternoon's work. But everybody else lined up for
a lunch from the service tables and settled down for the
hour break.

Ruby always tries to serve a hot-plate lunch, but the
more usual box-lunches are really very good. You may tire
of turkey sandwiches for a few days after Thanksgiving if
Britts have over-figured for their restaurants, but the boxes
contain two ample meat sandwiches, a boiled egg or two,
an apple or orange, some cookies or cake, and a carton of
ice cream. Milk or coffee at the counter. There is no limit
on repeats, and some of the extras put away meals which
could last them a couple of days, and prot^ly do when
extra work is no more plentiful than usual. The veteran
extm picked out the shady spots on the grass of the little

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 129

park, the youngsters were herded to their legally required
rest in a rented patio down the street, and the crews began
drifting over toward the next setup.

Joe spent the next hour and a half doing the two-minute
walk across the park, the crew moving the camera along
through a half-dozen setups to visualize the skeletal script
instructions: "All the neighbors are out, watering lawns,
digging, tinkering with their cars. ... Joe exchanges
friendly greetings with several of them." Now Joel's ad-
vance planning of the background action paid off. The
youngsters were lackadaisical in their first two runs toward
the Good Humor Truck, until the word went around that
there was real ice cream in there for free and the blase child
extras suddenly turned into hungry kids. A bit man was to
be washing a car in a driveway and Wellman let the com-
pany use his dusty convertible, didn't charge us a cent.
There was no way of getting an overhead mike into the final
conversation between Joe and Mr. Brannan without cast-
ing a boom shadow into the scene, so lanky Fred Faust
crawled along behind the hedge with the microphone in
his hand.

The next half hour, over in Joe's back yard, accounted
for several tie-up shots; Joe and Johnny walking out to the
garage on different days, starting the car backouts, and
Mary at the window. When those were done it was late
enough so that the long afternoon shadows began looking
like the very early morning which we needed for the se-
quence of Joe sheepishly delivering his son's newspaper
route.

The work had been going well all day, but now it accel-
erated. There's a wonderful atmosphere when a crew is
keyed high and shooting fast: a take goes in, the key men

130 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

swing in for a quick huddle around the director, take his
instructions, and spread out again to jump for the new
setup. The last bit went in just about twilight, boosted by
every arc Philbrick could blast at it. Mellor had barely
clicked off his test when the smog rolled in and the light
was gone in five minutes.

To get a jump on that precious production time, the
electricians sent word up the street to save some dinner
for them, and went to work lighting up the houses for the
night shots. Ordinary household lighting lets the windows
seem dark on film, so the boys put jK Pans behind the visi-
ble windows of Joe's house and the homes on either side,
planted floods behind some shrubbery to warm up the
house fronts, and placed arcs in the back yards to give the
houses some outline and depth. Location fixer Charlie Cole-
man, despite the emergency complaints he had been adjust-
ing during the day, had made most of his neighborhood
arrangements ahead of time. We paid $100 per shooting
day rentals for Joe's house and the Brannan place, and $25
each to their neighbors. Mrs. Catlan, the schoolteacher
who owns Joe Smith's house, said it felt very odd to stand
out on the street behind the camera and watch other peo-
ple apparently living in her home.

After dinner, with the big Brutes blazing blue-white from
their towers and half the town gathered around to see the
show, Weilman checked off all the neighborhood night
shots. Joe's bowling partners dropped him off in front of his
house and said good night via the mike in the car's glove
compartment, Joe and Mary went out to their car and
started for the hospital and the false labor, and finally Joe
on Bi-annan's porch and found that his runaway

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 131

son was inside. The high arcs clanked off and the streets
grew dark and the crowd began to melt away.

The day's work had netted the really phenomenal total
of twenty-five completed scenes, in forty-seven separate
and distinct camera setups. The 745 feet of actual screen
footage would run eight and a quarter minutes! Wellman
was driving this picture through as he used to drive the
silents. Out of the 168 scenes in the script, he now had shot
107. And we were sk days ahead of what we had thought
an impossibly fast schedule. The gamble was looking better.

The staff hurried back to the studio to check out their
paper-work. The grips wrestled in their platforms, brackets,
and camera tracks. The electricians pulled their miles of
writhing cables out of dark gutters and back yards, and
one by one the trucks rumbled their exhausts and rolled
out past the park up to the boulevard. It had been a sixteen-
hour day of rugged labor, but they could loll in bed until
six o'clock tomorrow morning. It was close to midnight
when the laborer policed up the last paper cup and black-
ened flashlight bulb.

Not until the next day would a hundred-odd people
realize that they were suffering not from some strange
skin disease, but that their long day in the open had sun-
burned their scalps clear down through their hair. Charlie
Coleman took a last look around, crossed his fingers, and the
maintenance pickup jounced away up the sleeping street,

16

Mary Smith was originally going to have her baby on Stage
1 8, but a man named Joe Cooke switched her to 19 to make
room for a cocktail lounge. This sort of thing happens
every noon, when Fred Gabourie walks down from his
Construction Department after lunch and meets assistant
production manager Cooke for their daily session of set-
spotting.

The set-spotting room is up in the Art Department. Its
principal furnishing is a big rack of plotting boards, one
for each of the stages, which map the size and position of
doors, sunken pits, power connections, and other items
of interest. Scraps of transparent tracing paper thumb-
tacked to the boards show the exact position on the stage
floors of sets now standing. Waiting for Joe Cooke is a
bundle of new tracings, representing sets which directors
expect to start using within the next week, and these are the
sets for which he must find a spot.

Since no Art Director willingly consents to strike a set
until dry rot begins to set in (he's right to keep it standing
as long as there's a chance of re-takes or added scenes),
stage space is always at a premium. M-G-M's stage numbers
run up to 30, but Joe and Gabe actually have twenty-three
stages to work with. Some of the stages are allotted to
other uses, such as storage and set assembly. Others are
adapted to special purposes; No.i for music recordings,
for sound and dialogue recordings, 5 and 6 for the-

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 133

atre and opera-house sets, 12 for rear-projection process,
14 for miniature work, and 30 for scenes which need its
800,000 gallon concrete tank. The working stages some-
times get pretty crowded, but Joe "puzzles the stuff in
somehow."

Joe's recurrent nightmare is that he will schedule two
different companies to shoot on the same stage on the same
day. He therefore likes to allot whole stages to just one
company where possible, and so most of the Next Voice
interiors were assembled on Stages 18 and 19.

Six major sets were puzzled onto the floor of 18; the
whole Joe Smith home, the aircraft locker room, Joe's
garage, the cocktail lounge, the saloon, and the interior
of a drug store for the montage. With another fifteen feet
Cooke could have puzzled in the montage hamburger stand.
While this looked at first glance like the most cluttered
maze a man could devise, actually the sets had been cun-
ningly angled so there was plenty of room for each camera
angle which Eddie Imazu had indicated on the tracings.

Realistic though these sets looked, from the camera side,
they cost less than you might think. For example, take the
complete Joe Smith house of living room, dining room,
kitchen, hallway and two bedrooms, with a finished ex-
terior front and enough lawn and painted scenic backing
outside to let the camera shoot out through the windows
on day scenes. Although it was built new, without stock
units, it cost less than $5500 and we played sixty-six scenes
in it. The locker room and each of the bar sets cost around
$1000 each. We spent $8500 on the church interior, but the
pictorial and plot climaxes took place there and justified
the expenditure.

Every once in a while I find myself looking at a seemingly

134 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

ordinary set and realizing all over again a startling fact:
that every single object and item and detail is there only
because somebody thought of it ahead of time. The garage
attached to my house or yours has sort of "accumulated"
over the years. But the construction people and set deco-
rators must start with nothing but the bare words: "INT.
JOE SMITH GARAGE DAY" and use their creative imagina-
tions to realize that a pane of glass would have been broken
and patched with adhesive tape, that years of pressing
hands would have worn the paint on the side of the door,
and that young Johnny's outgrown baby buggy and tri-
cycle would have been put out here for storage along with
the half-emptied cans of paint, the paintbrushes left to soak,
the broken chair that Joe keeps meaning to fix and two
truckloads of other familiar paraphernalia. Work like this
is worth a closer look.

It's the day after the location. The company is back on
interiors, working on Stage 19 where Cooke has spotted
the hospital corridor and waiting room, along with the
church interior and the exterior of Brannan's back yard.

The awesome red light and buzzer hold us out on the
street for a moment, but they fade and we push in-
side through the heavy icebox doors of the sound-lock
vestibule. You breathe in that characteristic smell of the
sound stage: a blend of new paint, sawdust, cigarette smoke,
perfume, distant coffee, ozone from the arc lights and what
not else. Your view is blocked by the near rear wall of the
Brannan set, but the familiar pool of blue-white light is
welling up beyond it.

The sound of hammering and a mix of voices seem to
be ilteriBg dimly, as from a great distance. The quilted
insolation which lines the walls and roof of the stage

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 135

kills all the normal bounce of the sound waves. Sound
travels to the walls but sinks to its death in the absorbent
quilting, giving you the strange feeling that your words
evaporate into nothingness before they reach the ear of
the person to whom you're talking. Most of the set walls,
rigid though they look, are also sound-absorbent.

As you've seen earlier, practically all sets are built of
prefabricated units. Our standard wall unit is a wooden
frame: its bones show in the back, but over the front is
stretched first a layer of black "daisy cloth" to block leak-
age of back light, over it goes a layer of unbleached muslin
to keep the black from choking through to the camera,
and finally the top finish which gets photographed is usually
a layer of tightly stretched canvas, painted to specification.
If the set is to show carved paneling, or stonework or brick,
the same square frame can be fronted with the appropriate
molded plaster or plastic facsimile. An added mixture of
sawdust in the finished paint gives a canvas wall a perfect
illusion of roughed plaster or adobe.

You may wonder about the rather frequent offsets in
the walls of the sets: they're attractive, and they cast
useful depth-creating shadows, but their real purpose is
to conceal the joints between wall units. The units are
nailed to each other, and held vertical and rigid by diagonal
braces to the stage floor and to the lighting scaffolds over-
head. Interior sets seldom have ceilings, because so much
of the light must be fed down into the scene from above.
Usually the camera is close enough to the characters so
that your eyes never get up to ceiling height, but in the oc-
casional long shot where the ceiling must become visible,
it is usually managed by unrolling a sort of horizontal canvas
curtain for the necessary distance. Most doors and windows

136 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

are "practical" industry jargon meaning that a thing really
works and are solidly constructed so that a character can
leave a -scene without seeming to shake his house down
behind him. Naturally we build only as much set as is nec-
essary for the action to be played in it, and that's the reason
you will often see just a corner of a room or a piece of wall
with a door in it or a fagade which ends halfway up the
second story.

Near the big main door of the stage, where they can
be hauled out easily when the company moves elsewhere,
are the portable dressing-rooms for the leading players.
Square, shiny, one-room trailer affairs which are hauled
around from stage to stage by bustling little tractors, they
are very cheerful little places, and the steps leading up
into the bright interiors give them the air of an odd little
residential street. Democratically adjacent are the knock-
down dressing-rooms built of black flats for the minor
players. Just beyond is a row of battered green make-up
tables, rows of bare bulbs rimming their aged mirrors, and
long canvas-covered benches for the extras.

Most of the extras have been around the business for
some time, and are no longer impressed by what once they
might have thought glamorous. When they're not working
they sit about alone and in groups talking, knitting, play-
ing cards, dozing, reading Variety and The Hollywood Re-
porter^ even occasionally standing on the set to look at the
principals in action. Middle-aged moviegoers can usually
spot some once-familiar faces among the atmosphere players,
and when yon hear a bit line such as, "Watch where you're
going, mister!" you're often hearing a person who once
earned several thousand dollars a week and now is gratefol

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 137

for the chance to speak the single line which boosts the
$15.56 extra's check to a bit player's $55.00.

Extras, by the way, are always telephoning, mostly
to see whether Central Casting has something for them
tomorrow: there is always someone in the phone booths
outside the stages and a line of others awaiting their turn.
Studio commissaries all over town give extras their lunch
change in nickels and dimes. A mysterious phrase you're
sure to hear floating from that booth is, "But nothing close,
dear." The extra is reporting to Central that she worked in
a scene but not close enough to camera to be recognized
again by the audience. Only the new and ambitious extras
push forward to get their faces in the camera; the old hands
gladly pass up the glory in exchange for the additional
days of work.

Here on 19, the lights are on in the long hospital corri-
dor set, but things are oddly quiet; the camera position is
deserted, and the only person working is Jimmy Luttrell
as he polishes footprints from the shiny linoleum floor.
Some sort of problem has come up and we're waiting while
somebody goes to get something: the technicians will give
you a much more detailed explanation, but mine is simpler
and just as enlightening. Probably it's something about the
corridor.

Everybody hates to work in corridors. They're long and
narrow sets, of course, closed in on both sides, and the direc-
tor usually wants his characters to walk all the way down
the distance, whispering to each other. The lighting must
be high and uniform all the way rather than concentrated
in "positions," almost as rugged as bringing a star down
one of those long curving state staircases.

Ij8 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

The sound men could mount a mike on the camera if
this were a travel shot, but Wellman wants the effect of
the small figures growing large as they approach his standing
camera. There is no possibility of using a moving micro-
phone boom, so Fred Faust must tie his mike to a "fishpole"
and walk along the high scaffolding as the actors move
along the corridor below him, fish-poling the mike down be-
tween the lights and crossbeams the best he can. Probably
that's the cause of the delay; mixer Kahn has called Sound to
send down one or two more men to work the scaffold route
in relays.

Bill Wellman has walked off the set and is back in a canvas
chair going through his usual between-takes routine. Sec-
retary Ethel Eickhoff has brought down the paper-work
from his office and he's trying to dictate in snatches.
Leonard Murphy from Casting is escorting two elderly
women for Bill to choose between for the "woman in awe"
in the church scene. Bill looks at the two nice old ladies
as they try to conceal their nervous eagerness and says,
"How can a man choose between two such beautiful crea-
tures? We'll use two women in awe." Eddie Imazu is hold-
ing the model of the Brannans* back yard set and wants an
okay on some changes. Wardrobe waits its chance to get an
approval on the spinsterish hat which actress Lillian Bron-
son will wear in the church scene. Publicity's Jim Merrick
has a Distinguished Visitor in tow and still-man Eddie Hub-
feel waits bis chance to bang off a flashbulb on a shot of the
visitor with Bill. The still-man replies to Bill's objection
wiA a cheerful, "Go ahead and fire me, I still got that little
poe^ in my back yard." Bill poses, with a gracious smile.
J&e! femes m with his, "Okay, Mr. Wellman, we're ready."
i B1I*$ Iktfe between-takes relaxation comes to an end.

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 139

Bill tries a run-through, and the scene begins to come
up. At the far end of the corridor, Mary comes out of the
door wearing her coat and carrying her bag, smiles at anx-
ious Joe and says with embarrassment as they walk up the
corridor, "See what you married? I'm just a false alarm."
Joe takes her bag, grins his reassurance, and as they come
close to camera Mary says, "I feel like such a fool leaving
here just as big as when I came in," and they walk off
camera. Bill calls over his shoulder, "How is it now, Mar-
coni?" and Kahn walks in from his panel.

Visitors often slip the mixer's headphones over their
ears, and immediately yank them away as though they
were exploding. That sensitive mike at the end of the boom
seems to be picking up everything for miles around in a
screaming jumble and jangling roar from which it seems
impossible that intelligible dialogue could ever emerge. The
reason is simple enough: nature has given human ears and
brains the power of selectivity, enabling us to tune out
or ignore unwanted sounds to such an extent that a dozen
couples can carry on individual conversations all at once
in the same room. But the tin ear of the mike picks up all
sounds, without selection, in an indiscriminate hodge-podge
which sound men call "mike stew."

This time, Kahn figured that all would be well if Mary
would delay her last line just a little longer, until she would
be directly under his last overhead mike. Bill agreed, the
grips chalked Mary's new position on the floor, and the
shot went in on Take i. Just for protection, Kahn had
Mary stand still directly under a close mike and record both
lines "wild," without camera.

Bill moved in for the pickup shots, which ran off rapidly.
Joel called out the tine-honored gag which signals a move-

140 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

over "We're in the wrong set, boys," and the crew
began swinging the setup toward the adjacent church in-
terior.

Joe Cooke strode out from behind the far end of the
corridor. If the wild flat behind the delivery-room doors
was moved back against the wall, there would be twenty
feet of beautiful empty floor space. The montage ham-
burger stand would be in there tomorrow.

17

The lighted streets which we see over Mary's shoulder
as she and Joe drive to the hospital were actually photo-
graphed while she was having her baby on Stage 19. This
spectral sort of accomplishment is the routine work of a
ghost director named Johnny Waters, who is in charge of
the Second Unit. A big ruddy Irishman with a smooth mop
of white hair and a rich New York accent, Johnny has
seen about everything there is to see in the picture business
and throws his cues with equanimity from a racing camera
car, a swaying dredge bucket, a diving plane or a bobbing
pontoon raft.

The Second Unit of a company, in general, picks up
outdoor shots in which the principals either do not appear,
or work sufficiently far away from camera to permit dou-
bling. In between his four calls on Next Voice Johnny
Waters handled, as typical assignments, an automobile race
for Gable's To Please a Lady and the hilarious Hyster and
speedboat chase stuff for Skelton's Watch the Birdie. His
assignment for this particular March evening was to get a
shot of the Next Voice motorcycle officer leading Joe's
old car through the night traffic and into the hospital ambu-
lance entrance, plus some background plates of the same
ride as viewed through what would later seem to be the
windows of Joe's moving car.

The last reds were fading from the sunset as the studio
cars pulled up at the location curb. Already parked were

142 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

the grip trucks, the four "picture cars," the local traffic
policemen, and the camera car. Maybe it's because it goes
back to the romantic early days of movies when cameramen
turned their caps around backwards as they cranked their
tripod cameras, but there is still something very glamorous
to me about a camera car.

For tonight's trip the "flying bridge" top platform
carried two big sun-arcs on swivel mountings, fed by a
three-hundred-ampere gas generator behind the cab. Short,
cheerful Hal Lipstein and his crew began mounting their
silent cameras on an aluminum beam across the rear plat-
form, and director Waters began laying out the first deal.
The city had promised to turn on the street lamps a half
hour early, to give him the effect of night while there was
still enough afterglow light to lend definition to the build-
ings and cars.

