Talking Screen (Jan-Aug 1930)

Setting the Stage for Talkies like a press agent's dream after the eighth cocktail. With nice, shiny diplomas in both law and architecture, the ambitious young adventurer sold the great German impressario. Max Reinhardt, the idea that he could design gorgeous settings, and costume all the players. Then came Max R6e to America, some four years ago, to startle the motion picture world by costuming Greta Garbo's first American productions and inventing the famous "Garbo collar." Two years as fashion creator for First National preceded his present position as art supervisor for RKO. His office makes you think you are in the toy department of a store at Christmas time. The room is bristling with miniature houses, castles, gardens, churches, bastilles, and villages ; for Mr. Ree has every motion picture set worked out in detail on a tiny scale over at the studio carpenter shop. Some walls are made "wild," just as the full-sized set will be, so that they can be removed when necessary, for camera angles or special lighting. Building materials are specified — a room may be "soft", or of harder makeup, depending on the intensity of reverberation that is to be allowed in mike recording. No natural rebound must strike the sensitive ear of the mike; yet a door must sound like a door when it is closed — and this is often a matter of building materials. The value of these miniature models, which might seem like too much monkey; business to an observer, lies in the ability of the director to get a concrete vision of the set with which he will later work. Changes are often necessary ; and to move a house or a tree in miniature is but the work of a minute as contrasted with hours wasted if the set were already completely built in fullsize. DANNY HALL, who claims to be the "oldest" art director in Hollywood, employs the method he inaugurated twenty years ago when a set was hardly more than a chair and a backdrop. An artist at heart, he paints a charmingly colorful, detailed picture of the set as he visualizes it, a task of only an hour and a half! Polglase, of Paramount, works only with black-and-white sketches, except where a picture is to be filmed in technicolor; but occasionally he has miniatures made from his designs to lend extra clarity in a difficulty setting particularly hard to visualise. It's not the ordinary home set, or even period designs, that worry an art director. These are just so much routine. The real brain work was doubled when talkies popularized revues which called for sets of unprecedented originality. Ideas simply have to be plucked from the imagination like cards from a conjurer's sleeve on this type of set-work. Then, there's that new modernistic trend in furniture that gives rise to other complicated and gymnastic mental contortions. And, as if this weren't enough for a busy brain, there's "trick stuff ". An earthquake had to happen on a desert island set, erected on a sound stage, in Let's Go Natives. Earth shook; sand dunes sank into the earth and reappeared a dozen feet away; palm {Continued from page 33] trees walked. This set naturally .required highly ingenious mechanics, consisting of small elevator systems in the floor and props on rollers. And, worse -yet, it all had to look "natural"! Not all "exteriors", you see, are filmed out-of-doors. "William Darling, of Fox Films, built a most convincing Louisiana swamp on an ordinary sound stage for Cameo Kirby. A portion of the cement floor was boarded up to hold water, and trees, moss, and swamp grass completed the illusion of an exterior. An illusion that was simply perfect. YOU can't believe all you see on a set. Green sawdust makes beautiful grass. Snow is usually coarse salt. Once upon a time a bright boy suggested using white cornflakes for a snow storm — but a horse ate up the snow. Fog is liquid smoke, smoke pots, or even flour sifted slowly onto the .scene. Cobwebs are made from a rubber solution in a contraption that looks like a revolver. Lightning, which used to be made with noisy high amperage, now consists of two sunarcs in glass cabinets, controlled by an outside switch. "Water in a shower bath sounds like stones in a can, unless there are several layers of ordinary wire fly screening laid on the floor to break up the drops as they fall. Just now a big worry is seastuff, a great deal of which is shot on a stage tank. The machine which rocks the "boat" makes a noise that has little to do with water; but violent waves and shouting sailors can drown out the rocker very well if they have to. Huge buildings, or even sections of an elaborate set, are often only " glass shots" — paintings on glass plates placed before the camera in such a position that they pick up the part of a small set on which the action actually takes place. Often miniatures are used in lieu of ordinary sized sets, particularly in flood or fire sequences where they must be destroyed. Then, there are "transparencies", a sort of double-exposure system capable of showing a star casually strolling down Fifth Avenue or the Rue de la Paix when she has never strayed a hundred miles from Hollywood. These short-cuts are often invaluable in creating unusual and amazing effects. Technicolor has complicated the work of the art departments greatly. The costume designer and the art director now have to work hand-in-hand, so as to avoid a hodgepodge of colors. A subdued set permits gay costuming, and vice versa. Too much color is apt to be tiring. Until the process is perfected, only a limited number of shades are really usable — greens, flames, and reds and browns. The modern set designer must be a color-artist as well. Now that the sound and color bugbears are fairly well controlled, another even greater terror is looming on the horizon that will probably affect the set designer more than anyone else in the studios. It is the magnoscope. which broadens the screen without adding to its height. The effect is very much the same as cutting off an inch or two from the top of a small picture — the proportion is entirely changed, and a sense of height is destroyed. When the magnoscopic screen is generally adopted— and this step is not fardistant — height will have to be gained more through suggestion than actual design; and that's a man-sized job for the best of the art directors. Twenty years ago the same set was used for a ballroom or a hut. When the actors were not before the camera, they spent their time repapering the set. All the early young masculine stars were expert paper-hangers. Furniture was borrowed from somebody's mother, and there was no nonsense about it, either. Today, an average-sized art department contains twenty-five persons. In busy periods there are often twice as many. Every individual picture has its own art director, working under the art supervisor, and two or more draftsmen. From 200 to 600 carpenters are busy building these sets and tearing them down to give way to other sets. The art work on The King of Jazz ran around $150,000; All Quiet on the Western Front will top this by several thousands. The Love Parade and The Vagabond King are up in the big money, too, along with Song of the Flame and other big and extravagant revues. IT CERTAINLY is a long stride in the history of motion pictures — this setting of the stage for the talkies. Gone are the days when a couple of chairs and a table did for any number of scenes, and gone, too, are the days when you gayly borrowed the furniture from the lady living next door to the studio, and returned it when the scene had been shot. Like every other kind of job in the talkie studios, set-building is indeed a highly-specialised art. And an art that requires the excellent brains of a highly organized stafT. The next time you see one of those lavish revues it will give you an added kick if you stop to realise the time and labor and energy that have been put into the sets which are built to enhance the pleasure of your eye. This realistic tree set in a swamp was built in a studio for Cameo Kirby, with J. Harold Murray. It looks unbelievably true to nature. 77