The Photo-Play Journal (May-Dec 1917)

PAGE 26. THE PHOTO-PLAY JOURNAL FOR JULY, 1917 Illlllillllll Hill III 111 A Reel Battle is Perilously Similar to a Real One By FRED SCHAEFER IpREAT dramatic film spectacles have a habit of bursting upon the public eye GM suddenly. Emerging from VJ behind the impenetrable glamor of preparation with a joyous bound, they cry, "Here am I !" This is right. It is psychologically correct. Why fag out the public with raw details of manufacture while the thing is in the works? Why not stimulate interest with the coy reluctance of assured achievement, with the mystery and reserve of inevitable realization? Let stray, therefore, the titillant rumor now and then through the year of toil at production, but cover up the big stuff against the day of optical feasting. That is the way big film spectacles are conserved. Of course, and to be sure, some of these big screen enterprises become locally familiar months before the world is invited to the box office. To a certain location in Italy "Cabiria" had gone stale long before it reached the laboratory part of its evolution, from half the population working on both sides of its lath and plaster splendor. At Hollywood seven acres of "Intolerance" became weather-beaten ere all the rest of the U. S. A. saw it in the film unveiled to music. So also did "Womanhood, the Glory of the Nation," have its period of make-ready with some neighbors to be cognizant of it in advance of the world. Nevertheless "Womanhood" enjoyed comparative privacy. With a kind of daring it was produced within the confines of a city of 5,000,000 people, its big scenes and all. That helped. A city is the best place for concealing anything. So America was invaded, great battles fought, and the foe driven from these shores, with very few outsiders witnessing the affair, although there were 5,000,000 possible spectators. It had been hidden away too well. "Womanhood, the Glory of the Nation," is two things. It is an epic of American womanhood, with a tribute to her nobility and fortitude ; and it is a dramatic document for national defense. The womanhood, or "story" part of it, of course, could be handled at the studio, and so it was, with the added use of real interiors as, for instance, suites in the Woolworth building. But the tremendous war scenes which form a vivid background for the plot had to be done in a large, loose out-ofdoors, without any window panes to make the artillery nervous— say several square miles of very remote out-of-doors. Commodore J. Stuart Blackton, who wrote this story with the collaboration of Dr. Cyrus Townsend Brady as a sequel to his former success, "The Battle Cry of Peace," at first believed he would have to produce the war incidents at the military training camp at Plattsburg, N. Y. However, Director W. P. S. Earle, his assistant producer at Vitagraph, discovered Staten Island. Staten Island is in New York City, but it is remote. It serves as well for remoteness as Labrador, and the fare isn't anything like the fare to Plattsburg. The writer was one of the inside spectators of the inconspicuous filming of "Womanhood" last summer on Staten Island, and witnessed what after all is the most fascinating aspect of super-caliber motion picture production. He had been given a friendly tip. Therefore, depositing his nickel in the ferry house at the Battery in New York, he floated upper-deckishly and lazily past Governor's Island, past the Statue of Liberty, and then past the jumble of charred piles that had been Black Tom Island before its impulsive store of munitions exploded. After half an hour he was debarking in another ferry house at St. George, the port of entry of the region described as Borough of Richmond, otherwise Staten Island. Boarding a wheezy little train selected at random from a flock of such he was jerked several miles into the unknown interior and deserted at a frame station called Grasmere, surrounded mostly with expanse. Staten Island just riots in expanse. There was, however, no need to inquire the location of Vitagraph's camp. The rattle of small arms proclaimed it over to the left. Attracted by the orgy of blank cartridges and some dull booms of heavier discharges, He the eiiect of the " Explosion Man's " participation in a reel battle which was almost real that portion of Staten Island which doesn't commute to lower Manhattan every morning, was found to be fringing a wide battlefield serried with trenches and hand-picked defensive positions. Mine was a greater privilege than to fringe the battlefield. I had a pass that let me stroll through the carnage right to the headquarters tent. Here Commodore Blackton was discovered in khaki and a sun-burned forehead, engaged in the manufacture of spectacular effects for "Womanhood, the Glory of the Nation." He had not left the battlefield for four days, and was even now putting the artistic touch to the final repulse of the feverish Ruritanian foe at the hands of the ardent Americans. Everybody who was anybody, Vitagraphically speaking, was on hand, each suffering from mosquitoes and sunburn, and bustling about to promote the conflict. Commodore Blackton, on horseback to get about faster, kept his grown son, J. Stuart Blackton, Jr., and other mounted aides busy dashing hither, and sometimes thither, carrying orders. Director Earle, in a seersucker coat, was armed with a megaphone through which he implored into distant black specks across No Man's land. Profound camera men in scattered dispositions geared and squinted their machines. Details of militiamen signalled frantically with flags, "transwagging" spoken messages. A. Victor Smith, studio manager, with all the vital cares of the commissary and supply on his shoulders, went around silently getting things done. A heavy-set, wary man mothered a cache of powder and fuses — Herman Rottjer, Vitagraph explosion expert. Flocks of assistant directors were actively rendering assistance. Pickets held back the palpitant, picnicking populace. Your humble servant got in everybody's way. And he was awed under the towering great guns reared here and there by studio artificers, those most ingenious of unsung craftsmen. I had come at a moment when the crisis of the four days' battling was about to be staged. All the American trenches were manned to the full behind their barbedwire entanglements. Over on the other side of a valley, ideal for a scrap, was a healthy horde of Ruritanians who were to charge these entanglements with excessive effrontery and to hew through the line, let the bullets zip where they may. All the firecracker stuff that had been heard from afar was in localized scenes for close-ups or short camera