The first shot was to show the motorcycle officer leading
Joe's car down the street, across a busy intersection, and
into the hospital yard. The prop man set up a sign "Ambu-
lance Entrance," the assistant director stationed the cars
which would swing out of the lanes to let Joe roll through,
and the city traffic officers got ready to block "civilian"
traffic on Johnny's signal. The dusk began to settle, but
the street lights didn't coihe on. The watches still lacked
five minutes of the agreed time, but the ideal conditions
for this type of shot fade so fast that there is always an
urgency in the crew; to the cameraman it's time, tide, and
light that wait for no man. Then suddenly the street lamps
came on, in a beautiful glow, right to the second.

Johnny ran a final check of his arrangements. The ele-
ments of the scene were spread over several city blocks,
where a walkie-talkie radio rig would have saved invaluable

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 143

time, but the signals came back okay. The two cameras
were set to crank at eighteen frames per second, so as to
increase the apparent speed of the cars when the print
clicked through theatre projectors at the standard speed
of twenty-four. The two pedestrian atmosphere extras
would do their walk in a sort of slow motion, to look nor-
mal later on. Johnny blew the whistle to get set, the traffic
officers set up their blocks, and the streets went suddenly
empty. Johnny flashed the agreed cue on the arcs.

Far down the street the four atmosphere cars pulled out
from the curb and went into motion. The camera car
ground into gear and started accelerating, with the motor-
cycle and Joe's car roaring along behind, outlined in the
vague blue-white of the shuttered arcs. Sirens wailing and
motors roaring, the crew hanging onto the rail, the three
cars flashed past the extra cars one by one, and neared the
intersection, hoping that no volunteers had strayed through
the traffic blocks. The camera car hit the car tracks, swung
sharp left and stopped, to let Lippy's camera fast-pan the
cycle and Joe's car across the intersection past the "Ambu-
lance Entrance" sign into the hospital yard. In another two
minutes the light was gone; hot or cold, that was it. Johnny
threw the signal to unblock the civilian traffic and head
for the next setup.

The script clerk scrawled on his log, " WX 1 60 A-BACK-
GROUND PLATE Joe's Car, Night" and the crew repeated the
same run, except as though looking back out of Joe's car.

You're entitled to ask at this point, "What is~^ back-
ground plate? "VI think you are entitled to a frank answer.
There has always been a sort of iron curtain in the industry
around some of its most fascinating and ingenious work.

144 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

We are not supposed to tamper with the audience's illusion
that whatever they see on the screen actually happened just
that way. But I doubt if any audience believes M-G-M had
cameramen at the San Francisco earthquake, or that we
were able to send our representatives back almost twenty
centuries in time to film the actual burning of Rome. I am
very proud of some of the extraordinarily inventive and
ingenious things the industry can do, and I see no valid
reason for keeping them under cover.

It's obvious that even with all our resources of set con-
struction and location shooting, some essential shots are
just plain impractical. For an everyday example, when
you see Joe and Mary on the way to the hospital you want
to look into their faces close up to find out how they feel
about what's happening. But the mechanical problems of
mounting a camera on the hood of the moving car, lighting
the faces and recording intelligible sound would run up the
cost to a point where we couldn't give you the scene.

And many of the most memorable scenes in the history
of movies are downright "impossibles." These are the
San Francisco earthquakes, the bombings of Tokyo, the
burnings of Atlanta, the sinkings of the Titanics, the train
wrecks and the oil-well fires and the automobile crashes
and atomic-bomb explosions, and so on through the gamut
of pictorial and dramatic spectacle. These are things that
audiences want to see. Many a wonderful story can be
brought to the screen only if the spectacular event which
climaxes its action can somehow be recreated.

And so, all through the industry, the answer to the im-
practical and the impossible comes from a little group of
specialists whom outsiders regard as the Magic Department.

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 145

Most people have heard by now about rear projection
process. Most of our process work is done on Stage 12,
and it was to that stage on an afternoon late in the schedule
that the Wellman company put the human action in front
of Johnny Waters' background plates.

The interior of the big bare stage was painted soot-black,
to kill any reflections of light as dead as the quilted insula-
tion kills the sound waves. Down toward one end of the
stage stood a large framework in which was suspended,
by a sort of tennis-racket lacing, a transparent movie screen
of pearly plastic. It was about twelve feet square. At the
other end of the stage a caboose-like projection booth was
mounted in a sort of portable elevator. On Wellman's signal,
its projector would beam background traffic scene WX-
i6oA onto the rear of the transparent screen, recreating
the second journey which Johnny Waters had shot looking
backwards as though from Joe's car.

On a platform in front of this transparent screen, hence
also in front of the flickering traffic scene, was mounted
an exact duplicate of Joe's beat-up old car, sawed off at
the windshield so that you had a full view of Joe sitting
behind the wheel and Mary beside him. The actors were
lit very carefully so that no light could leak onto the back-
ground screen.

The camera stood in front of the platform looking into
the open-faced car, and through the car to the screen be-
hind it. It was a standard sound camera except that its
shutter was synchronized to open and close exactly in
step with that of the rear projector. And as the strip of
film went through this camera it photographed Joe and
Mary, plus the moving street and traffic background which

146 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

was visible through the car's rear window on the process
screen.

There was a good deal of thought and skill involved in
this operation, even apart from the ability of the process
crew to match the lighting of the two elements so that they
would seem to have been photographed simultaneously on
the original location.

The cut-up car body was mounted on springs. Effects
operators jiggled it slightly for the illusion of motion, and
tilted it on the turns. Just below Joe's feet, a man turned
a crank at the base of the steering column in synchroniza-
tion with the picture so that Joe would seem to turn the
steering wheel as the background turned. Wellman pro-
tected the illusion with such cautions as, "]oe, look toward
the left before you turn your wheel that way," and, "Re-
member, in a noisy car you'd have to push your voices a
little." And Waters had protected Wellman by shooting
the same plates three ways: straight back, angling left, and
angling right, so that Bill could take his choice of closeup
angles on his actors.

As you see, this is an honest illusion. It merely brings
two separated pieces of reality into a new combination.
Audiences want the satisfaction of seeing authentic back-
grounds, so science brings the mountain in through the
main gate to where Mahomet waits, made up and ready
to go. Any dialogue scene in a moving vehicle is most likely
a process shot if you see scenery moving past the window,
although on poverty budgets a director is prone to switch
the scene to night and have some of the boys run past the
window waving flashlights. Come to think of it, there was
a man on Stage 1 2 flashing a Junior across Joe and Mary
to simulate the passing traffic.

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 147

Back on Stage 18, you may have noticed another kind of
illusion background. Or, like a certain visitor, you may not
have noticed it. Looking out through the front window of
Joe Smith's living room he expressed his concern that we
would go to the expense of building a whole grassy park,
dozens of trees, and twenty or thirty houses inside a stage.
He felt rather sheepish a moment later when he found that
he had been looking at one of George Gibson's scenic
backings, a continuous canvas background so cleverly
painted to reproduce the actual Joe Smith location street
that it took hold of his eye and carried it right out to the
horizon line.

The Next Voice backings were comparatively small, and
their only function was to protect Wellman if he wanted to
angle a daytime shot so that the camera must look through
a window in the background. But Gibson's beautiful back-
ing for the Concord street in Little Women was 600 feet
long, covering three walls of enormous Stage 15, and sixty
feet high. It blended with the actual set buildings in the
foreground and carried the scene back over fields and
woods and rolling hills to a horizon which photographed
as miles distant. And in Technicolor. In no other way could
we give audiences the beauty and scope of that scene and
the authentic look of the New England countryside, and
yet be able to photograph the same set with the snow
and rain and dry grass and autumn leaves of all four sea-
sons within the few weeks' span of a shooting schedule.

Gibson's workshop is the oddly tall, thin building ("a
two-story building ten stories high") which towers above
the rest of the back lot. The floor on which the artists
work is fifty feet above ground level. The roof is fifty
feet higher than that, and the canvases in work hang from

148 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

frames which move up and down past the artists on eleva-
tors. Scenic artists trained in the theatre have a considerable
adjustment to make out here; where a theatre stage set
can be impressionistic, movie backings must seem to be
the acme of realism. Strangely, however, photo-murals
(enormously enlarged actual photographs) aren't very
successful. Our artists must constantly "force" their true
perspectives and values and colors to get the illusion of
depth. Like the cameraman and gaffer, Gibson is always
fighting for separations, to pull foreground objects out from
the background. But he must do it on several levels with
only a single flat surface to work with.

Since this handcraft art must be produced on a produc-
tion-line basis murals by the acre Scotch-burred Gib-
son has developed a number of ingenious shortcuts. His
men use stencils for painting in the brickwork or clap-
boards of large walls. The wholesale foliage of a distant
woods goes on with an ordinary brush which has been
partly "filled" with shellac so that the wetted bristles sepa-
rate into a hundred clumps, like the fur of a soaked cat.
It used to be a slow and expensive job to paint the bark of
scores of trees, and to brush in each individual blade of
grass in a foreground field. But now a piece of carved felt
wrapped around a coffee can is dipped in paint and rolled
down the tree trunk to make bark, and an old brush handle
studded with a dozen ordinary pipe-cleaners will lay in
twelve realistically irregular blades of grass at one swoop
of an artist's arm.

When an art director needs just a fractional background,
or must have his reality cut up and put back together in a
more useful combination, he calls on the specialized talents

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 149

of a tall, inventive, chain-smoldering chess enthusiast named
Warren Newcombe.

Much of Newcombe's work is a sort of college version
of the old "glass shot," where the camera lens viewed the
human action on a small actual set through a small piece of
glass on which had been painted the much larger set which
the director wished he had. This was very convenient
for converting a few square feet of flagstone into INT.
CATHEDRAL NOTRE DAME, but today's audiences wouldn't
accept it as convincing.

A few weeks ago Art Director Dan Cathcart was work-
ing out a street scene for Toast of New Orleans. It was
a short scene, but there was no street set on Lot 3 which
had the distant background required by the plot. And he
couldn't afford to build such an extensive layout. So he
selected a Lot 3 street which could be inexpensively altered
to suit up to the level of the first floor. Then on the day
of shooting, Newcombe's cameraman Mark Davis photo-
graphed the action with the upper part of his lens blocked
off (with a matte), thus leaving his film unexposed above
that first-floor level. Then the Newcombe artists went to
work on the upper half. Working in the top portion of
a 22 /r X28" canvas, an architectural draftsman laid in the
outline of the typical lacy New Orleans ironwork on the
balconies in the foreground, completed the upper portions
of the buildings along the street, and outlined the imaginary
rooftops and steeples in the distance which Cathcart had
sketched. The color artist completed the work.

After some extraordinarily careful testing, the half-
exposed film of the street scene was loaded into the New-
combe camera. The matte was now reversed to block off
the bottom part of the lens, and the exposure of the film

150 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

was completed with this beautifully detailed miniature
painting. The boys tricked some moving smoke and
foliage into the shot, but that was sheer virtuosity.

The use of this matte-and-painting technique permits us
to add a good deal of beauty and scope which picture
budgets couldn't otherwise afford. Shooting under the eco-
nomical controlled conditions on our stages and on back-
lot sets, or on accessible locations, we can call on New-
combe to change the background of a summer home from
the existing oil wells to a storied sea (The Happy Years),
put a mountainous landscape behind a flat-land village
(Crisis), or build the city of Rome on a shot of barren
hills. On his repair shift, Newcombe can remove telephone
poles from the background of a medieval village, add the
plotted storm clouds to an as-shot cerulean sky, and supply
the lighted windows for a day-for-night scene which was
shot in the economical daylight with camera filters.

When Sam Wood was making The Stratton Story }
a certain background plate of a double-decked baseball
park was ideal except that it showed a scabrous patch of
empty seats right in the middle of the upper tier. So New-
combe's group performed a skin-grafting operation, and
if you were to examine the frames of the final picture under
a microscope you would find a little group of spectators
getting double value for its money, sitting in the lower and
upper tiers simultaneously. But probably the loveliest of
his recent jobs is in the scene of Annie Get Your Gun
where Betty Hutton and Howard Keel stand on the sway-
ing platform of an old-fashioned train and sing "Fall-
ing in Love is Wonderful" as the Newcombe landscape
behind them moves and changes and the sun sets tint by

tint in glorious Technicolor.

SHOOTING THE PICTURE

Not all impractical scenes are impractical because of
cost or time or distance. Almost every story has some
segment which, though essential to a rounded telling,
threatens to stretch out to an impractically long footage,
or to become dull. These problems usually end up in the
bungalow of round-faced, earnestly intent Peter Ballbusch,
whose specialty is montage.

"t~Montage^has been called the shorthand of the movies.
It's cinema in its pure form, an impressionistic composite
of image and movement and visual rhythm. It uses all the
tricks, the zooms and cross-dissolves and superimposures of
related objects, to make its plot points crystal clear in an
amazingly short time. There is a tendency to misuse mon-
tage as a sort of special act, setting it off from the flow of
the film with signaling dissolves and music. And so I was
particularly pleased that the montage in Next Voice where
Joe roves the night streets, looking for his son, is never
spotted as such.

Whether recognized or not, montage is probably as use-
ful a tool as we have in the whole cinema kit. In a matter
of seconds, it lets us cover long time-lapses in a story, show
the "progress" of a journey or a rise to fame or a battle,
depict a whole phase of a man's life, arouse an emotion or
create a mood or establish an atmosphere, summarize the
pressures which cause the change in a character's mind,
intensify the excitement of an earthquake or similar spec-
tacular event, report the stream-of-consciousness turmoil
inside a mind, depict a dream, and so on and on. But Ball-
busch often gets his assignment after the sneak preview,
when montage is called upon to plug a hole in the story,
to condense a series of scenes which miss fire with the
audience, or perhaps just to help shorten a too-long picture

CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

down to a feasible running time. But whatever the objective,
the germ essence of a montage effect is a cleverly guided
association of ideas in the audience's mind (hence the fre-
quent superimposures), and the essential device is juxtaposi-
tion.

'< Juxtaposition, in the movie sense, means that any two
pieces of film, when placed next to each other, combine
into a new concept which neither of the pictures had by
itself. Til want to talk about this later when we look into
editing and cutting, but Slavko Vorkapitch, who was in
charge of montage at the studio for many years, put it this
way: "When an American Indian wants to tell another from
a different tribe that he is happy, he makes signs for 'Sun-
risein the Heart.' He puts together two apparently un-
related images and lo, an expression visual and rich is born
a perfect montage."

Out of montage has come the symbolism of the American
movie, a language as individual and vivid and changing as
slang. We see the funnel of an ocean liner and the wake of
a steamer and we know that our hero has crossed the ocean.
A glimpse of radio towers tells us that the news is going
out. The spinning wheels of a train, the quaking of earth
and a toppling wall, the banging gavel of a judge, a hundred
or a thousand other symbolic images condense minutes of
meaning into seconds of film time.

These earthquakes we've been hearing about, as well as
the ship sinkings, airplane battles, dinosaur fights, circus-
tent fires, munitions ship explosions, and other such "im-
possibles" fall mostly in the province of the studio's spe-
cialist in cosmic catastrophe, pipe-chewing Buddy Gillespie
of the Art Department.

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 153

Buddy has been here since 1923, a year longer than
newcomers Newcombe and Irving Ries. Although he has
charge of all rear-projection process work, and also of full-
scale effects such as burning down houses or toppling a wall
on Gable, his most interesting work is done in miniature.
The word "miniature" is misleading, however, because
the Rome which he helped Nero to burn contained several
hundred complete buildings on two acres of ground, and
the jungle trees which he felled for Green Dolphin Street
were fifteen feet high.

L Miniature work% seldom used to save money. In fact,
Warner Brothers are said to have spent $800,000 for the
miniature work of a single picture, Air Force. Obviously,
the director on a Wizard of Oz cannot very well send out
a nine A.M. call for a real tornado, nor instruct it to try an
entrance more to the left on the next take. So, like the work
in the other Effects Departments;Kminiatures are mostly
used to satisfy the audience 5 desire for spectacle and sweep--
ing action that cannot in any other way be brought to their
eyes. ^

An example is the avalanche in Kim. An essential plot
point requires Kim to dislodge one small rock at the top of
a mountain, the rock bouncing down and dislodging others
until half the mountainside seems to give way in a thunder-
ing granite fury which buries Kim's pursuers. We tried to
get this shot on a real mountain in full scale, up near Mt.
Whitney. Even though we nearly buried the camera crew,
the important action happened so far from the camera and
was so widely dispersed that it looked utterly unreal on the
screen.

,So Gillespie's men erected a rig over on Lot 3 which
became known on the schedules as EXTERIOR, AVALANCHE.

154 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

It looked something like a baseball grandstand in general
contour, forty feet across and fifty feet high at the rear,
faced with a plank floor built on a 45 slope. This slanting
floor was made up of many wooden trapdoors, each hinged
so that it could swing up and out horizontally, and each
supported by collapsible crutches called "weak-knees." The
avalanche was rigged by loading all these horizontal gates
with real boulders and gravel, interspersed here and there
with gnarled juniper branches for trees and other bits of
vegetation. When you looked up at it from Max Fabian's
camera shelter at the bottom and let yourself go out of fo-
cus a little it was a completely real mountainside.

When the day came for the shot, Don Jahraus made his
last check of the complicated layout and Carrol Shepphird
rehearsed the operators for the last time. Then the last
okay came down to Buddy. He took a final look around,
crossed his fingers, and threw the cue. From the painted
plaster crags far up at the top, one small stone came adrift,
sending up little puffs of dust as it began to bounce down
the slope. Other stones joined it and began to roll. Then
the operators on the high control platform at the side began
pushing the buttons which yanked the weak-knees out
from under the horizontal gates, one by one, starting from
the top in that downward progression which the plotted
avalanche required. As gate after gate slammed down, its
load of boulders joined the rolling slide until the last gates
fell and the avalanche reached its thundering climax. When
the dust settled and we looked up, our beautiful mountain-
side had changed back, Cinderella-like, into a sloping plank
floor. But the avalanche was in the cameras, and it was
wonderful. The rig had taken weeks to build, days to load

SHOOTING THE PICTURE

and prepare. The avalanche went on film in forty seconds,
and now the boys would have to re-load the whole thing
to get the detail and pickup jobs and angles with which the
cutter would build up the thrill and suspense.

