American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1941)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

Controlled Gradation and Uniformity T»ADt l*»* P a t li e L a b o r a t o r i e s I n e COMPLETE 35MM AND I6MM LABORATORY FACILITIES. EB oil v wood Bound I Brook. \. •!. New York school and began a nation-wide advertising campaign for young artists. The production costs on our Symphonies shot skyward until some of the little pictures approached the ridiculous figure of $100,000. But the quality was there, and by 1935 even the Three Little Pigs looked dated and a bit shabby in comparison with the newer Symphonies. Our staff at this time numbered around three hundred. A greater degree of specialization was setting in. The plant was becoming more like a Ford factory, but our moving parts were more complex than cogs — human beings, each with his own temperament and values who must be weighed and fitted into his proper place. I think I was learning a great deal about handling men; or perhaps the men were learning how to handle me. But let me tell you this — young artists are just as reasonable and easy to handle as anybody else. Our temperament goes into our job. We had our technic well in hand. We had learned how to use our tools and how to make our characters act convincingly. We had learned a lot about staging and camera angles. We knew something about timing and tempo. But a good story idea, in our business, is an imponderable thing. It seems to be largely made up of luck and inspiration. It must be exceedingly simple to be told in seven or eight hundred feet. It must, above all, have that elusive quality called charm. It must be unsophisticated, uni versal in its appeal and a lot of other things you can't nail down in words but can only feel intuitively. The Three Little Pigs, The Flying Mouse, and The Grasshopper and The Ants, were examples of good stories. I used to feel at times that there wasn't another good story idea left in the world which could be told in eight hundred feet. The leyigth limitation of the Symphony became more and more galling. We were batting story ideas around for months and sometimes years trying to get the certain twist, the lacking element, or whatever the idea needed to make it a good story. Our files were filled with abandoned stories on which we had spent thousands. It was inevitable that we should go into featui'elength pictures if only for the unlimited new story material this field held for us. I thought we could make Snow White for around $250,000. At least that's what I told Roy. The figure didn't make sense because we were spending about that much on every three Symphonies or 2500 feet of picture. Roy was very brave and manly until the costs passed a million. He wasn't used to figures of over a hundred thousand at that time. The extra cipher threw him. When costs passed the one and one-half million mark, Roy didn't even bat an eye. He couldn't; he was paralyzed. And I didn't feel very full-blooded, either. We considered changing the name of the picture from Snoiv White to Frankenstein. I believe that the final figure, including prints, exploitation, etc., was arouni two million. We sort of half-way explained this to everybody by charging a million of it off to research and development. You know, building toward the future. And this was true, although we hadn't exactly planned it to be that way Webster sums up the spirit of the S White enterprise in his definition of adventure at the beginning of this article — "risk, jeopardy; encountering of hazardous enterprise; a daring feat; a bold undertaking in which the issue hangs on unforeseen events, t tc." As a matter of fact, we were practically forced into the feature field. We not only had to have its new story material, but also we had to have feature profits to justify our continuing expansion, and we sensed that we had gone about as far as we could in the shortsubject field without getting ourselves in a rut. We needed this new adventure, this "kick in the pants," to jar loose some new enthusiasm and inspiration. Research and preliminary work in a small way had begun on Snoic White as early as 1934. I picked that story because it was well known and I knew we could do something with sev< n "screwy" dwarfs. Beyond that, we didn't know exactly where we were going, but we were on our way. The picture was n leased at the turn of the year, 1937-3S. At the end of its first year, Snow White <i»d tin Seven Dwarfs was reported to be the biggest money-maker of all times. It at least settled the question as 140 March, 1941 American Cinematographer