With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

Douglas Fairbanks as D’Artagnan in “The Three Musketeers.”

Here are presented all three basic characteristics of a good story—fascinating characters engaged in stirring action, at an interesting time and place. Note the careful details of costuming, and decorations of the old furniture.

Courtesy United Artists Corporation.

Another Scene from “The Three Musketeers.”

See how even the flagstones of this narrow alley of Old France have been reproduced with faithful care.

The property man of a famous director once told me: “I’ve got the greatest collection of junk in the whole business. Just odds and ends. No one thing in the whole outfit worth anything in itself, but the King (he was referring to the director) would be crazy if he sold it for ten thousand dollars—yes, or twenty-five thousand, either. I tell you, sometimes junk is the most important thing in a picture.”

After a set has been built, it is usually “dressed” by hiring first the furniture from one of the concerns that have grown up for just this purpose—renting furniture, old or new, to motion-picture companies that want to use it for a few weeks. If, in addition to what has been rented, the producing company is able to supply bits of “junk” from its own property room and make the set look more natural, so much the better.

The story is told of one enterprising concern in Los Angeles that started in collecting beer-bottles just after prohibition went into effect. Since the bottles were no longer returnable, they were able to buy them here and there for almost nothing, until they had on hand a tremendous supply. The word went around that such and such a concern was in the market for bottles, and every boy in Los Angeles gathered up what he could find and took them around while the market was still good. People thought they were crazy, and had a good laugh at the movie industry that didn’t know any more than to buy up hundreds and hundreds of old beer-bottles that nobody would ever be able to use again.

Then one of the producing companies wanted a batch of bottles for some bar-room scene and found that they didn’t happen to have any on the lot. They went to the big property concern that they usually traded with, only to find that they, too, didn’t happen to have any beer-bottles. So they went to the concern that had been buying them all up at junk prices.