The prop shop craftsmen can supply Gillespie with
amazingly accurate miniatures. They have to be extraor-
dinarily accurate, because of the fantastic magnification on
the screen. So Buddy seldom worries about the appearance
of his miniatures; his usual problem is how to bring their
movements down to scale. The wrecked cars of a miniature
freight train, for example, will turn over faster and tend to
bounce higher than their full-scale counterparts. This prob-
lem becomes really serious on the "wet shots," since no one
has yet discovered how to construct a small-scale drop of
water.

However, Buddy has licked the other water problem
that of inducing small-scale waves and swells, complete
with whitecaps and foam by doping the water with one
of the new chemical detergents to reduce the surface ten-
sion. And down under the waterline of his fifty-one foot
ocean liner is a maze of pipe outlets through which com-
pressed air activates the convincingly foamy bow wave
and wake as the ship moves slowly across the Lot 3 tank.
This tank is a concrete-floored ocean, 300 feet square and
three feet deep overall with deeper pits for sinkings, and
is backed by a painted canvas "sky" background which is
taller and broader than most six-story buildings. .

As this locale implies, practically all miniature work
is filmed outdoors. Gillespie has found that he can best
slow the movements of most miniatures down to scale by
fast-cranking the cameras. In full size, this would obvi-

156 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

ously be slow-motion; in miniatures it looks just right.
Since fast-cranking demands more light than stages can
supply, miniature magic looks to the sun.

Sooner or later, most of the magic passes through the
skilled and inventive hands of rotund Irving Ries and his
department of Special Optical Effects.

"Opticals" include the routine fades and dissolves which
punctuate all pictures and give them tempo and timing, but
Ries's men go far beyond this kindergarten work. They are
the technicians who made Gene Kelly dance hand in hand
with the cartoon king, who perambulated the Canterville
Ghost through solid walls, and who made possible the
amazing ballet of shoes which apparently danced by them-
selves behind Fred Astaire in The Barkleys of Broadway.

Perhaps bored with elementary split-screen work, Ries
has recently done a triple-split. It's in the Watch the Birdie
camera shop, and Red Skelton plays himself, his father and
his grandfather all at once in the same scene, probably the
first time in Hollywood that one actor has had three stand-
ins. Red sent up a memo that he wanted three checks on
this picture, and periodically complained about the old ham
of a grandfather who was stealing his scenes.

Much of Ries's work is handled by an amazing precision
instrument called the optical printer. It looks rather like
a very fancy lathe. One end is a miniature "projector"
through which runs the film to be altered, and on the other
end is a camera which can move in and out on a track, and
tilt, so as to rephotograph any desired part of the original
film. Such as that patch of spectators who moved upstairs
in the Stratton grandstand. The optical printer often saves
a situation by enlarging a selected fraction of an original

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 157

long shot to get needed full-screen closeups which were
missed during the schedule, or perhaps to build up the part
of a newcomer whose appeal wasn't recognized until after
the preview. The International Department depends on
Ries to move in on an original scene so as to eliminate the
marginal liquor bottles which would bar the foreign print
from Pakistan, the winged angel which would bar it from
Britain, and the "cleavage" which excites disapproval in
everyone but audiences. Not long ago Mr. Ries personally
caught a 222-pound marlin off Catalina and had a pic-
ture taken to prove it but everybody in the industry pro-
fesses to believe that he printed a stock fish into a back yard
snapshot.

Ries's department is part of a larger organization through
which everything has to go before it can reach an audience,
John Nickolaus' film laboratory.

The windowless concrete walls of the lab enclose some
of the most bizarre sights of a bizarre business. In one room
the white and chrome of ingenious machines whir silently
in a dim greenish glow. In another, shadowy shapes glide
silently about like gnomes in a Satanic red fog. Miles of
shining wet film loop between ceilings and long swashing
tanks in dim tiled caverns, and technicians tell you that al-
though a million feet of film a day often move through
here, thousands of gallons of chemical fluids are success-
fully kept within .1 degree of a constant temperature, and
many kilowatts of electricity held within .2 of a volt.
These are exacting standards, but necessary for quality,
because of those twenty-four separate pictures which will
pass through the theatre projector every second; each must
match its mate in the scene, and match the same scene in
hundreds of other prints. These controls explain why, they

158 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

tell you, no longer is a certain scene sunny at the Bijou and
gloomy at the Strand, and no longer need be feared the
glaring contrast which loses the black buttons on the hero's
dark suit.

The man who presides over this plant, which he himself
designed and built after he came to the studio with Mr.
Mayer twenty-five years ago, refuses to admit that this
network of rubber piping, stainless steel tanks, and elec-
tronically controlled precision machinery is any more com-
plex, in principle, than a hobbyist's home darkroom down
by the furnace. "You folks snap a picture, develop the neg-
ative, and show the print to your friends," says Nickolaus,
"and that's all we do here, except we do it continuously."

Nick permits himself to get excited about only one phase
of his operation. He brags that he runs the cleanest place
in the world. Literally that; when Nick says "dirty," he
has in mind something like the squalor of a hospital operat-
ing room. "The most expensive thing we make is air," he
explains. When the picture on the film is magnified 60,000
times on the screen of the Radio City Music Hall, "a tiny
speck of dust blows up to the size of a nickel and chases
around the screen like a dust storm." Every bit of air that
enters Nick's building gets scrubbed in water, oil, and elec-
tric filters. And the whole interior is kept under higher air
pressure than the outside, so that when visitors come in
from the dusty outdoors the vestibule out-draft brushes
them off.

Later on, Nick would make the release prints of Next
Voice for theatre exhibition; about 400 of them, most
likely, and worth about $180 each (Technicolor prints of
the same length would run around $600).

However, the story is trying to get ahead of itself.

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 159

Counting chickens before they're hatched isn't nearly as
risky as making 400 release prints of a picture before your
director has finished shooting it. While we have been ex-
ploring the back lot, Wellman has been shooting film at an
unprecedented rate, and when you hear the rustle of the
turning page the time will be exactly day fourteen.

18

Wednesday, March 8th. Everybody was running in over-
drive. If we got the breaks, this could be the last day of
shooting. Fourteen days; it just didn't seem possible. And,
of course, maybe it wasn't.

As is usually the case with the final day or two of a
schedule the crew wore their roller skates, moving all over
the lot to pick up the bit shots and afterthoughts and tie-
overs and tough ones you're so apt to push aside until the
last minute. But the Lot 2 shot of the dog chasing news-
boy Joe, estimated for half a day, went in on Take i in fifty
minutes. The company moved back to the house set on 1 8
for montage bits, which were checked off shortly after
lunch.

The early afternoon went to picking up a half dozen
added angles on earlier scenes. I had worked with the cut-
ters day by day, of course, screening each batch of footage
and advising on its assembling, so that I had some feeling
of the whole. Daily, I had passed along my reactions on
various items to Wellman, and despite the rapid shooting
he had already picked up most of the second thoughts; the
occasional closeups I felt we needed, and the infrequent
bits of business which might seem slightly overdrawn. This
afternoon's work would about clean up that phase. I stayed
up in my office out of Wellman's hair as long as I could
stand it, but about four I came down to the set. I watched

SHOOTING THE PICTURE l6l

for a few minutes, and when Billy finished a setup I asked
him if I could talk to the people for a minute.

I hadn't intended to say very much. They were all keyed
high, rolling so fast and hot that I doubt if they'd have held
still for much. And as it turned out, I said almost nothing.
I got started all right, saying something I meant very sin-
cerely about a great crew and a great cast and a great direc-
tor. But then I made the mistake of looking into those won-
derful faces, and pride and affection welled up in my throat
and I finished up fast and got out of there before I made
a star-spangled spectacle of myself. They went back to
work, and after an hour of moving-automobile shots on
the process stage, the company broke for supper.

While the crews loaded their trucks for the move-over
to Lot 2, the staff walked to the cutters' projection room
for the nightly ritual of screening thpr dailies. Sometimes
caUedX'rushes, the dailies are the previous day's takes on
which Wellman had ordered, "Print it."v~

Camera, Sound, Wardrobe; each key man of the crew
checks his own phase of the work, looking for the faults
rather than the good points, but hoping that nothing will
have to be retaken. These men absorb this confusing as-
sortment of film in their stride, despite the fact that every-
thing is out of context and the same action appears over
and over from different angles, with the director or a grip
walking off the scene at the beginning, the man with the
chalk-numbered slate walking in, and the miscellaneous
voices poking into the sound track here and there. (The
cutters can snip any unwanted sounds out of the film so
long as they do not overlap wanted sounds.) The sponta-
neous actions and lines of actors when they fluff sometimes
become collector's items. Tonight's batch of footage is all

1 62 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

fine, no problems. Somebody says, "Okay, we can come to
work tomorrow," and the men head for supper.

Twilight has faded and the lights are on in the studio
street when the staff ambles out of the commissary toward
the waiting cars. The extras are coming in through the
main gate and walking up the street toward the buses.
"Forty men, thirty-five women, mixed ages, dignified
types," per the teletype to Central Casting, "nice clothes,
hats and coats, as would wear to church."

Over on Lot 2 the white colonial church stands immo-
bile in the lights like a tranquil Gulliver as the busy Lilli-
putians swarm over and around him. The windows and the
wide doors are already bright with incandescent yellow,
and more lights are going in behind the fluted columns to
give depth to the portico. Across the pleasant suburban
street, a battery of huge sun arcs on spidery wooden tow-
ers bathes the street with blue-white light, casting the
opaque shadows of night as they stand in for the moon.
The night is cool, 'but not chilly, and there is little need
for the red-glowing charcoal braziers which are spotted
about. The coffee wagon is due any minute.

Wellman and Mellor are standing back on a lawn across
the street, squinting at the layout as Joel barks orders
through the electric megaphone to jam the street in front
of the church with automobiles packed in four abreast.
This is the seventh night of the play, that last night on
which everybody in the world has crowded into the church
of his choice. We want a preliminary shot of the packed
street and the church portico crowded with people who
cannot get in, and then the scene where two ushers force
a passage through the crowd as Joe helps Mary out of the
church and down the steps to start the trip to the hospital.

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 163

The last bus-load of extras rolls in, and Bill takes over
the electric megaphone as he peers through the camera-
finder and works out the composition of his shot. It works
up quickly. In everybody there is that strange spirit of
camaraderie which seems to infect the most blase veteran
on an outdoor night location which they express by com-
plaining about the cold, squawking about delayed coffee
and otherwise beefing happily to cover up their unsophis-
ticated feeling of excitement and adventure. Perhaps it's
atavistic, going back to cavemen around a fire, but there
is something mystic about that bright, up-welling pool of
blue-white light in the all-encompassing black which seems
to set these people off in a world populated only by them-
selves for these few hours.

Both of the long shots went in on Take i , and the crew
moved in for the close stuff. And there, on what could be
the windup of the picture, came a hitch.

To an outsider, it would have looked fine: the two ush-
ers pushed a passage through the crowd, Mary and Joe
came into camera and moved off toward their car. Can-
didly, I think I would have bought it myself. But Bill didn't
like it. He couldn't put his finger for the moment on
exactly what was the matter, just insisted, "It doesn't ring
right." He ran it through again. This time he spotted the
trouble.

He took the actors aside and told them that they had to
force their way through the crowd a lot faster. Then he
sent the cast off for coffee and told the extras confidentially
that the actors were copiing through much too fast, so jam
in together more tightly on the porch and shove them
back. It worked fine. Between Jim and Nancy trying to
make Bill happy by lunging through the crowd faster, and

164 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

the crowd trying to make Bill even happier by preventing
the stars from moving at all, the look of pure desperation
on those two faces is strictly authentic.

Bill dismissed the extras and took the crew over on the
New York street to pick up the last two flashes of the mon-
tage where Joe is searching the streets for young Johnny.

Nancy stayed behind in her trailer dressing-room, and
after she had changed her clothes she just sat there for a
while. All of a sudden she was realizing that it was over,
that she wouldn't be coming to the studio tomorrow to be
Mary Smith. It seemed as though she'd been Mary Smith
as long as she could remember, and she'd sort of taken
it for granted that she would always keep on being Mary
Smith, and now it was over. It was a very empty feeling,
and the girl whom this picture was going to make into a
great star sat by herself in a trailer dressing-room feeling
lonely and forlorn.

Then a prop man poked his head in the trailer door and
said, "Can I have your wedding ring and prayer book?"
He added, "Mr. Wellman was looking for you. We want
you at the party." And Nancy felt fine. This was the won-
derful thing about pictures. The theatre was wonderful,
too, but out here you belonged somewhere. People called
you "we."

Over under a lamp post on the New York street Joe
walked up to a newsboy, asked him a question; the news-
boy shook his head, Wellman said, "That's the one," Bill
Hole wrote "CLOSED PRODUCTION" across scene 1 14x3 A, and
some wit topped the old move-over cliche with, "We're on
the wrong lot." First thing in the morning, a very grate-
ful producer would start a jeweler engraving St. Genesius
medals for each of the members of a great company.

SHOOTING THE PICTURE 1 65

Another director might have had a very posh party at a
night spot. Not Bill: this party was pure Wellman, a very
nice array of food and drinks set out under a battery of
work lights on a Lot 2 street corner. There was that won-
derful healthy-tired feeling which comes after a stretch
run, and the warm friendliness of people who have proved
themselves to each other. Soon they'd break up; tomorrow
or next week they'd be pushing other pictures with other
people, but tonight they were a unit. Somebody had given
Nancy some champagne and she broke it out, and after a
little while the fellows began coining up to shake hands
with Wellman and check out for home. There was a little
stammer in everybody's voice, everybody's heart was beat-
ing a little faster. No matter how many you've done, it's
always a thrill to put another one away. And tomorrow,
everybody would get a haircut.

PART FOUR

Finishing the Picture

19

Making a picture is, in one small way, like fighting a battle.
The exciting and adventurous part of the job which catches
the public's interest is quickly over. But it was preceded by
a long period of preparation, and must be followed by an
arduous and unglamorous mopping-up operation.

When Bill Hole wrote CLOSED PRODUCTION across his
script, the picture was far from finished. To switch analo-
gies, it was in the stage of a garment for which the cloth
has been cut to pattern and laid out on the tailor's bench.
There still were several essential operations to be done on
Next Voice in the way of assembling and fitting and trim-
ming. To say nothing of putting it in the show window
and catching the interest of the customers.

These several finishing operations would be done by
small specialized teams, working simultaneously in differ-
ent parts of the lot^The editors would have to cut the
picture together for the showing of the first rough-cut,
and keep on improving it until at last the negative was cut
and the picture frozen. Somebody would have to shoot
the numerous insert scenes of newspapers, watch faces,
feet, and what not/fThere might be some montage work
to be done, and certainly the lab must supply the numerous
dissolves and fades and other optical effects/ Certain bits of
dialogue which had been obscured in recording by extra-
neous sounds would have to be "looped" on the dialogue
stage by the actors^/The multitude of sound effects must

1 70 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

be inserted or added, the title and background music must
be composed and recorded. Then all of these would have
to be combined in the re-recording rooms before we could
take the picture out for its sneak preview, see what more
work was needed, and at last wind up the studio operation
with the okayed answer print.

The moment the camera stops turning, everything be-
comes double rushr^Nevertheless this finishing phase in-
variably uses much more time than was consumed in the
actual shooting; the average picture consumes two or three
months or more/leven without retakes. Arid most of it is
work of a highly creative^ order 'which has a tremendous
influence on the entertainment value of the picture as it
finally flashes on the theatre screen.

This finishing phase of Next Voice took six weeks.

20

Day by day during the shooting, the exposed film of both
pictures and sound had been delivered to the studio lab,
developed overnight, and fed into the routine in the form
of positive prints.

Each day's batch of Next Voice prints, together with
the "dailies" of all other productions in work on the lot,
filtered down through a series of private projection rooms.
Sound's Doug Shearer, Camera's John Arnold, Lab's Nick-
olaus, Art's Gibbons, Supervising Film Editor Margaret
Booth and others checked every foot for possible flaws
in their various specialties, alert to correct any dangerous
trends which might seem to be creeping in, with particular
care to ensure that nothing unfortunate was happening to
the stars. In the Continuity Room, Gloria Colone and her
girls clicked the footage through their moviolas and typed
the description of the action and dialogue in each take, one
sheet to each, which would accumulate day by day to a
sort of as-shot script. The Next Voice footage usually got
over to my projection room in the late afternoon, and after
I had put in my session with Jack Dunning, the editor on
the picture, he took it over to his cutting room.

Perhaps in the next year or so when the industry shifts
over entirely to safety-base film the cutters can work in
more comfortable surroundings, but now everything is
fireproof except the film and the people. The two-story
concrete building is a geometrical collection of concrete

172 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

hallways and concrete cubicles, the dominant decoration
being overhead piping, sprinkler heads, and metal-clad
doors. The prevailing smell is acetone and carbon tet, and
the prevailing sound is a weird concatenation of screeches
and squawks and beautiful voices and uproars from a dozen
busy moviolas.

The walls of Jack Dunning's cubicle are lined with racks
of shiny square cans which contain the sorted and indexed
takes of Next Voice. His x mo viola, an instrument which
looks like a man-sized insect of all legs, arms and reels, with
one glaring glass eye, is a sort of personal movie machine
on which he can run his strips of sound and picture film
in synchronization^ The sound from the primitive little
speaker is rather squawky, and he views the picture as it
passes under a three-inch magnifying lens, but he carignove
the film through at any speed, forward or reverse, stop it
anywhere, and make any necessary marks on it with a col-
ored grease pencib^The film in work spills into a big white
canvas basket. The strips of cut takes awaiting disposition
hang down from serried hooks into a similar container, and
the standard furniture of the metal bench is a shiny preci-
sion sprocket-wheeled synchronizer and the rumbling re-
wind. The cutter's identifying badge is a loose white cotton
glove on his left hand. His other occupational tag is a
tanned face, because he has to go out of the building and
stand in the sun whenever he wants to smoke.

