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Shot to HADES
By H. B. K. Willis
A
RCHIMEDES, that nonchalant if scientific old gent who did a Lady Godiva, clad solely in his beard and a bath-brush, long before Godiva did, was the progenitor of motion-picture location men.
"Eureka! I've found it!" the Third Readers say he chortled as he galloped down the Appian, or some other, Way, leaving his tub behind him. Personally I shall always believe he meant the soap, though more learned writers blame him for the discovery of specific gravity, the present-day curse of undergraduates, home-brewers, bootleggers and battery doctors.
The Quest for New Locations
location men in screenland are a lot like dear old Arch. They chortle and they gallop but as yet they have never found it — "it" meaning the new locations they are paid to locate.
If they said "Eureka" the producers would probably think it was the name of a California city, hamlet or town if not a Turkish cigarette. So they don't say it, as ' they know naught but old locations are tried and true — locations long since shot to Hades in more than a decade of canned scenery.
Once upon a time there was a location hunter who found a new location, a setting for a cinema scene. He dashed back to the studio with high hopes and a
Drawings by Kli^
swelling chest. There he told the director, whose scenic eyes he was, of his find. The director, being young and reactionary, and therefore different, wrung his hand and congratulated him.
Overdoing the Old Locations
TThey used the location. But when the film was shipped to the New York brain division the shots made on it were deleted, the fable has it, because the Gotham office ogres believed their inclusion
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was too radical a departure. Location men of >y other companies, howW ever, found the same spot the next day and have been using it ever since. There you have the reason in a nutshell why you are ever, glimpsing cinema settings that are as familiar to film addicts as the hungry mouths of the V quarter gas meters are to the cliff-dwellers of Little Old New York.
The producers hate to be different. Sure-fire photography on one location makes them ever after homesick for the place. Though Southern California is as full of varied and virginal settings as an ulcerated tooth is of pain, because one company used a certain location effectively every other company hastens to take a shot at it in order to show the previous shooters they missed something. No wonder they are all shot to Hades.
oreigners, knowing us only through pictures, must believe America is full of glittering, white mansions, guarded by dys