Hollywood at Work

Behind the Scenes with the Movie Industry's Workers, Revealed in Conversations on the Job

YOU ASK HOW I like Hollywood. The Hollywood I've been seeing and hearing I like very much, but it's not the social nor the commercial Hollywood, but the working. I am very grateful to Mr. Wanger for giving me the chance to see a picture through from script to close. The picture is "Trade Winds," directed by Tay Garnett, with Fredric March, Joan Bennett, Ralph Bellamy, and Ann Sothern in the leads. As I write this, shooting has just stopped; the picture goes to the editors and dubbers. It will be released in about a month.

I have sat in on the struggles to make the script right; I have heard the production planned; I have inspected backgrounds and models and seen the sets built and dressed; I have been on the stages day after day and watched scenes shot. I have listened to everybody who would talk to me. Perhaps I can give you the flavor of the working Hollywood by having you listen too.

THE GAFFER: Kill the arcs. Bring up the baby. Hit the junior. Put a silk on the broad. (It sounds scandalous, but these are all lights.)

THE DIRECTOR: I was a gagman at Mack Sennett's, but I never could find his limit. So one day I said, "Fade in on a long trestle, two miles long; a train comes puffing wer it; dissolve into the diningcar; Ben Turpin at a table. Ben says, 'Fish.' The waiter shouts, 'Fish.' The cook shouts 'Fish,' pulls a line from under the sink, throws it out the window, hauls it in again immediately with a fish on it, throws the fish into a pan, fish appears on Ben's plate. Ben cuts it down the middle; inside he finds a bottle, uncorks the bottle, shakes out a note. The note reads, 'Dear Ben, I am leaving you a million dollars in my will. Your Uncle Jeffrey.' " And at that point Sennett says, "We'll shoot it."

PROPERTY MAN: There's picture business for you. See that bit player standing by the piano? Five years ago he was a star, $50,000 a picture. Now he's glad to get two lines to say, at $25 a day, and those days don't come very often.

THE GRIP: When I did the animation on King Kong, I had to pretend I was a gorilla, and figure out every tiniest movement a gorilla would make. I had to think like a gorilla. I made animal noises in my sleep and my wife left me.

THE DIRECTOR: The scene as we've shot it lacks authority. The police chief is too worried. He's just a pavement-pounder who's run into a problem too big for him and it's made him jittery. We want a guy who knows what's wrong, how to correct it, and is sure of the result. I don't think it's a writing problem; I think it's a casting problem. We could give the new chief the same lines, and because he's a different actor, colder, crisper, we'd have a different scene and a better one.

AN ACTRESS: I can't go to the dailies. They make me too unhappy. I don't enjoy seeing myself up there. I always know I could have done better.

WARDROBE MAN: Hitler will take Poland and Mussolini will gobble Spain. Stalin will jump in and ....

LUNCHCART MAN: What do you mean there's no difference between Communism and Fascism? What are you, anyway?

FOURTH ASST. CAMERAMAN: I'm a radical capitalist.

ASST. DIRECTOR: When I first come to Hollywood and get this job as property man, I have $1.25 to my name. My wife is staying in bed to keep from wanting to eat and I've got cardboard in my shoes to keep my feet off the ground. But this cameraman likes my work and is very nice to me so one day I tell him I'm agent for these bonds. He asks me quite a lot about them and then on Saturday night he invites me to his house to talk about them some more. There's another guy there, a fellow I'd never seen before. Between the two of them they take S80,000 of the bonds and I start the next week with my wife in pretties and $1500 in the bank.

CHIEF CAMERAMAN: Somesing iss wrong.

ASST. CAMERAMAN: I had my toughest assignment when I was a prop man on Peg 0' My Heart. The director said, "I want six lice, human lice, by 9 o'clock tomorrow morning." I knew nothing about lice, because this was before the war. So I went to the county jail and I told the sheriff. All the punks there were insulted, but finally a Russian, who could barely talk English, said he'd provide them. I promised to pay the fine, pay the lousy one $1.50 a day and expenses for a week to wet-nurse the lice, and afterwards give him a permanent job in the studio on the labor gang. The next day we lined up six lice on Bessie Barriscale's shoulder-strap, shot 'em, and the lousy Russian went to work. He's an assistant director now, and he'll tell you to this day that he got his start in pictures because he was lousy.

A WRITER: How much time would a 180 lb. man, falling from an airplane at 15,000 feet, have to open his parachute at 1000 feet? Come on, professor, you ought to know!

CUTTER: Look. We go from the long shot, boom to the angle, boom to the close shot, boom to the medium with the bubbles coming up. That'll kick them in the pants.