In the early days of motion pictures there were no cut-
ters; the function of editing didn't even exist. The camera-
man-director of the turn of the century took it for granted
that he had to shoot his scenes in their exact dramatic con-
tinuity. He removed the exposed rolls of film from his cam-
era, developed and printed them, and that unchanged

FINISHING THE PICTURE 173

was the movie which went on the screen. But then an
unsung genius named Edwin S. Porter demonstrated the
simple but revolutionary idea that the roll of film was not
sacred from the touch of human hands, that by the use of
scissors and cement he could reassert the continuity of the
scenes on the original roll. And it was? Porter's epic picture
The Great Train Robbery (its real contribution *was over-
shadowed by its distinction as the first "feature") which
proved on a practical scale- that this new "assembled" film
medium could go beyond mere peep-show incidents and
tell a full, rounded, dramatic story. /

Perhaps this doesn't sound very important. But on your
mental screen please flash a big face closeup of Joe Smith,
his eyes looking upward. Now follow it with a picture of
a street sign. Obviously Joe, in his closeup, was searching
for an address. Now cancel that out, and imagine Joe's
closeup is followed instead by a picture of a bunch of ba-
nanas. We were wrong in our first guess about the closeup;
obviously Joe was hungry. But suppose Joe's closeup is fol-
lowed by the picture of an airplane taking off or a dead
boy at Joe's feet on the sidewalk or any of a hundred
other varied images. See what happens? The meaning of
any one little strip of film can be changed, according to the
picture which precedes it and the picture which follows it.
The editor knows this as he assorts and reasserts the con-
tinuity of his scenes, and the angles within his scenes, and
he uses this power not only to keep the audience clearly
informed of what is going on, but so to arrange his accents
that he increases his dramatic and entertainment values. He
is really a sort of director.

Many scenes give the cutter no particular problem. The
bits, the tie-overs, the minor scenes which merely carry

174 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

along the narrative with no particular emotion usually
reach the cutter in a form of a single take. His only job
here is usually to trim off a slow start or an anti-climactic
finish.

Incidentally, audiences have become so conditioned to
the film medium that we can move a picture much faster
nowadays. You'll notice that in today's pictures actors
don't make a definite entrance into a scene, transact their
dramatic business, and then say good-bye and walk out
(except when the actual arrival or departure makes some
dramatic point) . We cut instantaneously from the meat of
one scene to the meat of another, coming in on each scene
as close as we can get to its high point and still remain in-
telligible, and cutting away to the next scene the instant
that the point has been made. Sometimes we cut even be-
fore a minor point has actually been nailed down, the editor
cutting away as soon as it becomes obvious to the audience
what would happen if we kept on hanging around.

There's a good little example of this trimming technique
in the Next Voice script, at the beginning of Scene 23.
It's on the first evening: Joe has just told Mary and Johnny
about hearing the Voice and he has walked out of the bed-
room trying to figure out who was trying to sound like
God on the radio. Young Johnny has suggested it might
be a young radio ham up the street. Scene 23, in the hall-
way outside the bedroom, originally read:

Joe rubs his neck, thinks hard. He shakes his head, 'walks to

the phone, dials a. number.
JOE (into phone)
Gus? Joe . . . Say, was your kid fooling with the radio just

now , . , ?

FINISHING THE PICTURE 175

The instruction to Joe probably served its purpose in
telling Jim Whitmore what his attitude should be. But when
you see this sequence on the screen it will cut directly from
Mary in the bedroom to Joe just starting to talk into the
telephone.

Sometimes the cutter will make radical changes in the
order of the scenes. Sometimes whole scenes and even se-
quences will be thrown into that white canvas basket which
serves as the traditional cutting-room floor. Sometimes in-
dividual scenes will be so reasserted internally that their
whole emphasis and consequence is turned upside down.
.But when a good script has been well directed and shot,
most of the editor's work is on the shot-by-shot progres-
sion inside the value scenes"

Nevertheless, he still has many vital decisions to make.
On Next Voice 55,000 feet of "print it" takes came into
that concrete cell, and the finished film went out at a length
of 7,630 feet. The difference represents the decisions.

Jack Dunning had studied the script until he knew it
thoroughly. He dropped over to the set once or twice
every day during the shooting to see what was in Well-
man's mind, and he and Margaret Booth and I would talk
over the layout of the scenes when we ran the dailies in my
projection room. By the time the dailies came over to his
cubicle and assistant cutter Greydon Gilmer had cut up
and indexed the rolls, the scenes had usually shaken them-
selves down in Jack's mind into a rough plan and progres-
sion.

Much of Jack's work went to keep his function from
being recognized. Any cut which the audience notices is
a bad cut. Good cutting looks like no cutting; the editor

176 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

cuts from one shot to another on something that distracts
the audience's attention for an instant, such as a gesture, a
look, a sound, the opening of a door or anything that makes
the cut quicker than the eye. Your blink, by the way, lasts
five frames, while the cut takes only one.

I once heard a learned lecturer state that a primary pur-
pose of cutting in films was to provide visual variety. "The
eye tires of any fixed viewpoint after a very few seconds,"
he said, "and must be refreshed by a change of angle."
Actually, 'any scene which can go dull without changes of
angle was a dull scene to begin with, for visual variety is a
by-product of editing rather than a reason for it>
--The editor assorts his cuts to place accent and emphasis,
to build laughs and keep them spinning, to justify the tears,
to flesh out the characters with significant touches, to put
over plot points, to establish plants subtly in the audience's
mind, to demonstrate relationships and connect up cause
and effect, to build importance and give emphasis, to build
suspense^-to do all this by guiding the audience's curiosity
at certain times and following its curiosity at others to
project the changing moods of the story in terms of pace
and tempo and^vabove all, to keep the human line of the
story strong and clear and alive in terms of the characters'
emotional reactions?^

All this perhaps sounds very abstract. I'll grant that I
have never known a cutter to analyze very deeply the rea-
sons why he prefers one cut over another. He just feels it
that way; years of working with film has given him a sub-
conscious feeling for tempo and pace. He is, however, al-
ways conscious of the need to show the emotional reaction
of his characters. He knows that a movie in its essence is
simply a progression of reactions. An action itself, to the

FINISHING THE PICTURE 177

audience, is only a sort of trigger, which immediately sets
off the question, "How does so-and-so feel about this?"

Imagine a newsreel shot of a Chinese village which has
just been bombed. A young woman is lying on the street,
her body mangled like the others. The newsreel camera-
man's lens may go in close enough for you to see the grue-
some details, but your emotions aren't really stirred beyond
the tsk-tsk stage. But now the camera pans. A little way
down the street a mite of a child in a kimono is picking her
way among the bodies. She's looking for someone, peering
at the faces. Suddenly it hits you did the cameraman show
you that young woman on purpose, was it a plant? The
child walks up the street, and your stomach muscles
tighten; she comes closer to the dead young woman, closer,
closer. . . . The child sees her, stares for one awful
moment then throws herself down on the dead woman's
breast and sobs. You, the audience, are torn apart by the
sight. But what tore you apart was not the tragedy of the
death, not the action it was the emotional result, the reac-
tion of a character in 'whom you had taken cm- interest.

Coming back to story films, you may have noticed that
as soon as a given speech has gone far enough so that the
audience can guess out the rest of it, the picture cuts from
the speaker to the hearer as the speech continues off-scene.
Reason: to catch the reaction, to see what emotional effect
that speech is going to have on the character to whom it's
addressed. The term "action pictures" is often applied to
low-budget western and other fast-moving films of the sort
which usually appear on the lower half of double bills.
There is significance in the fact that the pictures which
command and sway the great audiences could well be called
"reaction pictures."

Ij8 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

All of this most certainly calls for a concrete example
out of Next Voice. A little earlier we saw how Wellman
shot the pickups of added angles and reaction closeups for
Scene 22. This was the scene on the first evening where
Joe came into young Johnny's bedroom to tell about the
strange voice on the radio -which claimed to be God. The
master shot of the over-all scene (the full shot looking
across Johnny and Mary toward Joe in the doorway) told
the story adequately, but it would not "milk" the scene of
its shock, suspense and emotional values. Wellman knew
this. That's why he shot the pickups.

Dunning's first decision was to "play it on the boy," to
insert closeups of young Johnny which would indicate his
feeling that "Pop is unusually worked up, what's wrong?"
And he wanted to spin the scene out, hold it back with sus-
pense and set an entrance for Joe's important disclosure,
the keystone of the whole story. He would do this not by
adding footage, for he was committed to the time-span of
the dialogue as recorded, but he could slow down the scene
in its apparent tempo by cutting from closeup to closeup
on the individual lines. So here is that scene in a sort of cut-
ting continuity, showing how the shots were chosen and
assorted, with an over-simplified indication of Jack's rea-
soning on each cut.

FINISHING THE PICTURE 179

Which INT. JOHNNY'S ROOM-NIGHT

Cutter thinks: "We'll establish the place
and the people."

2iD MARY AND JOHNNY Mary is sewing as young

(12 Sec) medium 2-shot Johnny, at desk, in pajamas,

struggles over his homework.
JOHNNY (mumbling) : Bring down
the nine . . . another nine . . .
The off-scene radio shuts off.
Mary looks up, toward door.

Audience wants to know: "Who's there?"

22A Full shot over MARY The door opens, JOE steps a

(17 Sec) and JOHNNY across little way in. He seems puzzled.

whole room toward MARY: What is it, Joe?

doorway Joe just shakes his head.

MARY: Finish the dishes?
JOE: Huh? Oh, sure . . . yeah . . .
MARY: You're not listening to the
radio. What's wrong?
JOE: Kind of a funny thing
on the radio just now they an-
nounced it was exactly eight-
thirty

JOHNNY (mocking): Garry Ga-
very, the Golden Voiced Goon
MARY: Quiet, Johnny.
JOE (oddly puzzled) : Yeah, they
announced it ...

(cut to)

Audience: "What's he acting so oddly about?"

2iB JOE, waist closeup JOE (continuing) : . . . then there

(9 Sec) (in doorway) was kind of an odd empty sound.

Then a voice said, "This is God.
I will be with you for the next
few days. . . ."

l8o CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

Which Cutter: "Let's show 'em how important this is."
shot?

22F JOHNNY, waist CM. The boy looks up, startled.

(i Sec) (Silence)

Audience: "Does Mary agree it's so important?"

22E MARY, waist c.u. MARY (taken aback) : What?

(2 Sec)

Audience: "Does Joe really believe this stuff?"

22C JOE, face closeup . JOE (puzzled} : A Voice said,

(6 Sec) "This is God. I will be with you

for the next few days."

Cutter: "Let's build the reactions a little higher."

22D MARY and JOHNNY MARY: Then what happened?

(4 Sec) medium 2-sbot

Audience: "Yeah, what did happen, Joe?"

226 JOE, waist c.u. - JOE: Nothing happened the pro-

(8 Sec) gram came back on. ...

MARY: Maybe it was just the in-
troduction. . . .

JOE: No because when the pro-
gram came back on Garry was in
the middle of his first song. . . .

Cutter: "Let's keep the full scene alive."

22A - Full shot whole room MARY (.thinking hard) : It must
(13 Sec) across MARY and be one of those Mystery Voice

JOHNNY toward shows, fou have to guess whose

JOE in door voice . .

JOE: Bu, they never do that un-
til after they tell you about the
prizes. . . .

MARY: Or maybe it was one of
those Orson Welles things. . . .

FINISHING THE PICTURE l8l

Which JOHNNY: I got it! It was young

shot? Eddie Boyle. He's always trying

to be a radio ham. Maybe he cut

Cutter: "Let's set Joe up for the boy's big line."

zzB JOE, waist c.u. JOE: Well, if that isn't the silliest

(5 Sec) . . . Would Eddie Boyle's voice

sound like God?

Audience: "What about it, son?"

22F JOHNNY, waist CM. JOHNNY: I don't know. I never

(3 Sec) heard God.

Cutter: "That calls for something
from his mother."

22E MARY, waist c.u. MARY: That's not very nice,

(2 Sec) Johnny. Go to bed.

Cutter: "Let's finish on the over-all relationship."

22 A Full shotwhole room JOE: Yeah . . .

(8 Sec) across MARY and (Joe exits through door.')

JOHNNY toward MARY: Go ahead, Johnny, get

JOE at door into bed.

(Scene (She kisses Johnny, turns, fol-

Length: lows Joe out and closes the

90 Sec) door.}

Next scene: "What are Joe and Mary
going to do about this?"

V

Day by day during the shooting, Dunning had cut to-
gether his takes ihto rough assemblies. The picture had
been shot so fast ^ to make it practically impossible for a
cutter to keep up. But I found a way to make all of this
previous rush look like paradise. I couldn't help it; an op-
portunity arose that was just too good to miss.

1 82 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

Visiting the studio from their New York headquarters
were William F. Rodgers, in charge of sales for the com-
pany, and Howard Dietz, in charge of all Loew's exploita-
tion and advertising. The success of the picture with the
public would depend very considerably on the push which
these two men and their departments put behind it. I
wanted them to see the picture while I was present so that
I could answer their objections, take advantage of good
ideas that they might have for changes, and perhaps instill
in them some of my own enthusiasm. We finished principal
photography, as you will remember, on a Wednesday night.
Mr. Dietz was leaving the coast Friday afternoon.

Anybody would admit that it was impossible to put even
a clumsy rough-cut on the screen in a few short hours. But
at ten A.M. Friday morning the film went on the screen in
a downstairs projection room of the Administration Build-
ing. And it was not clumsy. It had none of the fades nor
dissolves nor opticals which smooth the flow of a finished
film. It lacked vital sound effects and had no music, and the
dramatic highpoints frequently fizzled out in a title-card
SCENE MISSING, but it was a well-organized job of telling a
straightforward emotional story. In addition to the two
New York men, Benny Thau was there to see how Whit-
more and 'Davis had handled their first assignments as stars,
and Howard Strickling and Frank Whitbeck had brought
their studio exploitation and advertising people. I sat
through the showing with my stomach flipping over and
over as nervously as though I were trying to get my first
job in the business. And if Wellman was as calm as he claims
why did he chew his pipe in two?

The lights went up into a dead silence. I stood it as long
as I could. Then I essayed a nervous laugh and said, "Is

FINISHING THE PICTURE 183

everybody dead?" It turned out that they liked it. They
liked it well enough to throw all their very considerable
weight behind getting it to the public. Even Wellman was
pleased. But the greatest compliment seemed to me to be
the reddened eyes of Jack Dunning and Gil, because when
your picture gets to the emotions of its cutters, you've
really got something. So I said to the boys, "You've run
this picture so many times, I think it's wonderful it can
make you cry."

"Who's crying?" said Dunning, rubbing his eyes, "we
were squinting into moviolas until three o'clock this morn-
ing."

Jack and Gil took the film back to their cubicle. We'd
make 'minor alterations, smooth out the flow during the
next few weeks, but there would be no extensive retakes
nor major changes.

And, more importantly at the moment, the film was
close enough to final version to start the several remaining
specialized teams on their contributions.

Back in the really plush days it was not uncommon for a
director to expect his initial shooting schedule to produce
only a sort of first draft. With this in hand he could see
where the story sagged, what the problems were, and then
he would go ahead and really make the picture in the re-
takes. Said retakes might run into weeks of time and hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars. Nowadays we prefer to find
and solve our problems before the overhead starts, and
Next Voice was a fortunate and rather typical example of
the new practice.

Nevertheless, on any quality picture which expects to
play the top first-run houses, a certain amount of post-
production patching and trimming is expected. We allow
for it on both picture and sound.

Most of our second thoughts on Next Voice were shot
on that final Wednesday of the schedule, without added
cost. There were six shots, all in the house or garage and
all rather routine. They ranged from a new angle on young
Johnny coming in for breakfast on the first morning, to
give him a more sympathetic entrance, to a new shot of
Aunt Ethel in the armchair after the false-labor scene,
which would give that strong scene a stronger curtain.

Our closest approach to retakes was one morning about
a week after close of production. Joe ancf Mary and Aunt
Ethel came to Stage 18 to re-do two short bits which
played so well in the rough cut that I thought a slightly

FINISHING THE PICTURE 185

different treatment would build them into high points. The
crew started setting up their equipment at ten o'clock, and
by ten-thirty-seven Mellor had lighted and Wellman had
rehearsed and shot three takes on the beginning of Scene
78, Aunt Ethel's initial entrance. Then we swung over to
the scene where Joe wakes up at home after the saloon
sequence. Wellman and the two actors viewed the film of
the previously-shot scene on a moviola which had been
brought over to the stage, refreshing their memories suf-
ficiently to make the new action match exactly with the
footage into which it would be cut. At eleven-twenty
Wellman had what he wanted, the actors checked out and
the crew stayed around to shoot a screen test of a new
girl the studio was considering. Our retake expense ran ten
minutes short of an hour and a half.

Of course, some post-production photography is routine
and already allowed for in the budget. On Next Voice, this
work consisted mostly of inserts. These are the closeup
shots of newspapers, clocks and other props, without ac-
tion other than perhaps a slight movement of a hand. If an
insert shot does show action, it is of a very close-up and
detailed character, such as a finger pulling a trigger. Inserts
almost never require the presence of the original actor,
which is why many of them are held over until the finish
of production. The closeup inserts of Joe's foot pressing
the starter pedal of his car required definite character act-
ing to project the irritation, fear and surprise which Joe
felt on the different occasions. Those we had picked up
during the schedule.

Most of our inserts were shot on Stage 1 8 the day after
the close of production. Many people even within the in-
dustry have an impression that inserts are shot with special

1 86 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

equipment in special quarters, but that is seldom the case
unless the insert presents some special problem, such as pan-
ning around a map, or showing germs under a microscope.

There were seven extras on the call, most of them peo-
ple whom we had seen recognizably in the church as they
looked down at their watches. Now we'd photograph the
closeup faces of the watches themselves, coming progres-
sively closer to the fateful eight-thirty and the anticipated
Voice of God.

. The camera setup on inserts is usually very simple This
was a silent camera, looking bony and naked without its
protective blimp. The lighting setup was also simple; one
broad with silks, one Junior with a gobo shade to shape its
beam, and a couple of midgets. The camera lens came down
within inches of the watch faces and there was trouble with
the reflections of the light in the crystals until somebody
got the revolutionary idea of taking the crystals out.

Next, stand-in Jack Harris slipped the newspaper bag
over his head, stood on a grass mat, and held the newspaper
in his hand while the camera read the "God Speaks on
Radio" headline over his shoulder. Then the church radio
set which we see in closeup on the pulpit in that tense mo-
ment of silence was brought over from the Stage 19 church
and photographed on the counter of the montage drug
store.

The last insert was of the poster in the hospital waiting
room on which the Stork is saying, "I've never lost a father
yet." That also was on 19 but we brought it over to the
setup, hung the hospital clock above the poster, and pre-
pared to shoot. Somebody called attention to the second
hand on the electric clock; people would notice that it
didn't move during the three or four seconds of the shot.

FINISHING THE PICTURE jg7

But electric clocks run only on alternating current, and so
the closing shot of the picture featured gaffer Philbrick
patching together a hundred feet of cord and searching
the clutter of the stage walls for the AC outlet. When and
if you see the picture, the studio will appreciate your
glancing up from the stork and admiring the beautiful way
in which that second hand goes round and round.

