Business screen magazine (1946)

to and from any medium 8mm Super 8 16mm • Quality • Fasf Service Magno Sound 723 Seventh Avenue 18 West 45th Street \l501 Broadway New York 212-CI7-2630 "The Three-Ten from Texas" History-PR-Information piPELINE BUILDING, conservation and -* a lesson in little-known history of the Southwest are the ingredients successfully combined in the sharp new film, The ThreeTen from Texas. This film is a refreshing approach to a subject that can all-too-easily be boring. More like an exciting chapter from "Death Valley Days" than a pipeline film. The Three-Ten from Texas offers some little known history of the Southwest while following the construction trail of a massive pipeline being installed through beautiful, sometimes foreboding terrain by El Paso Natural Gas Co. Masterfully narrated by the craggy voice of Victor Jory and interspersed with Remington-like paintings by Reynold Brown, the film changes neatly from Brown's scenes of the Old West to the present world of hardy men fighting choking dust and the desert to install a pipeline across parts of four southwestern states. Producer Jack Williamson, of Jack Williamson Motion Picture Productions, understaled. "We had some difficulties." "The pipeline was well underway," said Williamson, "before the film got a go-ahead, so without waiting for the niceties of a script, we had to plunge headlong into this 700-mile-long construction project before they (construction crews) got it into the ground and covered up. Consequently, we shot 14,000 feet of film to get our ISVz minutes, retracing the route later to tie in our historical yarns." Williamson said, "The initial concept of the film was sold with a storyboard presentation, Reynold Brown's sketches put on slides, aided by a I/4" mag voice track with head-and-tail music and one or two sound effects. "In our initial consideration of the script, we recognized immediately that our problem would not be finding enough trail stories along the route, but a matter of selection. We all agreed that we didn't want Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp and Geronimo; we wantted the people nobody had ever heard of — "nobodies' like harmonica-playing Dewey, who rides into the prologue and then out again. The only song he knew was 'Where's My Sister Annie?'; it got written into the script that way — and there wasn't any such song. So we wrote it. Sammy Kahn can relax." Producer Williamson has cleverly captured the challenge, the drama and the exhilaration of pipeline building, while telling how it is done without lengthy monologues on the mechanical technicalities. Perhaps most important, the viewer leaves knowing a little more about the history of the area, feeling that the colorful natural beauty of the area has been preserved and aware that some companies (El Paso Natural Gas in this case) are providing important modern conveniences without polluting or impairing the natural environment. Producer Jack Williamson (right) directs photography for Cameraman Don Flocker and Assistant Cory Williamson. Bending a natural gas pipe is tiicky business — too much and it won't work — too litt e and it won't lay right. Through the hills, valleys and desert, "The Three-Ten from Texas," follows a rolling, twisting route. 30