I say “we.” That is correct. The owners insisted on “sitting in” on everything, so that each decision was a compromise, instead of being the best judgment of the one they had hired to make that picture for them.
When we came to taking the first scenes we made a discovery.
Our hero was a sissy.
He looked like a regular fellow—we had every reason to suppose he was at least as much of a regular fellow as most actors can be. But he threw a baseball the way a girl does.
He couldn’t even throw a custard pie. Luckily we didn’t want him to. But we did want him to look and act like a man’s man, and mostly it was mighty hard for him.
He had fifteen or twenty different suits, but no sign of a tennis-racket, or baseball glove, or golf-stick.
He couldn’t drive an automobile. But he was supposed to be a wonderful actor—just the man to play a hero!
Then, along came the property man.
You will remember that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link. A motion picture, that is made by the combined efforts of a whole group of people, all pulling together, is much the same way. If any one of the group, on whom some particular duty depends, is ignorant, or inexperienced, or lazy, or pig-headed, the defects of his work will mar the finished film.
If the actors can’t act well, the picture will be laughed at; if the camera man is poor, the photography will be poor, and so on.