When a sound mixer is having trouble trying to record
dialogue against the interference of other sounds, the jar-
gon has it that he's "fighting iA."

Stage zA, just across the alley from the Sound Depart-
ment, is the place where dialogue voices and sound effects
are recorded for sound only, without camera, by synchro-
nizing supervisor Ted Hoffman.

Some of the dialogue work on zA is repair work; some
of it you might call new construction. In the latter cate-
gory would fall the session following close of production
when we recorded radio commentators Cecil Brown, Chet
Huntley, Lou Merrill and others in the speeches which
would come out of the assorted radios to report what the
Voice had said and how the world was taking it. zA is
much like a radio studio, with Hoffman working in a moni-
tor's booth behind a soundproof glass window, and these
readings were the daily bread and butter of the profes-
sional announcers we had cast. I wanted to experiment a
little with the degree of excitement to be given the various
speeches, and so on, but the takes clicked in with no par-
ticular problem.

Ordinarily we would have recorded these segments prior
to production and played them back on the set as the scenes
were shot. But there had not been sufficient: time, and so

1 88 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

now Jack Dunning held the stop-watch to make sure each
speech would fit in the hole which the actors had left for it.

Connie Kahn had fought the good fight and, in spite of
the rapid production, there was very little repair work to
do on the dialogue itself. Some of the work resulted from
changes. We had to switch the name of the radio station
from the KIH of the script to the KWTA which the FCC
cleared for us, so all dialogue containing the outlawed let-
ters had to be newly recorded. Joe's remark at the sec-
ond breakfast about not needing Mr. Brannan's three cents,
when viewed in the light of today's newspaper prices, gave
us the air of a period picture, so the line was newly re-
corded with a price of seven cents.

But most of the repairs were concerned with dialogue
lines where words were indistinct or blotted out by extra-
neous noises. For example, Joe had made part of his speech
of reconciliation with Aunt Ethel while walking on his
crumpled newspaper. Again, in the scene in Brannan's
workshop where Joe squares himself with his young son,
certain essential words had been scratched by the noise of
Johnny's sandpapering. Most of this repeat recording was
done by a very interesting process known as "looping."
^.Take Joe's line, "Even if you're sore at me, Johnny
don't forget, it's Mom who takes the beating." All the way
through this line on the screen, young Johnny was showing
his emotion by sandpapering like mad and the excess sand-
papering had to be wiped out from under the dialogue.

The stage was darkened. The strip of film containing
the original faulty line had been cut out and cemented into
a loop, and the sound was fed to the actor over and over
through earphones until he had soaked in its mood and

FINISHING THE PICTURE 189

tempo. Then the sound was fed him as the picture was pro-
jected on the screen and he watched his mouth movement
on the syllables. Joe practiced until he could exactly dupli-
cate what he was hearing, in perfect "lip sync," then sig-
naled that he was ready and watched his lips in the picture
as he spoke the new line into the mike, ;

This process can be extraordinarily useful. Sometimes,
especially in very noisy action pictures, and films which
are shot largely on location, almost the entire dialogue may
be looped. In an emergency we can operate on an actor
whose voice is wrong in some way to give him a com-
pletely new voice. With luck we can even change a few
actual words, usually for legal reasons. All this can be par-
ticularly useful now that Hollywood is making many pic-
tures abroad, with foreign actors.

This phase of the work is exacting, of course, but it's
mechanical. The creative side of 2 A begins to fizz when
Mike Steinore's boys check in to make some of the sound
effects.

For example, Joe's line of dialogue above had been sliced
away from the sandpapering, and now the sandpapering
would have to be put back in the track to match the pic-
tured action exactly, though in such a way that it would
no longer interfere with the dialogue. That, among many
other things, would be Mike Steinore's responsibility.

On March ijth Mike and his brood got their duplicate
print of Next Voice. Over in one of the projection rooms
in the cutters' alley, they ran the reels and laid out the job.
"Kenny and Finn take Reel 4," said Steinore, and Finn went
over under a hooded light to watch the picture and mark

190 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

the needed effects on his pad, checking the illuminated
footage counter at the bottom of the screen to catch the
point at which each effect must start and stop.

Many sounds will be left just as they were recorded on
set along with the dialogue. Others will be "sweetened,"
the actual effect reinforced to achieve the added promi-
nence or significance which Mike feels needed. Other ef-
fects will be supplied from scratch: "Lay in some new
footsteps along here, less woody". . . . "Put in a good
door-close". . . . "Let's feed in some light traffic behind
this exterior."

Sound effects can add a whole new dimension to a pic-
ture, and vastly increase its scope. The sound of automo-
biles and the clanging of trolley-car bells supply the traffic
outside the cocktail bar which was lacking when we shot
the scene inside Stage 18. And when Joe is walking the dark
street in search of his son the distant whistle of a train un-
derscores his mood. Because of the desirability of record-
ing clear dialogue, practically all the sounds you hear in
A-budget pictures were added to the film long after the
actual scenes were shot, and this includes all kinds of
sounds, from the obvious footsteps and doorbells and auto-
mobile pull-aways to purely atmospheric backgrounds of
crickets at night and the buzzing of flies on a sylvan Sun-
day afternoon.

The thousands of little rolls of stock film indexed in
Mike's library vault contain almost every imaginable noise
and nuance thereof. Mixer Kahn had co-operated by re-
cording wild takes of atmospheric sounds on the various
Next Voice locations, particularly the hard-to-duplicate
specialized sounds in the aircraft factory. And the boys had

FINISHING THE PICTURE 19!

recorded an assortment of special sounds on Joe's beat-up
old car one afternoon on a street in the back lot.

As Mike's boys ran each picture reel across their benches,
they "built" the two or three or four auxiliary tracks of
sound effects which that reel would need. The effects, on
their short strips of sound film, were carefully laid into
reel-long lengths of blank film until each effect was so
placed that it would speak up in exact synchronization with
the action of the picture. When several effects would have
to occur in a cluster, they were spread around on different
tracks so each could be separately controlled and balanced
in. Later, the whole collection of sound tracks would be
combined with dialogue and music onto the one master
track which would be printed on the theatre version.

Most of the effects in any movie come from the stock
library. Mike's boys can choose, for example, between 284
different dog barks, and every mixer who returns from a
location turns in a few more effects which he has recorded
on helpful speculation. But in every picture some of the
effects must be specially recorded. Footsteps, for example,
are so individual in spirit that stock sound never seems ex-
actly right. And so, sooner or later, the deal ends up back
with Ted Hoffman on 2 A.

You don't notice it until the boys begin making their
peculiar noises, but the floor of 2A looks like the display
of a mad flooring contractor with its patchwork squares
of concrete, brick, hardwood blocks, rubber tile, felt, car-
pet, and flagstone. Plus some large wooden pans where one
may walk on dirt or gravel or through weeds or water or
mud. The soundproofed stage is properly dead, but Ted

I9 2 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

can get the bouncy effect of auditoriums or outdoors by
routing the sound through a concrete room called an echo
chamber, adding whatever he wants in the way of rain-
barrel reverberation to the original sound.

It was late in March when Scott Perry and Harold Hum-
brock recorded three special sound sequences for Next
Voice on which stock effects would not serve. The first
one was from the first evening of the picture, when Joe
comes into the living room from the kitchen with a glass in
his hand, picks up the newspaper, walks over to the leather
easy chair, sits down, and opens the paper. Scott donned
acoustically matching heavy shoes and hard-fabric trousers
from the supply lockers, Harold placed a strip of carpet
over the linoleum floor at the proper breaking point a few
feet from the leather chair, and prepared to handle the
clink of the glass. As the projectionist darkened the stage
and ran the strip of picture while the boys rehearsed it for
synchronization, I suddenly realized how complex a per-
fectly ordinary sequence of human movement can be. Ted
was satisfied on Take 3; the glass clink was a little high but,
"We can paint it down on the track."

Joe had delivered his son's newspapers on the outdoor
location, where we could not possibly have gotten micro-
phones in position to record his movements. Yet the audi-
ence would expect to hear on the screen his feet hitting the
concrete and the newspaper plopping into the bushes. So
Scott walked in the changing rhythms of Joe on the screen,
from concrete to brick to grass; and after some experi-
menting to satisfy Ted, Harold threw the paper so that it
would land in the bush with a glancing impact rather than
a flat drop. Everybody adds "little touches" to the film as
he does his part of the work, and it's a summary of all the

FINISHING THE PICTURE 193

touches which makes realism: here, Ted noted that Joe let
his left foot drag momentarily on his final step, as most of
us do, instead of coming to a military halt. The last job of
the afternoon, that of completing the illusion of Mr. Bran-
nan watering his lawn, was performed by the forthright
device of having Harold squirt a hose on a pan of earth,
adjusting the nozzle as Ted listened to the sound over the
loudspeaker and spoke his directions over the talk-back.
"Fine it up a little; get a hiss. . . . No, now it sounds like
frying. . . . Don't keep squirting it in the same place, it's
getting muddy and loud."

In every picture there is some one spot where the impact
stands or falls on the success of a sound effect. In Next
Voice, it was the rain on the third evening. The radio
announcer reported God as having said, "Are you afraid
because you believe that you have earned another forty
days and forty nights of rain? Must I perform such miracles
in order to make you believe?" On the screen Joe switched
off the radio, and he and Mary and Johnny stayed silent
and unmoving as the words sank in. Then must come the
sound of rain which, building rapidly until it seemed to be
fulfilling the prophecy, would throw our characters to-
gether in a climax of mortal fear in the face of God's wrath.

This problem would have been a challenge under any
circumstances, but here it was made almost impossible by
the fact that we could not show the visible rain in the pic-
ture. The sounds of many actions are amazingly alike, and
human ears need the help of an image or some other clue
to make identification. In radio broadcasting, for example,
the dialogue will notify the audience whether the sound
effect is an earthquake or an automobile crash or a col-
lapsing chair, but the key sound of each effect may be the

194 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

crunching of the same old strawberry box. We had the
further complication that real rain covers such a wide fre-
quency of sound waves that "effects rain" must be recre-
ated, to fall within the limits of our electronic equipment.

Mike and the boys decided to build a little production
sequence on this. The sound begins with a few big drops
hitting a window pane. Then a very distant suggestion of
thunder. Then a scurry of drops across the pane in a cre-
scendo which brings Joe to the window, then a crash of
near thunder and a deluge of rain and build it from there.

Wellman had directed the scene so that Joe becomes a
representative of all men in the face of the Eternal, trying
to protect their loved ones and knowing their failure. The
climax image on the screen has the quality of a statue. The
statue now rests on a solid base of sound.

22

There is comparatively little music in the Next Voice; in
fact, there is startlingly little. But what is there is terribly
important.

I have a great respect for the power of background mu-
sic in dramatic film. Fundamental expressions of universal
emotions sometimes drop below the level of a verbaliza-
tion, and there the film can speak in the universal language
of music. Music can heighten the significance and broaden
the scope of great scenes, and may even add to a mediocre
scene an importance which was lacking in the unscored
version. We may depend on music to guide the audience's
mood economically, using a single chord or short phrase
to replace several feet of scene. We expect music to point
up action, enrich emotions, bridge transitions, and particu-
larly to weave the whole picture into unity with thematic
threads of musical continuity.

Darryl Zanuck's deservedly successful film Pinky was
laid out to carry a musical background under 125 of its
130 minutes of running time. The decision to take Next
Voice to the public without the support of background
scoring was not an easy one to make.

A good deal has been written about music in films, much
of it with the unconscious assumption that the film exists
as a background for the advancement of music. I have seen
nothing written on the subject from the point of view of
the producer, to whom music is one of several important

196 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

elements which he must blend and balance in terms of a
fused "whole."

In deciding the Next Voice problem I was guided by
some good advice which David Selznick had given me
many years ago. Selznick, who has employed music as suc-
cessfully as any producer in films, told me never to be over-
come by music and not to be afraid of it to be tough
in my decisions, determining for myself when music was
needed and when it would be out of place, and to let no
one dissuade me once an honest decision had been reached.
I had the feeling that in this particular film, had I been
working with Selznick, he would have advised me to omit
all background scoring; that extensive scoring would impair
the whole style of the picture.

Nevertheless, the producer who is not a schooled mu-
sician should keep a coolly objective eye on his own
technical limitations. It was generally agreed that we would
use a hymn-like theme for the music which, by scoring the
main title and end title, would encourage a proper emo-
tional approach to the picture in its beginning and solidify
the feeling which the audience would take away at the end.
One evening while I was running the picture at home a
melody floated into my mind. Next day I tried it out on
Johnny Green, head of the studio's Music Department. I
hummed it to him and he jotted the notes on paper, proba-
bly improving it as he went along. At first John viewed it
with some skepticism, thinking it had probably come more
from memory than inspiration, but a check disclosed that
it was really an original piece of music.

But David Raksin, the excellent young composer whom
Johnny had assigned to Next Voice, had already worked
out a hymn of his own. So both of the hymns were orches-

FINISHING THE PICTURE 197

trated, and Johnny made rough recordings of them. I sup-
pose I had a natural pride of authorship (a pride which
always seems most marked when a fellow does something
out of his normal field) and so it was a particularly diffi-
cult task for me to sit in one of the sound rooms as the two
melodies were played back and make a decision between
them.

The difficulty increased when I sensed that Raksin's
hymn was a lot better than mine. But I was darned if I'd
make the decision too quickly, so I turned to Wellman,
who didn't know that the first selection was the one I had
"composed," and asked him which he liked. He said, "My
God, there's no question about it. The second one is won-
derful and that first thing should be taken out and buried."
I gulped and said we'd use the second one, and afterwards
I told Wellman about the situation. He said, "Well, I'm very
sorry, but even if I'd known I'd still have had to tell you
to take it out and bury it."

It was March iyth before the work print was sufficiently
complete to run it for the Music Department. Apart from
the title music, we would need certain "justified" music, in
the several situations where a radio set was playing in the
scene. But we would take the picture to preview with
"canned track" from our stock of library music, and later
David would compose music which, though it must seem
like ordinary radio fare, would blend with and enrich the
emotional content of whatever human action was taking
place on the screen. To Dave, that was pure routine. What
about the considerable dramatic background scoring which
would normally go into a picture of this sort?

After considerable discussion, with some strong convic-
tions exhibited on both sides, I made the decision mentioned

198 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

above. The script, the director, and the actors had achieved
such extraordinary human realism that the introduction
into any scene of a theatrical device, no matter how beau-
tifully handled, might shatter the realism and thus destroy
the very mood the music would be trying to build.

Film makes a terrifying demand on a composer, requir-
ing that he create with the abandonment of an artist and
the discipline of a precision mechanic. Dave composed to
stop-watch and cue sheet, for his music must subtly ac-
knowledge and change character on each of several "turns"
within the length of a few bars and each cue be caught on
a split-second timing. The splitting of seconds is literally
true; musically, a single second is a vast time in which
twenty-four frames of film will click through the projector
and the orchestra can play a run of twenty-four fast notes
or several loud full chords.

Dave set down his score in terms of a penciled "lead
line," with indications of the harmonic and instrumental
colors he had in mind. This was carried out into voiced
and detailed orchestration by the arranger, whose work in
turn was broken down into the separate instrumental parts
by the copyists.

Since existing music seldom exactly suits a particular
dramatic situation, film composers may derive, but they
practically never steal. I'll admit to plenty of room for
criticism in our use of music for the screen. We still, for
example, suffer from the cliche the stock fire music, the
standard chase backgrounds, the obvious scoring under love
scenes, the too pat catching of visual cues, and the shock
cymbal crash as the camera finishes its tilt down to the
calendar which reads "December 7." But more and more,

FINISHING THE PICTURE 199

the men of big talent are moving away from this, and pro-
ducers are permitting it. Today, most film scoring is truly
original composition. Much of it is very creditable. Occa-
sional passages emerge from background scoring into mass
recognition (Dave Raksin's "Laura" came from his score
for that picture.) And some film scoring is recognized as
having permanent musical value. Most of the composers I
know are men of great integrity and enthusiasm as well as
talent, and since film scoring offers more opportunity for
experimentation than any other contemporary musical me-
dium, they may well have an influence on the music of the
future.

At nine o'clock in the morning of March zist just
thirteen days after the close of photography the orches-
tra members checked in through the studio gates from the
parking lot across the street and began gathering in the big
recording stage. This stage, too, is set up like a radio studio,
but it is much larger and cluttered with a forest of micro-
phone booms, music stands, choir platforms, and movable
baffles. Three or four of the "men" were feminine, at the
harp and in the cello and fiddle sections, and all these musi-
cians were of the elite both in competence and income.
Scale pay for a three-hour film recording session is $40.00,
and the studio's current contract with the AFM guarantees
an annual income of $6,916 to fifty musicians for their film
work alone.

The doors closed. The pleasant caterwauling of tune-up
sounded through the stage, and mixer Mike McLaughlin
walked in from his glassed booth to supervise final rear-
rangement of the multiple microphone setup. Vital, ebul-
lient Johnny Green shook down into his shirtsleeves, laid

200 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

out his score on the stand, set up his split-second timing
clock on the roomy podium and tapped his baton on the
lamp to begin the session.

The conductor, as you know, is a sort of musical "pro-
ducer," in that he envisions what he wants as a blended
end product and adjusts the work of the individual musi-
cians and choirs until he gets it. Dave stayed out in the
mixer's booth to help in the balancing and check on the as-
recorded version which he would hear from the booth loud-
speaker.

The work went with what a non-musician would con-
sider impossible rapidity. Johnny or Dave changed a note
here and there "Oboes, drop the B on bar 4 and come in
on the. B-flat." Johnny brought up the interpretation of
this group and that choir "Brass, bar 13 with crescendo
to the cutoff, please." They cut a trial disc. The leaders
of the several choirs went into the booth to listen to a
playback, and Johnny brought the interpretation a little
farther toward his goal "Bar 6, chimes, play me a B just
above the A on the third quarter" .... "Brass, the in-
between eighth notes aren't speaking, not articulating. . . ."
I felt the need of building even higher the feeling of triumph
and reverence in the end title, and Johnny added an over-
lay of single-note chimes, composing on the spot and calling
out the notes.

