With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

He had plenty of time, to start with. But instead of securing a likely candidate and trying it out, he decided that the cat of a friend of his would do.

It wouldn’t. Friend wouldn’t let cat act. The property man only found that out the day we wanted to have the scenes taken. If he’d been experienced, he wouldn’t have let an “unimportant” detail wait so long.

But there was a big grocery store near the hotel where we were staying, where they had a wonderful big tiger Tommy—tame as anything. Property man, in a hurry, decided he would do nicely.

But he didn’t. Tommy was well-mannered enough, and friendly, in the store, among his friends and customers and customary surroundings; but after he had been shut up in a basket half the morning, and all jolted up in the automobile getting out to “location” besides, he was another Tom entirely.

He would push like an elephant to get his big striped head out of the basket, and once his head was out the rest of him would follow it; and once the whole of him was out he would scratch and claw until he got clear of all hands that tried to reason with him or delay him; and once he got clear he was on his way to somewhere else at about ninety miles an hour.

It would have taken a mighty fast shutter, with a telescope lens behind it, to have photographed Thomas that day. He wasn’t sitting for his portrait.

So the property man, desperate now, because he was holding up the whole company, tried again. This time he drew a white angora lady cat, with a kitten five inches long to keep her from brooding on living in a basket. She was contentment itself, and because he couldn’t waste another day we had to use her.

Result of two days’ cat-hunting by a new property man: a garage-mechanic hero with a beautiful mother-cat shedding long Persian fur over him.

The cat always looked in one direction. People who watched the picture afterward wondered why. We knew. She was looking at the kitten. To make her shift her lovely eye we had to move the kitten.

The director wanted a metal aeroplane with a propeller that would whirl in the wind for the radiator cap of the hero’s automobile. Before the property man found one he had to put two cities with a combined population of nearly half a million on their respective ears, and we nearly all of us had to turn in and help him do it. But in the end we got the little aeroplane, and the director was happy.