MAKE-UP MAN: The great English actor, Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree, came to Hollywood to make a picture. In those days we used the old Pathe camera, which looked like a big black box. Tree came on the set the first day, looked around, and the first thing he said was, "Get that box out of here."

SCENE: The character in whose room this scene is set must be literary. The walls are solid with books in imposing bindings. I note some titles: a many-volumed Self-Culture for Young People, volume XIV of Modern Eloquence, a huge set of Journeysthrough Bookland, and a thick tome, OddFellowship: Its History. On the table lies a little volume in a jewelled cover, evidently a priceless work of literature. I open it and find it's a dummy.

THE DIRECTOR: One of these directors was shooting a suicide fleet scene and had about twenty-five stunt men lined up at the rail of a ship to leap off. While he's looking through his finder he sees the fins of three sharks cut water. Immediately he yells to the men, "Jump! Jump! It's terrific."

ALMOST EVERYBODY IN HOLLYWOOD: That government suit against the companies can do the business a lot of good, if it's honest.

PRODUCTION MANAGER: So Miss Bennett goes down-town and picks out a negligee at a department store, for .$12.95. When I get the store's bill it reads, "Negligee, $12.95; Fitting, $55.00." There's no closed season to protect studios, see?

A WRITER, not employed by Mr. Wanger: There's nothing to teach about screen writing. I try to think of my work entirely as camera material, and I write it all in terms of camera angles. Do you suppose that means anything to a producer? Not a chance. He wants it all in words, words he can read. If I sold directly to a director I might get somewhere. My scripts would have meaning to him. But before a director sees it I have to get it by a producer, and invariably he takes it and gives it to an illiterate who knows nothing about pictures and can't talk English, never mind write it, and that guy takes my material and puts it into words of one syllable the producer may understand. Then perhaps the picture gets shot, but all my belief in it is gone, and probably my story is gone too. Now what is there to teach about a racket like that?

PUBLICITY MAN: A man died and went to Heaven. He had to give his occupation on his application blank and he wrote "motion pictures." When St. Peter read that he rushed up to him and said, "You're just the man we want. Come on in." And St. Peter took him into a huge hall, with crowds of angels standing around. He pointed to a person on a throne at the end of the hall and asked, "Tell me, who's that?" And the man said, "Why, that's God." And St. Peter said, "That's what we keep telling him, but he keeps saying he's Goldwyn."

ASST. DIRECTOR: Come on, Rudy, are you ready?

CHIEF CAMERAMAN: What is zis for an insult? Let us proceed.

THE DIRECTOR: Now in this scene, Freddie, you're suddenly phony again, but you don't like it. You've been phony all your life until you met this girl. She's jerked you into being a little honest, but now you're in a spot where the only way out you know is to go phony again. So you pull it on her. But it isn't any pleasure. It makes you uncomfortable. Now give.

ASST. DIRECTOR: Quiet, please. Bell, Frank. (A bell rings. The studio is still.) Let's make history. Roll 'em.

ASST. CAMERAMAN: Rolling. (The film in the camera is moving.)

MICROPHONE MAN: Quiet. Speed, (The sound is being recorded.)

DIRECTOR: Action.

The actors do their scene, everybody else scarcely breathing.

DIRECTOR: Cut it. Get a test,

A bell rings twice. We all breathe again Another scene is in the cans.

This is something like the working, and talking, Hollywood. These people are interesting and alive. When I get back to Hanover and start teaching the course in writing for pictures, this is the Hollywood I'll have to talk about. I am told that the morale of the workers on Mr. Wanger's pictures is higher than elsewhere, in Hollywood, and that making a picture is rarely as harmonious, even gay, as was "Trade Winds." But this experience has delighted me. I hope I can convey some of the profit I've had from it to my students.

"A PROFESSOR'S LIFE IS NOT A HAPPY ONE"Paraphrasing Gilbert & Sullivan, the sabbatical leave of absence activities of Prof. Benfield Pressey appear to have some compensations for his diligent application to research in the movie industry. Professor Pressey, head of the Department of English, is doing athorough job studying the making of motion pictures at the Hollywood studios of Walter Wanger '15. (Left) Miss Joan Bennett,star of "Trade Winds," interviewed on the set during the filming of the picture. (Right) Mr. Pressey and Alan Baxter of the cast of"Trade Winds" chat just before making a scene in the new Wanger production.

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH

[Professor Pressey has written this Hollywood Letter at the request of the editors. He will direct the Irving Thalberg Course in script writing for the department of English, upon returning to Hanover at the beginning of the second semester. The course was established last year by Producer Walter Wanger '15, in whose studios Mr. Pressey is getting first hand information on every step in making a movie.—ED.]