The next rehearsal was good, and Johnny buzzed for
the picture. The overhead stage lights dimmed out. The
stand lights glowed like golden pools in the darkness as
they lit the faces of their instrumentalists, and on the white
screen behind them the picture began to flicker. The white
cue line moved across the screen, and when it touched the

FINISHING THE PICTURE 2OI

right edge Johnny's baton went down to start the take. . . .
his mind simultaneously listening to the sound track
through his left earphone, listening to the orchestra through
his uncovered right ear, following his score, checking the
second hand on his stop-watch and watching the picture
on the screen, and conducting to split-second cues with
perfect balance and spiritual feeling.

The film of the recording session came back from the
lab the next day. Then the selected takes were patched
with lengths of silent leader into reels corresponding to
the picture, and the Sound Department set Next Voice
up on its schedule for the re-recording.

This re-recording process is more commonly called
"dubbing." It means that the assorted sounds for the pic-
ture the dialogue, the sound effects, and the music, now
spread around on several separate tracks are played simul-
taneously and newly recorded on a single combined track,
which later will be printed down the side of the compos-
ite prints for projection in the theatres.

The dubbing room itself is a miniature theatre. Deep
leather chairs for the cutters, effects men, and other inter-
ested parties line the rear walls under the projection
windows. Pin-point spotlights cone down softly on the
gunmetal control desk where the two mixers sit before the
dials, their hands on the "pots" which control the volume
of each separate sound track channel, their eyes looking
intently ahead at the picture on the screen.

The sound of the several tracks emerges from the loud-
speaker up front as the "mix" in which it is being recorded.
Below the screen an illuminated footage counter clicks

202 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

along as the picture unreels. Penciled cue sheets notify
the mixers as to what sounds are on which track, and
state the exact footage point at which each sound comes in.

The first rehearsal of a set of new tracks produces a
weird and wonderful jumble of sound from which it
seems that nothing intelligible or convincing could possibly
result. But as the reel is rehearsed over and over, and the
various sounds are controlled to their lifelike balance, you
begin to see that the creative process of telling the story
still goes on long after the picture is "finished."

There is a good deal of discussion as to how the sounds
should be handled and balanced at certain touchy spots.
"People ought to hear that radio set before they see it,"
says Margaret Booth, "I want to be grabbed the moment
I come in that room. I want to know somebody is talking
on the radio and it's important make it tinny, push it. . . ."
And, "Put some character on that beat-up old car when-
ever you can, it's almost a personality." Cutter Jack Dun-
ning leans forward in his leather chair. "Let's meet the
automobile on the incoming A track with engine noise
on the B." . . . "The school bell's running long, take it
out at 237. ... Can you smother that dialogue a little
without losing it, maybe a little filter, so it sounds like he's
really inside the phone booth." . . . "Bring up the kid's
slide; it's a plot point." And, of course, on the climactic
miracle rain, which worked out right only after much
earnest experimentation: "Take two beats after the radio
stops before you start the rain, then sneak it in. ... Now
build it a little. . . . Catch the thunder, see if you can
sharpen it. ... Ride up the rain when Mary comes to
Joe and after the kid runs in, ride it as high as you can
go without blowing the tubes."

FINISHING THE PICTURE 203

Now, the last step before preview, the reels went over
to the laboratory, where the new combined sound track
would be developed and printed and checked. And the
picture track would be dressed with the optical effects
which had hitherto appeared on the screen as title cards
saying DISSOLVE or FADE.

These "opticals," by the way, are the film's form of
punctuation. The cutter is entitled to make an instanta-
neous cut from one shot to another only when no slight-
est time lapse is involved, as when a character walks out
of one room and into the next or when Joe dials the factory
phone and Mary picks up the receiver at hornerlf a moder-
ate time lapse is involved, such as that between Joe driv-
ing away from his house and driving into the plant, we
dissolve ;ithat is, the end of the first scene and the be-
ginning of the second are overlapped in the printing so
that one blends into another. (Incidentally, when Wellman
would instruct, "After you finish the last speech walk
over toward the window to give me some^dissolve foot-
age, ^.he meant that he wanted to ensure having his dialogue
in the clear, the dissolve blurring the screen only on non-
descript action.) < A long lapse of time or a significant
stop-and-fresh-start in the story is conventionally signaled
by a fade, wherein the film printer fades down the end of
one scene until the screen goes momentarily black and
then fades up the beginning of the new start into full light,
You might say that a cut is a film comma, a dissolve is
a period or paragraph, and a fade is a chapter break.

Having dutifully set down the conventional film punc-
tuation, I would like to air a personal phobia against the
use of fades. I think the fade is an out-dated device, and
I prefer to use instead a lengthened^ dissolve. This is not

204 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

esoteric hairsplitting. The "full stop" of a fade breaks the
continuity of image, and in my opinion a sustained con-
tinuity of image is a vital key to really full utilization of
the film medium. I think the fade is a hangover from the
old days when film was borrowing its construction from
the stage, when we used to build our film stories in chunks,
like acts. But we have come to realize that pictures do
not need "intermissions" as the theatre does, and now-
adays the best pictures move steadily along an upward
line, with unbroken continuity of image and thought from
beginning to conclusion.

The lab finished its work. The reels of the Next Voice
picture and track were packed in those battered octagonal
galvanized film cans and the word came to me that we were
ready for preview.

I took a deep breath, crossed my fingers, and phoned
Barrett Kiesling and Bill Golden to come over to the office
and we'd set things up.

'A sneak preview is just what the term implies. The work
print of the new picture is slipped in with the regular bill
of a standard theatre without advance notice. The object
is to get an honest audience reaction. Sometimes we also
get surprisedJ

I was particularly anxious to get some dependable mass-
audience reaction on The Next Voice. We thought we had
a good picture. But we were too soaked in the project by
now to be truly objective. We knew too much about the
story; if there were a hole in the logic of the screen version
we would tend to fill it in subconsciously from knowledge
to which the audience would not have access. We were
beginning to see the trees rather than the forest; we might
be splitting hairs about things the audience would ignore.
And in the final analysis the only dependable judge of what
the mass of people will like is a cross-section of the people
themselves.

| The total of a picture is really half on the screen and
half in the mass-emotion response to it of the people out
front; we can't really tell what we've got until we sit there
and watch the two halves go together. On the basis of what
we learn during the preview, we make changes in the pic-
ture, to come as close as we can to bringing those two
halves together with a perfect fit. /

All this went double for Next Voice, for no picture
like this had ever been made before; we had no precedent

206 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

to go by, no existing yardstick to measure the public's
taste. The paying public for any movie includes a lot of
teen-agers, and the great bulk of the American audience
is between the ages of eighteen and thirty years. We know
pretty well how they will react to musicals and melo-
dramas and comedies and the "type" pictures, but what
would they think of a picture about ordinary home life,
pregnancy, and God? We had to know, and we had to
know the unbiased, uncolored truth.

|With the several studios previewing all their feature
productions in and around Los Angeles, it is not easy to
find a theatre where we can depend on getting a really
fresh audience reaction. The regular audience of a house
which runs a lot of previews quickly turns "pro." Its
reactions are self-conscious and, consequently, useless to
us. Also, many people in the industry like to get an ad-
vance look at their own and the other fellow's product,
and they make the rounds of the previews.

An audience of this sort betrays itself with flurries of
applause and hep comments on the credit titles.fWhen you
hear wise whispers such as, "I thought Mellor was with
Stevens at Paramount," you know that you're going to
waste your evening. After the running you will get the
standard foyer routine of the taut handshake, the reverent
stare, and the "Basil, you've done it again!" This may make
you feel very good at the moment, but is small comfort
later on when the picture lies down and dies with typical
audiences. Small comfort of a different kind comes from
the cynical old studio hand who was annoyed at the way
the preview went. He looks at you grimly, shakes his head
and says dourly, "Needs a lotta work, my boy." I prefer
to bypass all the inside comments and put my trust in the

FINISHING THE PICTURE 207

comments of the people for whom we actually make the
pictures.

Too often, we think our plans for a sneak have been
kept beautifully secret only to make our way into the
theatre through a crowd of attractive young couples who
turn out to be our studio messenger girls and their boy-
friends. I decided that the sneak of The Next Voice would
really be kept secret. And at the cost of being a bit cloak-
and-daggerish at times, we succeeded.

First we decided to take the picture a goodly distance
from Los Angeles. We settled on the United Artists Thea-
tre, out in Pomona. Not only could we expect a real cross-
section of the American audience townspeople, farmers
and ranchers, plus a sophisticated element from the nearby
colleges but the house had not staged a preview in years.
Of course, this latter advantage would cost us the expense
of installing a "dummy head" in the projection booth
to permit running picture and sound on their separate
work-version strips of film. But I thought it worthwhile
and told Bill Golden to set the deal with the theatre man-
ager. The deal, by the way, is usually an even exchange
with no transfer of money; we get a small block of seats
and some special service from the theatre personnel and
the theatre gets a free attraction.

The date was set for Friday, March 24th. We had
peeled the attendance list down to the scant dozen men
and women whose presence was absolutely essential, and
at noon on Friday they got their first notice, a suggestion
that they keep the evening open and be on their phones
at four o'clock. Golden and Stanley Markham of the pub-
licity staff drove out to Pomona early to check on the
equipment and the physical arrangements, and to rehearse

208 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

the theatre staff in how properly to distribute the preview
opinion cards, how to impress the audience to fill them
out, and how to handle the placing of the audience (babies
to the balcony, and so on) so as to minimize distractions
during the running.

At four o'clock, a dozen phones rang in different parts of
the studio, and the people were told to rendezvous at three
different spots around the lot at five o'clock. A misty rain
was beginning to fall.

At five o'clock three of the long black limousines drove
up to the separate rendezvous points and picked up their
passengers. The rain was coming down hard now. The
drivers nosed their cars out the different gates in different
directions, and when they were under way one person in
each of the cars broke out the sealed orders, to head for
dinner at the St. Charles Grill in Pomona. The cars swung
around for their forty-mile run through the rain and dark-
ness down the San Bernardino Valley.

We all reached the St. Charles at about the same time.
The technicians who had ridden out in the print car would
hurry through dinner to get to the theatre early, but the
rest of us gathered in a small rear dining room. There were
Bill and Dotrie Wellman and my assistant Walter Reilly,
who had driven down with Mrs. Schary and me; and
Music's Johnny Green, his wife Bunny, Supervising Cutter
Margaret Booth, and writer Cap Palmer from the other
car. Johnny is a wonderful entertainer, the steaks were
good after the long ride, and I was doing just fine until
suddenly everything hit me at once.

All previews are tense, if you've had anything to do
with the picture, but there was so much more at stake
on this one. Any husband who has driven his wife to

FINISHING THE PICTURE 209

the hospital to have a baby will recognize my emotional
state of, "It's all a mistake we never should have gotten
into this, let's go home." There was a vague fear would
this picture become known as Schary's Folly, would it
become one of the famous failures? Some of the fears
were uncomfortably specific: "We've come to the wrong
town. . . . We picked the wrong night; it's a Friday and
the house will be full of youngsters. Maybe I've made all
the wrong decisions all the way through the picture. .
Maybe I've ruined Wellman. ... I pulled him into this
wrong gamble and if we flop he'll be so disappointed."
I was afraid the audience might not respond, then fright-
ened that they might laugh too much at the wrong places,
that people might even honestly consider the story irrev-
erent and walk out. . . . And then, with the rain suddenly
beating at the window behind me, I saw an awful vision
of the big theatre with almost nobody there but us. The
steaks were probably very good.

At eight-fifteen we got back in the cars and started for
the theatre. The lights were shining on the wet black
streets, the gutters were swimming with rain water and
the three theatres we passed enroute were playing great
pictures, wonderful shows, which had probably corralled
all the audience in town, and why hadn't we chosen a
theatre up on the main street where people could get to
it? We turned the corner and pulled up beside the lighted
marquee. The canvas banner MAJOR STUDIO PREVIEW TO-
NIGHT flapped dismally in the rain, and one lone man was
standing at the box office.

We gathered in the lobby, trying to look cheerful and
nonchalant. Golden reported that the film was on hand
okay, chief projectionist Merle Chamberlain was up in the

2IO CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

booth and both cutters were on hand to cover emergencies,
and Doug Shearer was inside on the fader. I wiped the
rain off my glasses and peered through the crack in the
aisle doors. My nose caught the smell of wet wool, and
then my eyes got accustomed to the darkness and I saw
that we had a packed house. We crossed our fingers and
went inside to the little patch of empty seats.

The picture now drawing to its close on the screen was
Nancy Goes to Rio. It was loud, colorful, musical, funny.
The music swirled into its climactic finish, and I was glad
we had arranged to break the mood by drawing the stage
curtains and bringing up the house lights between the fea-
tures.

Then the house lights faded down. The curtains drew
apart, and on the screen came the title card announcing
that this was a preview and would the audience please fill
in opinion cards after the running. The studio Lion roared;
he gave way to the title card The Next Voice You Hear,
and then that wonderful joyously reverent music swept
up and under the titles and faded as we dissolved into the
tranquil morning establishing shot of the Joe Smith home.
The music dropped out, we dissolved to Joe squeezing
his oranges at the sink and Mary slitting her box tops,
and the case began to go to the jury.

For those first few moments which always seem like
years the audience just sat there. A few rows down a man
stood up and pushed his way out past the people and walked
up the aisle. Murder filled twelve hearts, until we saw that
a very little boy was pulling him by the hand. Now young
Johnny slid into the scene and the three people began
the breakfast business. The camera went close on Joe as
he looked upward and .just chewed suddenly there was

FINISHING THE PICTURE 211

a snicker, it built into a laugh, and when the camera cut
to the twin shot of Johnny looking upward and chewing
in the same dead-pan fashion, the laugh built into a roar and
I let out my breath for the first time since the start.
The laughs kept rolling beautifully for the next two or
three minutes, and they were the warm sympathetic laughs
of people identifying themselves with the doings on the
screen. Joe and Johnny did their fast backout into the
other car, Johnny went to school, Joe checked into the air-
craft locker room and, after the dissolve, came home in
the afternoon to the despised pot roast. The laughs were
running very high now. Were they too high?

Maybe we had withheld the introduction of our serious
note too long and had led the audience to expect farce
comedy all the way.

The film clicked inexorably closer to the one short
shot which I had felt all along would be our make-or-break
point. It was the moment at the beginning of the scene in
Johnny's room where Joe says, "A funny thing happened
on the radio just now . . ." and told about hearing the
Voice that claimed to be God. If the audience thought
that was funny, we were dead. But if we made that one
transition, we were over the hump. The scene kept coming
closer.

Joe finished the dishes and started in toward the living
room. We cut to Mary helping Johnny with his home
work. We cut back to Joe settling down with his paper and
glass at the radio. We cut back to the full shot across Mary
and Johnny toward the bedroom door. And then the door
opened and Joe stood in it, and Mary said, "You're not
listening to the radio what's wrong?"

I should have trusted Bill Wellman. He had held back

212 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

the disclosure just the right time, balanced the scene like
a celluloid ball on a column of air, and when Joe told about
the Voice saying, "This is God. I will be with you for the
next few days," the proverbial drop of the proverbial pin
would have echoed through that house. We were home.
There would be spot fixes as we went along, plenty of
them, but we were home.

And now we could get back to our proper business and
concentrate on the job in hand.

We expect the actions and the reactions of the preview
audience to give us certain specific information. Those
reactions should expose holes in our story and any blurry
points in our logic. An expected climax which misses fire
shows us where our building has been wrong, an unwanted
laugh puts the finger on items which audiences can misun-
derstand. On the pleasanter side, we find throwaway lines
or casual situations getting welcome unexpected laughs. We
make a note to perhaps build those up, and if necessary to
move back any essential dialogue which the laugh blots out.

Of course, we look up at the screen during the running
only often enough to keep in touch. By now we know the
film frame by frame, and our eyes keep roving around the
personal cross-section of people we've picked out to spot
their reactions. We make mental notes of the points where
the audience begins to wriggle in its seats, of the scenes
which outstay their welcome until the popcorn bags begin
to rattle, of the laughs which are late or hold an uncertain
note.

Back at the beginning of all this I mentioned that, to
make a good movie, a story must first possess that mys-
terious life-giving sparkle called showmanship. Here at the
preview, you see that quality in action. It seems to be that

FINISHING THE PICTURE 213

combination of elements which makes a group of people
function as an audience, instead of functioning as 800
individuals who happen to be confined within these walls.
Only when the picture is right do those individuals fuse
together into that whole which really constitutes an au-
dience. When the picture is running really "hot," the row
of heads along an aisle moves as a unit, the faces all wear
the same expression.

Incidentally, this is one reason why I never put too much
trust in any statistical method of sampling audiences. You're
really sampling individuals. When those heads in the theatre
are moving as individuals, the picture isn't working. That's
why I wish all the critics would view the pictures they're
to write about, not in solitary state in a private projection
room, but right out there with the audiences for whom they
are writing.

The Next Voice kept on unreeling to a response that
seemed wonderful to us. There was one awful moment
when the voices of Joe and Mary suddenly lagged behind
their lip movement and we feared that a whole ten-minute
reel might be out of sync, but they came back in step on
the next dissolve; it was just a single faulty cut. There was
an unwanted laugh on Joe's coming home drunk, for
audiences have been conditioned over the years to laugh
automatically at the sight of intoxication, tragic or no.
(This spot was cured later by a rearrangement of order
which Bill was quick to see: in the final version, we cut
almost immediately from Joe's entrance to the shocked face
of his son, and the boy's closeup expression smothers the
laugh.) There was a scattering of unwelcome laughs when
the climactic rain began, after God's voice had prophesied

214 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

the miracle. Partly they rose from the coincidence of the
actual downpour of rain outside the theatre, but also they
betrayed the familiar nervous note and we crossed them
off as the unavoidable "relief" laughs we're apt to get dur-
ing very tense moments or just afterward.

The final dangerous moment was in the church. Well-
man's camera roves the tense, awe-struck audience, the
radio announcer leads into the phrase, "The next voice
you hear . . ." and on the screen there comes a pause, a
long pause of utter silence. If a baby cried, or a teen-age
comic blurted out some volunteer dialogue, we just didn't
know how the audience would react. But everybody in
that entire theatre brought to that moment the same respect
we had brought to its making, and the silence was very
moving. In a few minutes Mary was wheeled out of the
hospital delivery room, made her unconscious response to
Joe's loving touch on her ear, and our characters moved
up the corridor and out of our story. The house lights faded
up, people began to stand, and Wellman and I realized
from our stiff muscles that we hadn't moved since the pic-
ture began.

