With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

Suppose a story of the Sahara Desert is to be filmed at Culver City, California, where several different big studios are located.

Costumes are designed or hired, and actors and actresses are made up and togged out to represent desert chieftains and wild desert beauties and languid harem maidens and uncouth tribesmen. Horses are fitted out with all the trappings of Arab steeds. Half a dozen rebellious camels are hired from one of the big menageries that makes a specialty of renting wild animals to film companies.

Then, sets are constructed to represent the interiors of buildings in Tunis or Algiers, or some of the little cities of the desert. Possibly a whole street is constructed—and it is only necessary to build the fronts of the houses, of course, propped up from behind by braces and scaffolding that do not show in the picture—to reproduce an alley of some town near the North African Coast.

Finally, as the scenes of the story or “continuity” are filmed, one after another, the company goes out “on location” to get the balance of the exterior scenes. Perhaps the sand dunes of Manhattan Beach, one of the small resorts near Los Angeles, not far from Culver City, are used to represent the hummocks of the Sahara Desert. Perhaps a part of the desolate bed of the San Gabriel River, where it leaves the mountains twenty miles east of Los Angeles, is used to show a supposed Sahara gulley. Or the company may travel to the Mohave Desert, or all the way into Arizona, or some desolate portion of Old Mexico near the border town of Tia Juana below San Diego, to get just a bit of the real “Sahara” that they want. Maybe a desert tent is set up beneath the palm-trees of a supposed oasis, that, by careful photographing, looks like the real thing and gives no hint of the Los Angeles suburban traffic officer at a busy crossing less than fifty yards away.

The result? Possibly a very good picture of the Sahara Desert, with Americans playing the parts of Mohammedan tribesmen and pieces of America representing Africa. But naturally there are many chances for mistakes. The costumes may be wrong. The actors may not look the parts, or act as the types they are supposed to represent really do. The dunes behind Manhattan Beach, or the “Wash,” of the San Gabriel, may not really look like the Sahara at all.

Recently a widely traveled oil man was telling me of an afternoon he spent at a trading town on the East African coast, a thousand miles or so north of the Cape.

“I was killing the day with an old trader,” he said. “We were to set out into the interior the next morning, and had nothing to do but amuse ourselves until we were ready to start. We saw the posters of a movie that was being shown, that told a story of the very town where we were. And say! When we went in, we certainly were amused, all right!

“It was an American film, made by one of the Hollywood companies. The heroine was washed ashore from the wreck, and regained consciousness just in time to see a tiger ready to spring at her from under the palm-trees at the edge of the beach. But the hero was Johnny-on-the-spot. He was tiger-hunting himself, and dropped the beast with a single shot. He was wearing riding-breeches, and puttees, and a pith helmet,—sort of a cross between a motion-picture director and a polo player.”

“What was the matter with it?” I asked, “Everything?”

“Pretty much. First place, the beach along those parts isn’t anything like what was shown in the picture. There aren’t any palm-trees within a thousand miles. Tigers don’t grow in that part of the world, either. Lions, yes. But tigers, no. You have to go clear to India to get tigers.