The first interior scenes to be taken, we will say, are those in a drawing-room set, that the carpenters completed first. They are, perhaps, the scenes that in the script are numbered 22, 23, 49, 107, 108, 109, 191, 224, and 225. In Scene 22 the hero comes into the drawing-room and finds that his father has just had a severe paralytic stroke. In Scene 21, perhaps, he said good-by to a companion on the front steps and then entered the house. Scene 21 was taken “On location” three months before Scene 22 is to be taken in the studio. But in the finished picture, the hero will walk through the front door and immediately come into the drawing-room.
It is the duty of the property man to see that he isn’t wearing a golf suit when he goes in the door on one side and riding-breeches when he comes out on the other side of the door.
Our property man was a friend of the owners, who had no previous experience to speak of. They wanted him to learn the business (or art, if you prefer) and insisted on his appointment.
That is no unusual thing in picture-making; it would amaze people to know how far, in the case of the great majority of all pictures that are made, the owners influence things.
If you have a good director, and assistant director, and photographer, and actors, what difference does a property man make? It would seem, would it not, that the various assistants would look out for all the details necessary, dividing the work up among them?
But they can’t. There was the cat, for instance.
We were taking some of the early scenes in a city of the Middle West (one of the great charms about movie-making is that you often travel to the places you want to photograph, instead of trying to “fake” them in the country around the studio) and the script called for a cat.
The hero, according to the story, would not desert his old cat when he left town, so he took her along in his automobile.
All correct as far as the written story was concerned—but now to get the genuine purring and mewing or scratching cat. The assistant director couldn’t do it, because he was busy sticking with the director and helping him in the scenes, keeping the numbers of the scenes, the “takes” (or different shots of the same scene) and so on. The assistant camera man also had to be on the set, holding the number-board, reloading cameras, and all the rest. The continuity writer was making some changes in the script. The owners were buying an automobile. The art director, and everybody else available except the property man, were out hunting for locations.
So the new property man must get the cat. And he had no experience.