Out in the lobby, tables had been set up and the well-
rehearsed ushers were persuading people to stop long enough
to jot their opinions and suggestions on the printed preview
cards. The cards are simple. You can check various grades
from "poor" to "outstanding" on How 'would you rate
this picture? and How would you rate the performances
of the following? You check yes or no on Will you rec-
ommend this picture to your -friends? You check whether
you're male or female, and check the age group in which
you fall. On this particular picture we also asked you to fill
in your church affiliation (and supplied a space for "none") .

FINISHING THE PICTURE 215

The cards are so printed that they can be folded up and
mailed to the studio without a stamp, but we're human
enough to want to end the suspense as soon as possible by
getting the cards filled out before people leave the theatre.

Over at one side of the lobby our small group was hud-
dled in the usual post-mortem. This is no time to feel good;
while your impression of the audience and your recol-
lection of its spot reactions is still fresh in your mind, you
dig into the changes the picture needs and the ways in
which it can be made better. But here, there were few
changes. The conventional The End seemed too jarring
an awakening, abrupt, and I decided to replace it with a
companion Biblical verse to the one which opens the pic-
ture: it would not only be more appropriate to the mood,
but would provide a start-and-finish frame around he
story. Bill thought that one or two points would be put
over more sharply by substituting different takes. Maybe
that period of silence in the church was a trifle too long;
we'd pull out one or two of the cutaways. But beyond those
we had nothing much but the usual minor trims for pace
and smooth flow.

We went back to the St. Charles for a gathering with the
town's civic and religious leaders. Barrett Kiesling had ar-
ranged for them to see the picture and meet with us later
as a sort of test for a similar method of selling the picture
in the general market later on. Their opinions were very
pleasant to hear. Bill Golden and Stan Markham stayed
down at the theatre "counting the ballots" and telephoning
in the returns every few minutes until we climbed back
into the cars and pulled out in the rain for Los Angeles.

It was a long ride without much conversation. As the
car pulled up into the driveway at my home shortly after

2l6 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

one A.M. the phone was ringing inside. It was Bill Golden
with his last report for the night. Out of 279 opinion cards,
the picture was rated from "Very Good" to "Outstanding"
by 266. To the vital question, Will you recommend this
picture to your -friends? the vote was Yes 248, No 3.
The detailed analysis which Mildred Kelly and her helpers
were making up during the night would show that an
amazing 200 of the people who took the trouble to sign
cards were in those make-or-break age groups, twelve to
thirty years old. I wanted to call up everybody who had
worked on the picture then and there and tell them about
it and thank them for what they'd done. I compromised
by calling Wellman and thanking him. Then I thanked God.
The best news of all came when the analysis was deliv-
ered the next afternoon. We had gambled that audiences
would accept a picture about decent people doing good
things, had risked violating the axioms that message pictures
drive people away from the theatres and religion is poison
at the box office. In the space left open for comments, card
after card asked, "Why don't you make more pictures like
this?"

Now that the baby had found out it could walk, it seemed
to grow up overnight.

The approval of the Pomona preview audience had been
so unusually fervent that, paradoxically, it worried us a
bit. A certain type of attraction enjoys great success in the
smaller towns, but misses fire in the large cities. Did the
Next Voice fall in that unfortunate group? While it was
admittedly a very human and unpretentious picture and
we didn't exactly expect it to break into the Radio City
Music Hall, nevertheless we had gambled on striking a vein
of human interest common to all people, whether country
or city, poor or rich, fanner or broker. We had to find
out more clearly where we stood.

Bill Golden set up another sneak preview. But this one we
scheduled for the Bay Theatre in Pacific Palisades, nicely
accessible to Los Angeles' most "sophisticated" audience.
Although we went through all the motions of secrecy,
somehow the word leaked out, and on the Thursday night
of the preview I could tell from the familiar faces in the
lobby that we were going to get the test we wanted.

When the lights faded down and the title came on the
screen, the butterflies beat their wings just as hard as at
Pomona. And for those same awful first moments, the
audience just sat there. But as it turned out, the warm
little details of everyday living were about the same in

2l8 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

large homes as in small ones, and the power of God had
no relation to one's income bracket or degree of worldly
experience.

The cutter made a few last trims. The Music Depart-
ment recorded the expanded end-title scoring. The Sound
Department ran its final re-recording, and the time came
for another of those executive decisions.

The decision that a picture is ready to go out entails the
same anxious responsibility as the original, "We'll do it."
Is it really ready? Are there things you still haven't thought
of which would increase its appeal? As long as you keep
the picture in your own hands at the studio you can keep
on improving it, but once you ship it that's the way it's
going to be and you'll stand or fall on it. Actually, I suppose
the feeling is akin to that of sending your child out into
the world.

I ought to mention here that a producer who is really
intent on his picture will run it some forty or fifty times
during this finishing stage, testing it again and again and
again, over-all and in detail. This is another thing whose
importance I learned from David SelznicHp "Run your
film." Loose editing on a picture is often a result of the
failure of the people connected with it to run it as often
as they should. Constant running and scrutiny leads to a
seemingly effortless smooth and easy editorial flow. If a
producer picks up just nine or ten little cuts or trims in
each of his runnings, he eventually has made three or four
hundred such minor changes, and his picture, good or bad
over-all, at least has a fluidity of image.

But there is a breaking point in every picture at which
further improvements will cost more in time and money
than they are worth. I ran the picture at home one final

FINISHING THE PICTURE 219

evening, slept on it, and the next morning sent out the word
to "Print and ship."

The lab began cutting the precious negative into the
final version, and here and there around the lot the files
began to close. With re-takes no longer to be protected,
the costume lines were broken up, and the sets were listed
for striking as soon as their stage space was needed. Ac-
counting drew lines under its columns, bundled up its
stacks of tabulating cards, and closed out the picture from
"In Process" to "Inventory." Purchasing filed away its req-
uisitions for dinner pails, and went back to its everyday
routine of buying airplanes, chicken feathers, ants, and
"three tons paraffin for ice (clear color, to see boy under) ."

The studio promotional departments were racing down
their last lap, but soon they would close out too. Publicity's
Jim Merrick had captioned all his stills, the gallery had shot
the posters and cover art of the stars, George Nichols was
well along on planting the national magazine features, and
Don McElwaine was wrapping up Kiesling's exploitation
campaign material for Wheelright to take to New York.
Les Petersen, modernistically listed in the studio directory
under "Radio Activity/' had the go-ahead to make Next
Voice one of his twelve monthly promotional specials, and
was arranging plugs on 1 50 or more network radio shows.
Tall Frank Whitbeck, silver-haired slogan-coiner from way
back, and his aide Herman Hoffman were working up the
advertising "trailer" which, showing in the theatres a week
ahead of the booking, would be responsible for a good per-
centage of the ticket purchases. The trailer would not be
easy to make, for the picture lacked the conventional hooks
on which to hang the dynamic hurry-hurry smash copy of
the cinema tradition. But at least most of the boys thought

220 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

it was a good picture, and they wouldn't have to hunt for
a hedge like that wonderfully noncommittal slogan which
blessed a famous clinker: "See It with Someone You Love."

Like any parent, I wanted to make sure that my youngster
would go out into the world with the best possible opportu-
nity to make his living. The M-G-M studio is only one
part of Loew's, Inc.; it makes the product which other
divisions distribute and exhibit. The selling is managed from
the New York headquarters of the company. And so I
arranged to go back there early in May to contribute what-
ever I could to the sales planning, and, humanly enough,
to try to pass on my own enthusiasm to the men who would
have to go out into the field and sell the picture.

All through the shooting the company had a running
gag that whenever some unidentified stranger stood around
the stage looking intently at anything he was tabbed as a
scout for Pete Smith. Pete, as you know, makes the very
funny shorts with Dave O'Brien, and he sometimes stretches
his budgets by moving in on sets which feature productions
have paid for. The night before I left for New York I took
a few minutes to walk over to Stage 18. Our sets were still
there. The walls and windows and doors were just the same,
but all the props were gone, the people had moved away.
It gave me a very lonely feeling. As I turned to go out, the
night construction crew trundled its carts in through the
big open door and set up work lights in the Joe Smith
house. I looked at the foreman's alteration blueprint; the
picture was listed as Fixiri 1 FooL And the producer? The
Smith named Pete.

There is an old joke 'in the industry about a mysterious
railway mail clerk who hates movies, this being the only
explanation of the claim that all pictures are sensational

FINISHING THE PICTURE 221

in Hollywood, but by the time they reach the sales force in
New York something has happened to them. We would
lack that alibi; cutter Jack Dunning had flown east with
the precious can containing our first composite print of
Next Voice. But as I stood outside the Loew's Bldg.
main projection room at 1540 Broadway and watched the
ninety-man jury file in for the crucial showing, I couldn't
help but wonder if my enthusiasm had clouded my judg-
ment.

I looked at their faces: keen, smart men, men of great
experience in selling pictures, managing theatres, creating
advertising and exploitation. They had seen many, many
pictures in their time, and this picture which was so impor-
tant to me was now just Production 1488 to them. Nothing
I could say or do would make any difference; it was all
up to the picture. In the next hour and twenty minutes
these specialists, using standards widely different from those
at Pomona and the Bay Theatre, would either have decided
that this was a picture they could sell, or that it was a turkey
to be played off on the second half of double bills.

And once again the lights faded down.

It was a very long hour and twenty minutes. At last
the lights went up. There was that same awful silence. But
as Mr. Schenck walked past he gripped my shoulder hard,
and whispered, "It's wonderful." And when I got the cour-
age to look around I saw that a difference of three thousand
miles in geography and a million miles in sophistication or
interests was no difference at all in the hearts of people.
Our child had adopted ninety foster parents.

Now, all the creative exploitation thinking and sales
planning which had gone on on both coasts in many parts
of the far-flung organization was brought together in a

222 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

series of meetings with Mr. Nicholas Schenck, President
of the entire Loew's organization, and Howard Dietz, who
heads all Loew's advertising and exploitation.

It was agreed that Next Voice was a picture on which
"word-of -mouth" comment passed along from person to
person would be particularly important. We were pretty
sure by now that the picture would be its own best sales-
man, and that the word-of-mouth from people who had
seen it would be favorable.

Therefore, it seemed that the heart of our promotion
effort would probably be an attempt to arrange an advance
showing in every community a few weeks before the theatre
engagement; the community leaders would be invited to
the showing and we would trust the picture itself to per-
suade them to spread the word. Another line of effort,
tying into the prominent radio angle of the story, would
be to enlist the sympathy (articulate, of course) of radio
commentators. Mr. L. K. Sidney suggested that the local
theatre manager be encouraged to step out on his own
stage in person a few days before the engagement to tell
his audiences honestly what he thought of the coming
picture. And we decided to send Jim Whitmore and Nancy
Davis on separate tours around the country to visit key
cities and meet the press and local drama critics, make
appearances on local radio stations, speak at the meetings
of various groups, and generally let their wonderfully
clean, attractive young personalities project the atmosphere
of the picture.

The promotion plans were good. But with all due
respect to the picture, what The Next Voice campaign still
urgently needed was that certain something variously
described as a gimmick, a nub, an angle or a lead in effect,

FINISHING THE PICTURE 223

it needed some single strong focal item which would draw
the whole campaign together, which would carry the flag
out in front of the parade, something equivalent to the
prestige conferred on a picture by a pre-release engagement
at the Radio City Music Hall. But this was not what you
think of as a Music Hall type of picture. It had no name
stars, no glamour, no spectacle, no eye-filling mounting of
a lavish budget, none of the standard "draws" which are
considered necessary to fill the world's biggest theatre.

Our tentative plans called for opening the picture on
Broadway late in the summer, probably at the Astor Theatre
where Battleground had run for so many weeks. A her-
mated disc in my back which had put me horizontal before
I left the Coast now refused to be ignored any longer and
I went to the hotel to go to bed for the rest of my stay in
New York.

Mr. Schenck came up to visit me the next day, and while
we were visiting, the phone rang. It was sales manager Bill
Rodgers and he said, "How do you feel? Can you handle
some good news?"

I said, "If it's good news, give it to the General," and I
handed the phone to Mr. Schenck.

Mr. Schenck listened. His face lit up. He said, "That's
great," and he smiled down at me. He said, "That's fine
sure, of course that's wonderful!" Then he hung up.

He reached down and gripped my shoulder, as he had
over at 1 540 Broadway, just in time to save me from dying
of curiosity about the call. He smiled again, and said, "Your
picture goes into the Music Hall. I'm very proud." We
called up the Coast and gave the news to Mr. Mayer, who
was as excited and pleased about it as we were. Then after
a little while Mr. Schenck went away.

224 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

For a few minutes, I lay there looking up at the ceiling
and thinking. Periodically, in this business, you ask your-
self, "Why do you go through this, the interminable hours
and the hard work, the bitter disappointments and the kicks
that you don't deserve and the slams that you do, and all
the rest of it, why do you go through it?" And here, right
here, was the answer. You go through it so that once in a
while you can feel like this.

You had a notion, and you worked on it and it came
out the way you hoped and maybe, at least for this little
while, you're helping to pull your share of the wagon.

Well, the youngster was grown up. And it would go out
into the world with the finest start we could give it.

Gradually the exhilaration wore off and I felt drained
out. It was that feeling of utter, exhausted relief that comes,
I suppose, to the "Father of the Bride" after the wedding.
I'm male, American, and well over twenty-one, but can-
didly I felt like having a nice quiet cry all by myself. Then
suddenly I remembered something I should have taken
care of earlier. I reached over for the phone, called Jack
Dunning in Washington and asked him if he had got hold
of the war film clips for my next one, Go -for Broke. Pirosh
would be well along with the script back on the Coast,
and we ought to get going.

Jim Whitmore and Nancy Davis appear on the screen in
The Next Voice You Hear for something less than an
hour and a half. That brief appearance called for months
of earnest work on the part of several hundred unseen men
and women from more than two hundred arts, trades and
professions.

These men and women are skilled, talented, and hard-
working. They are also widely misunderstood.

A few months ago the New York Times Magazine let
me sound off on the subject of a satire I want to do some-
time about Hollywood. It will be called Welcome Home,
and it is the story of a man who goes back to his home
town for a visit after ten years in the film industry. He is
a perfectly normal man, weighed down with the problems
of paying his income tax and getting his youngster's allergy
cured and all the other things everybody worries about.
The satire concerns the preconceived notions of his old
friends.

It deals with the people who think all the talk about
the money he makes in Hollywood is nonsense, but who
still want to know if he can finance them in a business. It
deals with the people who believe he makes a ridiculous
amount of money in Hollywood but still assume he will
touch them for a loan. It deals with the mother who wants
to get her child into this "terrible" show business; with
the writer who looks with contempt at Hollywood but

226 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

wants to sell a story to pictures with the newspaper re-
porter who has a feeling that all Hollywood people are
crazy, but how about a job as a press agent out there?

In other words, this satire of mine will be aimed, not at
Hollywood, but at the things that people believe about
Hollywood, because that, to me, is always much more
comic.

Now let's take a real look at this phenomenal place.
Hollywood is a community located in North America
which has produced, is presently producing, and will con-
tinue to produce, the best and most definitive motion pic-
tures in the entire world. Hollywood is bounded on the
North by legend, on the East by rumor, on the West by
scandal and on the South by superstition. Somewhere within
these boundaries lies the actual Hollywood community so
many talk about and so few really know.

Hollywood consists roughly of some 25,000 workers.
This amount is perhaps i % of the population of Los An-
geles, but this i % contributes to the Los Angeles Commu-
nity Chest Drive over 1 2 % of the money raised. This group
of workers produces three to four hundred motion pictures
every year. These workers include not only actors, writers,
directors, and producers, but electricians, craftsmen of all
kinds, painters, leather workers, carpenters, designers, and
a variety of many other trades. Eighty percent of them
voted in the last Congressional election, and 99.7% voted
either Republican or Democrat which doesn't leave much
for the Communists.

In the main, these people range in age from thirty to
sixty. Over 80% of the workers are male. Over 70% have
been working in the picture business more than ten years.
They came to films from many fields of activity from

FINISHING THE PICTURE 227

the amusement world, manufacturing, professional fields,
finance, insurance, real estate, government, business, con-
struction, transportation and personal service. Seventy-
nine percent are married and 70% are married to the same
partner they started out with. This figure of some 29%
of divorces in Hollywood compares quite favorably with
the Census report on the general divorce rate in the U.S.
in 1947, which was 40%. The children of these marriages
attend, in the main, public schools. Seventy percent of the
families furnished members to the Armed Forces. Sixty
percent of these people attend religious services regularly.
Eighty-five percent of them are equipped with high-school
education, or better.

These people, like everybody else, play golf, swim, play
tennis, hunt, fish and ride, and have other amusements.
The majority of them live in smallish single family homes
and they come from every single state in the nation. Their
hobbies include, like those of everybody else in America,
reading, photography, music, gardening, puttering around
the home with the children, cards, sporting events, traveling,
painting, sketching, boating, riding, flying, horse races and
going to the movies. The industry in which these people
work has some $150,000,000 invested in Hollywood. The
annual payroll in Hollywood in 1948 was a little over
$251,000,000.

That is the Hollywood that everyone talks about, but
so few know. Maybe so few know because of their mixed
feelings toward movies.

There is a curious ambivalence in attitudes toward the
motion picture. A man can admire Clark Gable and wish he
were like Clark Gable. At the same time he can hate Clark
Gable because, one, he is not like Clark Gable; two, his

228 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

wife or sweetheart knows he isn't like Clark Gable; three,
he can't hit a man on the nose and knock him down with
one blow like Clark Gable. A man may admire Lana Turner
because he'd like to put his arm around her. At the same
time he hates her because he can't put his arm around her.

Because of this ambivalence, we are attacked from every
angle. We are accused of being a reactionary town, inter-
ested only in a buck of being enormously extravagant
and of being Communist controlled. We are attacked for
not using the screen to say something, and we are accused
of being propagandists and of filling the screen with "mes-
sages." We are viewed as a town tortured by labor strife,
and we are told that, of course, there is no labor problem
in Hollywood because we have corrupted and suborned
the labor leaders. We are called insular, cut off from and
oblivious to the world, and we are regarded as a transient
community which has never sunk any roots. We are bela-
bored for our story trends and cycles, and we are asked,
"Why don't you make more westerns, more pictures on
anti-Semitism, or injustice to the Negro?" Why don't you
make more pictures like this and that, and then why do
you make so many pictures on one theme?

