Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1939)

veMsv&ay LOOKS AT YOUR LEGS! Juarez — The Life History of a Movie RINSE OFF UNSIGHTLY HAIR This Quick, Easy Way! Well-groomed legs are hair-free legs . . . dainty, smooth and feminine! Keep your legs and arms always lovely. Remove ugly hair as millions of women do — the easy neet way. Neet is the famous cream that you spread on unwanted hair . . . then simply rinse it off with water. That's all you do. Neet gently, quickly removes hair — and leaves your skin soft, smooth as satin. Avoid Bristly Razor Stubble There are no sharp hair stubs to snag your stockings, and no danger of cuts with neet. The new knee-length skirts I make legs more imneet leaves your p0rtant than ever. legs like velvet „,. , , . \\ ith stockings or without . . . vour legs look lovelier when they are free from hair. Get neet today! At drug and department stores. Generous trial size at all ten-cent stores. NEET Just Rinse Off Unsightly Hair laboratory, where it is developed, printed and inspected. It is sent to me the next afternoon. Now Dieterle, together with the cameraman, sound mixer and the rest of the technical staff, comes into the projection room and looks at the 'rushes,' or previous day's work. Dieterle and I pick out the best 'takes' of each scene. "No one else sees the rushes that night. The next morning, Major Levinsen, the head of the sound department, checks the rushes for sound. In the afternoon, Hal Wallis, executive associate in charge of production, looks at the rushes to see that the picture is progressing to his satisfaction. If he has any comments to make, he dictates a letter to the director. "Now I dash back to the cutting room and run the rushes once more to get the feeling of the sequence and start to assemble the scenes. But I never cut a sequence until all the scenes in it are complete." While he was speaking to us, Warren Low put a strip of film under a machine called a moviola, which is really a miniature projection machine. It magnifies the picture and its loud-speaker enables you to hear the sound track. And when our editor ran the film backwards, the actors sounded like animals making unintelligible noises. "I'm running the film backwards so that I can go back to a certain scene and not cut it in the middle of a sentence." WE asked Mr. Low something which has always mystified us— how he cut sound. "It's all done by numbers," he said, smiling. "When a scene is photographed, a slate is photographed, showing its number before it begins. At the same time, a spring is released which makes a sound and marks the start for picture and sound. When I cut a scene, I remove the slate, but by that time the film has been identically numbered on both picture and track and so I know they will synchronize. When I run the film through the moviola, I see it and hear it just as you do on the screen. "Let me show you how we cut a sequence in 'Juarez.' This is the sequence where Bette Davis as the Empress Carlotta first begins to lose her mind. We start with a long shot as she enters the council chambers of Louis Napoleon III, dictator of France (Claude Rains) . She moves around the table to condemn Napoleon for the betrayal of her husband. We hold on a two-shot of her and Napoleon. In a long shot we watch him get up from the table and start to go out of the room as she runs after him, then falls unconscious on the floor. We cut to a close-up of Napoleon to show his fright, then a medium shot of one of his ministers bringing her a glass of water. In a two-shot we see Napoleon trying to make her drink it. In a closeup we see Carlotta ooening her eyes, then we cut to a close-up of Napoleon and, by using trick lighting, show that she believes him to be the devil. Now we go back to a close-up of her as she says, 'He is trying to poison me.' Then we pan, moving the camera horizontally, as she jumps up, goes to the group of ministers standing around the table watching her, then rushes out of the door into the darkness." A picture must be completely cut before it is scored, because the composer (Continued jrom page 68) must know the exact length of each scene for which he will write the music. In the music building, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the composer of "Juarez," paced up and down the room talking excitedly about the film. "If a picture is good. I'll have the music for it in five minutes. If it's bad, I work for days and days and still can't get it. 