If you can’t work with other fellows without bucking and kicking,—don’t ever try motion-picture work.
The other trouble was with the owners. There were too many bosses on the job, which always makes a mess.
That quaint, humorous philosopher, “Josh Billings,” once said, “It ain’t ignorance that makes so much trouble; it’s so many people knowing too many things that ain’t so.”
With movies, that’s an ever-present danger.
Mostly, we’re all of us so sure of things, that we saw or heard or thought or remember, that we just know we’re right, about this or that, and can’t be wrong. If we know a little bit about surveying, we feel we can tell surveyors how to survey, and so on. And the less we know about a thing (as long as we do know something about it) and the more indefinite that thing and the knowledge about it are, the more we think we know about it.
Take stories: when you read one, you know whether you like it or not; but could you tell how it would be apt to strike other people? It’s easy to think you can do that—and most motion-picture producers and financiers are sure they can. But as a matter of fact, an editor, trained for years in the selection of stories, could probably do a lot better.
In motion pictures, the man who puts up the money for a production has to be pretty wise to realize how much less he probably knows about motion pictures than the men he hires to make the pictures for him.
As yet, few owners or producers of motion pictures know enough to keep their hands off all the things that they ought to leave to their employees.
Well, to get back to this particular movie.
We got another director, and then decided to give him an assistant after all. And we got another camera man—and then gave him an assistant. We got a cast, and started off to the city where most of the work was to be done.