American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1952)

PRECISION BUILT COMBINATION 16mm AND 35mm SOUND READER FEATURES: Simple threading . . . polished stabil¬ izer drum with needle bearings, with a surface which cannot damage film . . . film rollers ma¬ chined to conform with SMPTE standards, and equipped with oilless bearings . . . precision ground shafts . . . dimension 6x6x7 '/2 AMPLIFIER: 117 volt 60 cycle AC . . . power output 4 watts . . . heavy duty Alnico V speaker . . . safety fused . . . prefocused socket . . . pilot light ... 6 ft. heavy duty line cord. NET PRICE $185.00 F.O.B., FACTORY, NEW YORK PRECISION LABORATORIES 1947 BROADWAY ♦ NEW YORK 23, N. Y. A perfect dissolve every time with this automatic dissolve attachment. Full Price Only $48.00 JOSEPH YOLO 5968 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, Calif. SPARKLING COLOR FOR YOUR PRINTS Expert timing by color crafts¬ men plus the careful attention accorded your film in our fa¬ mous “personalized service" will give you unsurpassed prints whose brilliance makes them alive on the screen. Write for Information Dept. C-ll TELEFILM, INC. 6 0 3'9 Hollywood Boulevard Hollywood 28, California 10 • American Cinematographer cess printer selling for $25,000.00 was previously taxed $6,250.00, while an automatic film processing machine sell¬ ing for $15,000.00 was taxed $11,250.00. Now all types of professional developers, densitometers, sensitometers, printers and attachments, perforators, slitters, and the like are removed from the luxury class and are not taxable. A strange commentary on the levies which bore down upon both sellers and users of photographic apparatus alike, is that federal agencies also had to pay these taxes. Nothing could seem more ridiculous than the Army, Navy and Air Force paying taxes to their own government. Stale supported groups such as schools, colleges, and univer¬ sities were exempt, hut private and pub¬ licly supported institutions, which could least likely afTord it. were forced to pay. It is hoped that our Industry Asso¬ ciations will never again be caught off guard when new tax legislation upon our business is proposed. The same As¬ sociations have performed one of their most important functions in securing re¬ lief of a tax burden which has cost (he combined photographic and motion pic¬ ture industries untold millions in unfair levies since 1940. Those of us engaged in the production of motion pictures or photography for a living may now enioy the fruit of our labors without hindrance. Purchases of capital equipment which have long been postponed should now be placed in earnest. Manufacturers of photographic equipment who as yet are not entirely tied up with defense work will welcome such orders and give them preference. Dealers like ourselves have already scaled down prices, especially on apparatus that has been traded in. The Office of Price Stabilization savs that no increase will he permitted to make up for the omission of taxes, which means the consumer, the studios and laboratories really get a break. END SCRIPT PROBLEMS IN FILM MAKING (Continued from Page 21) cripple your budget either. The only trouble is that Robinson is under contract to 20th Century Fox and when you investigate his availability, you learn that Twentieth won’t be able to loan him out for at least 6 months because of their own production sched¬ ule. And that’s that. So you wind up after a couple of weeks with free-lance Freddie Fubbel and that’s not a bad compromise. Fred¬ die is young, eager, ingenious, and aff¬ able in a granite sort of way. He has read your script and told his agent that he'd love to do it — subject, of course, to a few little changes in thematic ma • January, 1952 terial, construction, and dialogue that he'd like to suggest. He comes to your office and you have it out with him. You listen to what he says about the story, and some of it makes sense — some of it doesn’t. Some of it derives from the fact that a new and intelligent mind is now evaluating the material in the light of his own subjective approach and there’s bound to be discrepancies between any two or three — subjective approaches. But whatever the basis of discussion is, the fact remains that a new member has been added to the producer-writer team, and out of the synthesis there must emerge still another script; this lime, you hope, it is the shooting script, including in as accurate detail as pos¬ sible the director’s visualization of the finished film, scene for scene, shot for shot. This effort, however, has been concen¬ trated within the walls of your own of¬ fice. Meanwhile, fifty or sixty of these vellow-covered scripts have been circu¬ lated to the various production and serv¬ ice departments of the studio. The Art Department, the Construction Depart¬ ment, the Wardrobe Department, the Camera Department, the Legal Depart¬ ment, the Censor’s Office, and so on. They have studied it, timed it, estimated it, and budgeted it, and sooner or later you find yourself in the offices of the production manager of the studio, feel¬ ing somewhat like a subpoenaed guest before a Senate sub-committee in Wash¬ ington. You learn, among other things, that while the estimate for Cast, Bits, and Extras has come in low by $10,000, you’re over almost $40,000 on sets. You learn that by the time your troupe will arrive at a location in the High Sierras where you're going to shoot the water¬ fall sequence, there won’t be any water because it’s been an unusually dry sea¬ son in California, so you will either have to go farther north up to the Cascades or else maybe build a waterfall right here on the back lot. The studio pro¬ duction manager suggests hopefully that perhaps you can write the waterfall se¬ quence entirely out of the script, and the director screams like a wounded panther at the very idea. But when you think about it, it strikes you that maybe the studio manager has a point after all, and you make a mental note to consider it carefully when you get hack to the office. The Music Department has one or two suggestions, too. How would it be if you substituted a sentimental etude on an off-scene piano for the serenade under the balcony? The mood would be sus¬ tained just as effectively and the for¬ ward progression of the action wouldn’t be interrupted. You file that one away, too, to think about later.