'Juarez' is a pleasure to score. It has quite a bit of background music, especially in the battle and love scenes. When it comes to political scenes, we don't have music. "I started the real scoring of 'Juarez' after I saw the picture three times and from then on I lived with it. I sat down at my piano in the projection room and wrote the music as I saw each scene on the screen before me. "I had holes punched in the scenes where I wanted music." AFTER some persuasion, Mr. Korngold agreed to play some of the themes he had composed for 'Juarez' on the piano. "This is the part where Bette Davis goes insane," he said. As he played the eerie music he spoke Bette Davis' lines softly. Then, as a contrast, he played the tender love music for Carlotta and Maximilian (Brian Aherne). "The music for this picture is very simple," the composer explained. "I've used the Mexican, Austrian and Napoleonic national anthems because of the historical background of 'Juarez.' Also La Paloma, which was the favorite Mexican song of the real Carlotta and Maximilian. As a matter of fact, it was used symbolically as a bond between the two lovers. "When I wanted to get authentic Mexican music for the 'Juarez' part of the story, we hired four Mexican musicians. They played a polka of 1870 written three years after Maximilian was executed in Mexico. It sounded exactly like Johann Strauss. So did everything else the Mexicans played, and some of it even sounded like Chopin. You see, Maximilian brought with him the Viennese waltzes when he came from his native land to Mexico. And the Mexican composers were evidently so much impressed that they all tried to imitate Johann Strauss. So I thought if Strauss and Chopin were Mexican, I'd make up my own Mexican music. "As a matter of fact, the music of Vienna was a form of dope. Everyone was poisoned by it, even Maximilian. My music makes him a little weak, because he was a weak character. But now you take Juarez (played by Paul Muni), there was a man with a relentless will. The music I composed for him doesn't make him great, and he was a great statesman. It makes him lovable. Muni rarely has music in his scenes — his first scene is played in complete silence." As we said good-by to Erich Korngold, he told us: "I'm so glad I'm not in a factory. Here I can believe that I'm an artist and that means so much to me." A MONTH later, after Korngold had completed the score, two musicians arranged it for orchestra and he went over every bar of it with them. They were rehearsing part of the score, which is always recorded in sections. Korngold wanted a higher tone from the cymbals. "Am I closer, now, Professor?" the cymbalist called out. Everyone calls Mr. Korngold, Professor. He wasn't satisfied with the trumpets. "More trills, trumpets. Like this. Ra-ta-ta-ta-tum," he sang out to them from the podium where he sat, his score in front of him. "All right. Let's rehearse with the picture," he said. The room was darkened except for a single spotlight over Korngold's score. On the screen suspended over the musicians' heads, we saw a series of battle scenes in quick succession — horses rearing, cannons exploding, a Mexican town toppling. At a given cue from Korngold, the orchestra started to play the exciting battle music. "How was that, Mr. Forrest?" he called to an unseen person. The unseen person's voice came through a loud-speaker, "It was all right to me." It wasn't a spook. It was Dave Forrest, the special music mixer, speaking from the monitor glass booth built high in the wall of the recording room, where he controls the tone of the instruments coming to him through six microphones on the stage. Now, the conductor put on a pair of headphones to hear the dialogue of the next scene. We saw Paul Muni's lips move, but we heard no sound. The picture is projected without sound so as not to interfere with the playing of the musicians. Suddenly Korngold signaled for them to stop. He explained to us that he had determined exactly where he wanted music as a background and where he wanted no music. That day, the orchestra worked fourteen hours. It would be another two weeks before they would be finished recording the score. Ordinarily, the music takes only three or four days to record, but in a big production like "Juarez," it takes much longer. nS soon as the reel of the battle scenes was scored, it was taken up to the "dubbing" or "re-recording" room where all additional sound effects would be added. The following afternoon, we were ushered into the dubbing room, where we saw our friends Warren Low and Erich Korngold, who are always present at the re-recording. In the dim light we could see a man at a huge console turning a number of little knobs. Yesterday's battle scenes were being projected on a screen and now we heard the music recorded yesterday and all the sounds of battle as well. To the right of the screen, numbers were changing constantly, giving the exact number of feet of film. The man at the console watched these numbers and turned his little knobs. But we did not understand these mysterious goings on until Major Levinson, head of the sound department, started to explain. "The man sitting at the console is Gerald Alexander, the effects mixer. Each of the dials he turns controls a separate sound track," Major Levinson whispered. "The mixer is using nine separate tracks for the battle scenes: the horses, the battle shots, the explosions, men fighting, swords clashing, a drum beating, cannons roaring and two separate tracks for the music, because the battle music blends into softer music for the Paul Muni scene. Some of these sounds were recorded while 'Juarez' was being shot. Others were taken from the sound library." 80 PHOTOPLAY