To make matters worse, Hollywood has become so
much a part of American folklore that it has acquired a
persistent stereotype in the public mind. There are all sorts
of similar stereotypes, all more or less pernicious. No Eng-
lishman is supposed to have a sense of humor. All Italians
are cowards and smell of garlic. Jews are parsimonious
men with heavy accents. Negroes are lazy and dishonest
and must be treated with a stern benevolence that only a
Southern gentleman understands. The Irish are drunkards.

The self-perpetuating quality of these stereotypes is a

FINISHING THE PICTURE 229

consequence of what is called the expectancy error. Let a
humorless Englishman, a cowardly Italian, a parsimonious
Jew, a lazy Negro, or a drunken Irishman attract observa-
tion and he is remembered, while all the witty English-
men, the brave Italians, the generous Jews, the industrious
Negroes, and the sober Irishmen are forgotten. People see
what they look for.

Unfortunately, newspaper editors and reporters are con-
stantly guilty of the expectancy error, at least as far as
Hollywood is concerned, and in other directions too, I
think. A lot of editors, I suspect, still believe that every
boy hates school and wants to take his shoes off and go
fishing, and that the boy, incidentally, has red hair and
freckles. And if an American Indian fails to say, "Ugh,
ugh," the reporters who write about him feel he ought to
have said it and may put it in the story, anyway. Some-
times, unfortunately, we do the same thing in pictures, but
we are trying earnestly to break the habit.

Now, what does this expectancy error do to news of
Hollywood? To begin with, let me admit that most of the
things you read about Hollywood are true. There are in-
tellectual, spiritual and moral iniquities in the film com-
munity. There is divorce, adultery, plagiarism, perversion,
cowardice, arrogance, cruelty, atheism, irresponsibility,
communism, fascism, avarice and extravagance among mo-
tion-picture folk. But we are not unique in any of these sins
and that is the point I am trying to make. In between
the fall of Babylon and the founding of Hollywood, there
was no dearth of sin.

Nevertheless, sin in Hollywood has a tremendous edge
over sin anywhere else when it comes to newspaper space,
and public thinking in general And it is ludicrous to see

230 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

how far the press will sometimes go to associate sin with
Hollywood. If a girl who had a single job in 1927 as an
atmosphere player in a silent film becomes involved in any
crime of even the slightest sordidness, she is a "Hollywood
Actress," and, no matter how much drudgery it may
mean for photographic retouchers, she is "beautiful." The
trouble is that people don't have this "expectancy" of
sin in Detroit, and Seattle and Birmingham. They aren't
watching for it, and anyway it doesn't have glamour. So
they forget it and remember the sins of Hollywood.

But the stereotype involves more than sin. It involves
our personal and industrial pursuits, and it was pretty well
crystallized twenty-two years ago by the very amusing
play Once in a Lifetime. How was it created in the begin-
ning? It was partly superimposed, and partly generated
from within.

To begin with, motion pictures share the smudged repu-
tation that all the arts have inherited from the time when
"manly" men were either warriors, statesmen, hunters or
farmers, and decent women spun and wove and repro-
duced. And motion pictures also share the particular dis-
reputability bequeathed to show business by the puritanism
and rigor of the American frontier. And even within show
business, motion pictures started out as a bastard form. The
theatre folk actors, playwrights, stage directors had in
the beginning a real contempt for the new medium. It was
a cast-out among cast-outs. Financial reward, the induce-
ment which ultimately lured the theatre people to the
screen, was not available for a long time. Then, further,
Hollywood has shared the reputation of another demi-
monde, Southern California, with its orange trees and sun-
shine and religious cults a new place, which was a small

FINISHING THE PICTURE 231

community when the film industry moved here. As the
community and the industry grew, the show folk and the
vacationers and the seekers for a new life exchanged influ-
ences as well as reputations.

And as I said, we generated a goodly part of our own
reputation (along with Southern California's) from within.
The publicity department of the industry developed white
Rolls-Royces, spoke of half-dressed women, prepared gag
shots of people reading newspapers and eating lunch in
swimming pools. They were selling glamour, and they cre-
ated a folk tale in which empty-headed vulgar men and
men with thick accents sat in enormous, over-deco-
rated offices and squandered fortunes on their whims, while
forgotten writers, drawing great salaries, made adolescent
passes at blonde secretaries, and sometimes got bricked
up in their cubicles and lost forever during reconstruc-
tion projects. At night, of course, everyone went home to
houses full of bear rugs littered with unclad women.

As a producer one of the major figures in this stereo-
type I can report, with only a tiny twinge of regret, that
I never had any of these advantages. The stories made good
telling, I suppose, back on Broadway, but whatever factual
basis they may have had, two decades ago when the whole
country was in a more extravagant phase, is long gone.
And yet we are still guilty of perpetuating the legend from
within. I know that I have sometimes told Hollywood jokes
which have only encouraged the stereotype that I am de-
ploring.

Eighteen years ago, when I came to Hollywood as a
writer, there was a writer's costume, a sort of uniform:
gray-flannel trousers, dark-brown jacket, sport shirt and
a colored scarf, and thick, rubber-soled shoes. Sure, I wore

232 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

it myself. It was part of the "release" of coming out from
New York. Hollywood was a far place, a place for fun
and comfort and relaxation not for real creative effort.

Now that's changed. Writers wear suits and shirts and
ties, and they comb their hair, and their shoes are either
black or brown, not two-toned. But the change is more
fundamental than an altered costume. The basic change is
in the writer's attitude toward his work. Once he came out
here only to make money, so he could go back and write
a play or a great American novel. Now he knows that the
motion picture is a medium in itself from which he can de-
rive great satisfaction. His early frustrations arose from his
inability to control his work, from the sometimes ruthless
misuse of his work, from the multiple credit system. You
never see nowadays what you used to see, what used to be
a joke . . . original story by based on an idea by adap-
tation by screenplay by additional dialogue by com-
edy construction by up to fifteen names. Now, essen-
tially, you see the name of one writer or a team of writers.
Producers have become careful in their selections and writ-
ers are participating more fully in their projects, seeing
them through. The writer's status has improved further
with the emergence of the writer-director and the writer-
producer.

As for the stereotyped conception that we are wasteful,
fumbling, extravagant, it just is not true. The most irritat-
ing question I know is: "Why do you make so many bad
pictures?" It shows absolutely no understanding of any art
form. Every art has a greater percentage of failure than
success. That isn't unique to Hollywood. It's true of the
theatre, of novels, of magazine writing, of newspapers,
sculpture, painting, everything. It's inevitable. But when

FINISHING THE PICTURE 233

you consider the tremendous pressures put on us, the time
tables, the time-clocks that we work under, the demand for
product in quantity, I think we do extraordinarily well. Ill
compare our facts and figures, in terms of artistic or finan-
cial success or failure with the theatre, which, by compari-
son, is a free and uninhibited art. We do have successes;
you'll remember many you've enjoyed.

Once, on a train, a man asked me what business I was in.
Reluctantly, I told him, and he asked the inevitable ques-
tion: "How do you make so many bad pictures?" It turned
out he was a manufacturer of neckties. So I smiled and said,
"Take a look around this club car." He looked, and he
didn't ask any more about pictures.

One thing that must be remembered is that we are irrev-
ocably committed to our mistakes by the economics of our
business. When we have a disaster, everybody knows about
it. In automobile engineering there have been horrible
errors whole die blocks or assembly lines have had to be
remade. But those errors were hidden, not broadcast to
the public as hot news. Leo Rosten's economic study of
film making proved that our percentage of error is no
greater than that in any other industry.

There was a period, in the early days of talking pictures,
when stories were purchased with such desperate haste that
six out of ten properties bought were never made. The
average was 60% abandonment. I have convinced myself
that it is possible to operate on a 20% abandonment and,
during the last year and a half at our own plant, we have
operated on an even smaller margin* We have been careful.
We haven't worried about losing a story property to a
competitor, and we haven't bought a story unless there
was need for it in terms of immediate production plans.

234 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

There are two more things which the industry must
consider about the stereotype of Hollywood. Does it do us
any harm? And, if so, how can we combat it?

Aside from my personal distaste for being the subject of
an exaggerated and dated stereotype, and of having it di-
rected at my children and my community, I think it hurts
the motion-picture community economically. There are
those within the industry who disagree with me. They say
that the stereotype is glamour, that the reputation for sin
is salable at the box-office, that the facts about our indus-
trial operations should be hidden behind a veil of mystery,
and that the misconceptions about our extravagance and
waste should be encouraged lest people lose their belief
in Hollywood's magnificence. They say: "Thank God the
newspapers give a Hollywood scandal unjustified atten-
tion. If they didn't we'd be slipping."

This thinking, I say, is antiquated. It is all a part of say-
ing: "Don't release stills showing that a marble palace is
made of canvas and plaster. Don't let the public know what
a process shot is. Don't let them know that So-and-so is
married and has two children." That doesn't make sense,
and I can prove it. Every year I wrestle with film on some
forty or more pictures. I know the scripts, I've worked on
the casting, I've looked at the rushes and production tests,
I've spent rime on the sets. And yet, when I go to a pre-
view, despite all my information about the picture, I still
respond to it as a member of an audience. And so does
everybody else who makes pictures.

The stereotype handicaps the film industry in discharg-
ing its commitment to be all things to all men. We have
not yet been able to evolve, because of our economic
set-up, a specialized picture for a specialized, hence small,

FINISHING THE PICTURE 235

audience. In a sense this policy of making all pictures for
the universal audience may be a handicap it is certainly a
responsibility. A picture of major-studio quality cannot be
made, nowadays, for much less than $500,000. That pic-
ture may not break even until the public buys more than
$2,000,000 worth of tickets to see it. Obviously, it re-
quires a mass audience.

Now, whenever any group of people begins to develop
a rigid attitude toward Hollywood, a false conception
about what pictures contain and how they are made, those
people will stay away from the box-office. Some will be
morally offended by their image of Hollywood; others
will be intellectually offended. If a segment of the potential
audience becomes convinced that Hollywood makes noth-
ing but musicals, we will lose some of that segment. We'll
lose a segment which comes to believe that Hollywood
has not broadened its intellectual horizon in twenty years,
or that Hollywood makes nothing but message pictures, or
that Hollywood has ignored its social responsibilities, or
that Hollywood is peopled with degenerate men and scar-
let women.

As for the stereotype as a newspaper space-getter, I
think I can show that that kind of publicity doesn't mean
anything at the box-office. Because of a specific stereotype
which grew up around her, Miss Greta Garbo attracted
more newspaper attention than any other actress between
1925 and 1940. And yet Miss Garbo's films were never
great financial successes in the United States her largest
audience was abroad, and many of her pictures barely re-
couped their negative cost in the domestic market. After a
tremendous avalanche of publicity had attended Douglas
Corrigan's "wrong-way" flight to Ireland, RKO signed

236 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

him for a picture. The picture was a failure. Famous ath-
letes have never lived up to expectations at the box-office
when they appeared on the screen. In short, newspaper at-
tention which does not directly concern the work of an
actor in motion pictures is no help at the ticket window,
will even be harmful if it destroys the public belief in the
integrity of an actor's work. An actress who is seen on the
screen as a siren and a temptress cannot hurt herself by
scandalous behavior in public. But if the actress plays nuns
or saints, she can limit her effectiveness by gaining a flam-
boyant public reputation.

Now what can we do about the stereotype? Well, for
instance, in our advertising, we are learning not to subor-
dinate everything to cheesecake. We have stopped selling
pictures like Mrs. Miniver or The Best Years of Our Lives
on the basis of "What was Tillie doing last night?" or "She
was a woman all men wanted." And while we are still
guilty of some misuse of advertising, we are not unique
in that respect. The use of superlatives in advertising is in-
herent in the American scene; pick up any magazine and
you'll find the razor your face doesn't feel or the tooth-
paste that will make women pursue you. We're far from
perfect. But we're trying.

We can and should extend our present efforts in the di-
rection of public education about the industry, its product
and its people. We should have more personal appearances
by stars and other personalities who can speak articulately
about their industry.

Recently at our own studio we have started opposing
the stereotype from another angle. We are instituting a
series of lectures for our new players warning them against
cliche publicity and tawdry publicity, explaining to them

FINISHING THE PICTURE 237

that their careers do not depend on flashy automobiles and
night-club exploits. We are saying to them, "If you want
to get married, try to keep from dashing off somewhere in
the middle of the night to do it." We are going to ask them
to make their public conduct a little more dignified, a little
more reserved, a little more fitting to their position in the
public eye.

Finally, there is nothing we can do about marital tan-
gles and obstetrical irregularities, if they occur, except to
keep on disseminating genuine information about the great
majority of our people who live in dignity and decency,
and reducing the amount of nonsense in our press releases,
so that the public will view our scandals in their proper
frame of reference, the same frame of reference which
exists in Milwaukee and Paducah.

The most hopeful thing is that motion pictures, them-
selves, are improving. They are, I think, to a great extent a
reflection of American education and culture. We know,
for instance, that twenty years ago the average education
of our audience was a trifle below that of a grammar-
school graduate. Now it has reached the second year of
high school. It is reasonable to suppose that, in another
twenty years, it will have reached the high-school gradua-
tion level. Man's life and leisure are expanding, so he has
more time for education.

And as the intellectual level of our audience improves,
the demands on us increase which means that our pictures
must get better and better. We must abandon cheap tricks
of dramaturgy and conceive our pictures better. We are
already doing so. It is no accident that some films are discuss-
ing vital questions like anti-Semitism, injustice to Negroes,
sex education. We are motivated neither by altruistic de-

2}8 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

sire to inform the public nor by venal desire to exploit it.
We are simply trying to give .the public what it wants.
Motion pictures have always been at one with American
society, reflecting what is going on in America. We have
never been much ahead of or much behind our audience at
any time. We have given the audience what it wants, and
now, I think, it wants more thought-provoking pictures.

I don't say that Hollywood is a typical American com-
munity, because that would be dishonest. But our charac-
teristics, as a show business, are typically American. We
are what the people expect us to be and what they insist
on criticizing. As individuals we are probably more emo-
tional, expressive, extroverted, than the norm. That is the
nature of show business. But I know that the men around
me are stable, normal folk who work their brains out.

My friends do not keep strings of women and little black
books full of juicy telephone numbers, as visitors to Holly-
wood usually hope they do. My friends get up early, go to
bed at a respectable hour; and they can't get drunk any
more than a grocer can in Kansas City, because they have
to work hard the next day, too. They spend their vacations
with their families, and they are concerned about where
their youngsters go to school. They indulge in a nor-
mal amount of seduction and divorce, and marriage and
church-going, and gambling and charity-giving.

But despite the fact that whatever they do is exaggerated,
by virtue of their position as the entertainers of America,
they are a credit to the American social scene. I think they
have made an enormous contribution to their fellow men
in terms of entertainment and, more important, in terms
of elevation of the human spirit.

These are the people who made The Next Voice You

FINISHING THE PICTURE 239

Hear. This has been their story. By now, you know them.
And if you have begun to share some of my sincere respect
and deep affection for them, and for what they do, I am
very glad indeed we ran into each other all those pages ago
outside that preview at the Bay.

Crew, Credits and Cast of

The Next Voice You Hear

PRODUCER
DIRECTOR
SCREEN WRITER
STORY BASIS
MUSIC BY
ART DIRECTORS

PRODUCTION CREW
UNIT MANAGER
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
2ND ASSISTANT
SCRIPT SUPERVISOR

CASTING DIRECTOR, ASSOCIATE
ASSISTANT

FILM EDITOR

ASSISTANT CUTTER

CAMERA CREW

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY

OPERATOR

ASSISTANT

2ND ASSISTANT

STILL MAN

RECORDING SUPERVISOR
SOUND MIXER
SOUND STAGE MAN
SOUND 2ND MAN

SET DECORATIONS
ASSOCIATE
ASSISTANT

Dore Schary
William A. Wellman
Charles Schnee
George Sunnier Albee
David Raksin

Cedric Gibbons
and Eddie Irnazu

Ruby Rosenberg
Joel Freeman
Fletcher Clark
Bill Hole

Leonard Murphy
James Broderick

John Dunning
Greydon Gilmer

William Mellor
Neal Beckner
Matt Kluznick
KingBaggot,Jr.
Eddie Hubbell

Douglas Shearer
Conrad Kahn
Fred Faust
Bill Edmonson

Edwin B. Willis
Ralph S. Hurst
William Skamnes

FINISHING THE PICTURE

PROP MAN
ASSISTANT

WARDROBE MAN
WARDROBE LADY

ELECTRICAL CREW
GAFFER
BEST BOY
CREWMEN

241

GRIP DEPARTMENT
HEAD GRIP
2ND GRIP
CREWMEN

REAR-PROJ. PROCESS STAGE
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
PROCESS ASSISTANT
PROCESS ASSISTANT
GRIP

SECOND UNIT
DIRECTOR

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
SECOND CAMERAMAN
ASSISTANT CAMERAMAN
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
GAFFER
BEST BOY
SCRIPT SUPERVISOR
GRIP
GRIP

James Luttrell
Dick Hendrickson

Bob Streeter
Florance Hackett

Chester Philbrick
Howard Roberts
Eugene W. Stout
Frank Huszar
Zeb Bojarsky
William McConnell
J. Toney
Lee Cannon

Leo Monlon
Les Coleman
Don Larson
Art Spang

Hal Marzorati
Dan Powers
Carroll Shepphird
Joe Gabourie

John Waters
Harold Lipstein
Max Fabian (Process)
John Nickolaus
A. C Riley
Bert SpurUn
Bill Allen
George Lasher
William Orr
Harold Constable
Roy Strickland

242 CASE HISTORY OF A MOVIE

STANDBY PAINTER Frank Wesselhoff

LABORER Al Simpson

LOCATIONS Howard Horton

Charles Coleman

PUBLICITY UNIT MAN James W. Merrick

STAND-INS Jack Harris

Phoebe Campbell
Dorothy Whalen
Henry Stone
Billy Cartledge
Venita Murdock
Ike Isaacs
Ben Watson
Bill Scully
Dick Ames

STUNT DOUBLES Jack Semple

Harry Wollman

Together 'with the several hundred men and women
of the studio whose contributions to the picture, often
sufficiently direct to be mentioned in the book, were
made off the stages.

The Featured Cast
James Whitmore Nancy Davis

Gary Gray Lillian Bronson

Art Smith Tom d' Andrea

Jeff Corey Douglas Kennedy

George Chandler

Together with the many feature, bit, extra, and atmos-
phere flayers whose appearance and skill contributed
greatly to the interest and validity of the picture.

5

CD

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