On the other hand, in contrast to these hurriedly made, inaccurate pictures, made to make money for ignorant people by entertaining still more ignorant people, are the really worth while historical films and others made with painstaking care. Some of the great American directors maintain entire departments for research work, that check up on the accuracy of each detail before it goes into production, costumes are verified, past or present, details of architecture are reproduced from actual photographs, and even incidents of history and the appearance of historic individuals are treated with scrupulous accuracy.
Valuable impressions of life in ancient Babylon could be gathered from Griffith’s great picture “Intolerance.” While not necessarily accurate in every detail, the wonderful Douglas Fairbanks films “Robin Hood” and “The Three Musketeers” instruct as well as entertain. In a magnificent series of historic spectacle films such as “Peter The Great,” “Passion,” and “Deception,” the Germans have set a high-water mark of film production that combines dramatic entertainment with semi-historical setting.
It seems a pity after watching one of the really well-made historical photoplays, to have to see a picture of the American Revolution so carelessly made, in spite of its cost of nearly $200,000, that you feel sorry for the poor British redcoats at the battle of Concord, when the American minute men, outnumbering them about ten to one, fire on them at close range from behind every stone wall and tree or hummock big enough to conceal a rabbit. Why, according to that particular director’s conception of the British retreat from Lexington, the patriots might just as well have stepped out from behind their protecting tree-trunks and put the entire English army out of its misery by clubbing it to death in three minutes.
Leaving dramatic photoplays, then, let us turn to the other kind of movie that shows what actually happens.
The news reels are the simplest form of this kind of movie. They correspond to the headlines in the daily newspapers, or newspaper illustrations. Indeed, a good many newspaper illustrations, nowadays, are merely enlargements made from single exposures, or “clippings,” from the news reels. You may yourself have noticed pictures in the rotogravure sections of Sunday newspapers that show the same scenes you have already seen in motion in the news reels during the week.
To get the news reel material camera men are stationed, like newspaper correspondents, at various places all over the globe. Or, when some important event is to occur at some far-away place, they are sent out from the headquarters of the company, just as special correspondents or reporters would be sent out by a big city newspaper, or newspaper syndicate. Sometimes a camera man and reporter work together; usually, however, each works separately, for newspapers and movies are still a long way apart. If a new president is elected in China, a news-reel camera man—Fox, or Pathé, or International, or some other, or maybe a whole group of them—will be on hand to photograph the ceremonies. If a new eruption is reported at Mount Etna, some donkey is liable to get sore feet packing a heavy motion-picture camera and tripod up the mountain while the ground is still hot, so that a news-reel camera man—possibly risking his life to do it—may get views of the crater, still belching fire and smoke and hot ashes and lava, for you to see on the screen.
The news camera men, like city news reporters, have to work pretty hard, not infrequently face many dangers, and get no very great pay. The tremendous salaries and movie profits that you sometimes hear about usually go to the studio companies, and not to these traveling employees.
Recently I talked with a “free lance” camera man, who had just completed a full circuit of the earth—England, Continental Europe, Turkey, and Asia Minor, through the Suez Canal and down into India, then Australia, New Zealand, Samoan Islands, and back to New York by way of San Francisco. He had paid his way largely with contributions to news reels, sold at a dollar or a dollar and a half a foot. The last part of the way home he had worked his passage on a steamer. He had borrowed enough money from a friend in San Francisco to get him back to New York. He had about ten thousand feet—ten reels—of “travel” pictures, for which he hoped to find a purchaser and make his fortune. But he owed the laboratory that had developed his film for him a bill of some three hundred dollars that he couldn’t pay, and was offering to sell the results of his whole year’s work for fifteen hundred dollars. And at that he couldn’t find a purchaser.
News reels and travel pictures, and beautiful “scenics” too, are only the forerunners of much more ambitious efforts to come, that before many more years have passed will be bringing the whole world before us through the camera’s eye. Did you happen to see the marvelous record of sinking ships made by a German camera man on one of the U-boats during the ruthless submarine campaign of the Great War? Or the equally remarkable series taken of the marine victims of the German cruiser Emden? They show what the camera can do, when the movie subject is a sufficiently striking one.
More than two years ago a camera man named Flaherty secured the backing of a fur-exporting firm to make a trip with his camera to the Far North. After laborious months of Arctic travel he returned to the Canadian city whence he had started with some thousands of feet of splendid negative. While it was being examined—so the story goes—a dropped cigarette ash set it on fire. Celluloid burns almost like gunpowder. The entire negative was destroyed in a few moments.