“Movie” Mysteries Are Here Explained.
Rumbling bass notes from the unbridled, unleashed piano. Thunderous roars from the big bass drum. Frequent crashes of brassy cymbals. You instinctively clap your hands to your ears and breathlessly await the bursting of the awful tornado that is scurrying over your head.
Then comes a pause in the deafening and ominous roar—the house is so still you can hear the clicking of the projecting machine as the film is reeled off.
Yes; we are in the midst of a fearsome forest, and the heroine is just about to merge from the inky blackness with all her troubles—there she is, now!
What was that? A flash of lightning! The drummer redoubles his sonorous roll, ending with a wild, spine-stiffening thump. Some storm. The heroine’s hair is blown so violently you fear it may be torn out by the very roots.[Pg 62]
She falls to the moss-grown forest floor. Livid flash and another thunderous roll. Then the deluge. The heavens open, and while the fanfare is loudest and the lightning is lividest, our fair lady is soaked to the skin with real water and falls to earth, beaten down by the very force of the torrent from on high.
Great scene, that!
Come with us now and see how the game is played. Ah, the movie studio!
Here’s a patch of nice green grass on the studio floor, and back of it a few shrubs and some sizable trees. Up on a scaffold high enough to be out of the camera’s ken are a dozen men, each armed with a huge watering pot.
The heroine stands on the side lines, waiting for the storm to begin. Storm in broad noon of a sunny day? Sure thing. Just watch.
An excited-looking individual holding a bunch of manuscript stands beside the heroine—yes, you’ve guessed it, he’s the movie director.
She gets behind the trees, and the man at the camera crank starts turning. She pushes her way through the tangled wildwood and stubs her toe, looking unutterable anguish the while.
“Down stage!” yells the excited director.
She staggers on as directed, the camera man cranking nonchalantly with one hand while he takes puffs at a cigarette with the other. The poor girl tries to rise, and wabbles feebly.
“Fall in front of the camera!” bawls the director.
She falls at the proper focal distance.
“Stretch out your arms—look wild!” yells the boss of the works.
“Let her go!” this time to the men with the watering cans.
And poor heroine, struggling and staggering, is drenched to the skin with the downpour, not from the heavens above, but quite as wet.
But, we ask, where is the lightning for this wild outburst of the aforesaid Nature.
“Oh, that’s easy!” laughs the director. “We put that in afterward with the scratch of a pin.”
“But how are you going to make it look like night?”
“Easier still—we’ll tint the film blue. Got to have sunlight to take any kind of pictures, anyway.”
So, when you see this thrill, remember that the lightning is a pin scratch, and the night effect is blue aniline dye and not by the gloom of night. As for Jupiter Pluvius, the men with the cans of water can wet down the place with equal skill.
Have you ever witnessed an exciting scene about a big building—a home or a factory—and then, in the next reel, watched it go up in smoke and flame? Yes? Some expense? Not so very much, for you haven’t seen the real building burn down at all, but only a little model of it after the scene has been acted out in front of the real building.
“The best fire effects are made in the studios, anyway,” the movie expert will tell you.
It was in a studio that the eruption of Mount Etna was manufactured. The promoters had tried taking real moving pictures of the volcano in eruption, but they were not nearly as good as the studio-made variety. These had the verisimilitude of real life, with fleeing thousands, men, women, children, and animals, pouring down its red-hot[Pg 63] sides. The films of the fleeing people were merely super-imposed on the film of the fake volcano, studio made.
You have seen your favorite heroine jump unhesitatingly off a tall cliff? Or swim an ice-choked river? You never knew she could swim. Nor does she. Another movie trick is what you have seen. Movie stars seldom do such things. Professionals, dressed exactly as they are, and made up to resemble them, do this part of the stunt for the real actors. Jumping from a burning building is another movie feat which is only a trick. The real people get only as far as the windows. Dummies do the jumping and the falling.
So! But how do they make inanimate objects move about as if they were endowed with life? How does a catsup bottle jump up from the table and climb down to the floor on the rungs of a chair? Or how can grandpa’s clock walk up the stairs, turning around solemnly the while to look you straight in the eye and give you warning of the flight of the hours?
Perhaps you have seen horses running full tilt at you and never seemed to catch up. So simple! Right in front of the horses is a high-powered automobile, in which the movie camera is set up. The horses follow the car, and the camera man grinds out his film, always keeping a few feet ahead of his charging subjects.