With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

Sometimes, though, there were new and entirely different experiences, as the picture gradually progressed from stage to stage, and scene was added to scene in all the thousands of feet of film sent to the laboratories to be developed and printed.

For instance, for a time I went on ahead, acting as “location man” in advance of the company, as we went from locality to locality where our scenes were to be filmed.

In one little Montana town the only car I could get to take me around for a day was a “closed” Ford. It was “closed” by having the top and body of a sedan, but all the glass was broken out, including the windshield, and the floor-boards were gone besides, so that you propped your feet on whatever rods came handy, while the road rushed past beneath you, and occasionally tossed a pebble into your lap. The fenders were dilapidated, and the poor little old buggy looked like an utter wreck, but we covered nearly two hundred miles in it before dark, over prairie roads that were hardly more than wheel-ruts through the grass. Twice we ferried across the Yellowstone, and once over the Missouri, before that valiant little wreck of a bus got back to the bleak prairie town, amid all the glory of a marvelous western sunset.

Well, I have been running along this line for a reason.

When an actor comes on the screen, in the early scenes of a photoplay, we look at him without much interest. But if we see him chop wood, or come through a fight, or learn what a time he had selling papers when he was a youngster, we unconsciously begin to get more interested in him. We like him better. Because we know him better. It is the same in real life. Old friends are the best friends; we know them better.

If I were going to school with some new arrival who was sure to be something of a leader, and who was going to have a lot to do with me, and influence me, and whom I might influence in a measure in return, you better believe that the sooner I became really acquainted with him, and liked him, and really knew his weaknesses and disliked them—why, the better it would be for both of us.

That is the way it is with this great new arrival—the motion-picture industry. It is a sort of big newcomer at the school, and we are going to see a lot of it, and be influenced a lot by it, and possibly influence it a bit ourselves, sooner or later.

It is worth while to get better acquainted with it as soon as possible. That is why I’ve taken you along on this all-forenoon ramble, as it were, through some of the paths of picture-making. And having gone so far, when next you watch a photoplay, you can think of how many people, doing so many different things, had to take part in the making of that picture, and how many problems they had; and how perhaps they had to stand around, day after day, waiting for the sun to come from behind a cloud at just the right time. And you can notice the clothes the actors wear, and the other properties, and wonder how much of a job the property man had keeping them all straight, and how good he was on his job. And if the film is an unusually good one, and everybody seems to have pulled together particularly well, you can praise it all the more; and if it’s poor, you can analyze it, and perhaps decide where the trouble, or part of it, lies.

Then, taken all in all, you’ll know motion pictures a little better, and be more interested in them, and like them better, and find they’re a little more useful to you, while you’re a little closer to the point where you’ll be useful to them.