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our hosts, who gave us a couple of pounds for our selected charity and champagne and cakes for ourselves. This part-singing enterprise was continued for several years and, indeed, led afterwards to much more ambitious efforts in the shape of light operas with orchestra and dresses and scenery and all the rest of it, but that is another story which I may touch upon later.
To get back to the film work (which I submit was none the worse for these happy interludes) I find that Fitzhamon had been with us for more than two years at this time. He was very busy and his curious Puck-like mind kept on evolving strange ideas which were often quite successful. In one letter he writes under date December 3rd, to an actor: Tf there is a heavy fall of snow this month I shall be glad to continue that sleigh picture commenced two seasons ago.' I could not in a hundred words give so good an impression of the times we worked in then.
One of our first attempts at publicity was the regular production of 'stills' — ordinary still photographs of selected events which, in the course of the film, occur in movement. We were a little late in adopting this comparatively easy way of publicising our activities, because I have always been rather against the use of stills. To say that one of these frozen pictures stands for and represents an intricate play of movement seems to me like taking a single chord from a musical score and saying that that represents a symphony.
Although I never ostensibly occupied the position of producer until a much later date, feeling that such special work should be entrusted to those who had been brought up to it as stagemanagers or the like, I did take a very considerable part in supervising all that was going on. To this, I suppose, must be attributed the fact that all the films that came from the house of Hepworth had a certain likeness or style by which they were recognisable, in spite of the vastly different character of their subjects. The subjects, indeed, varied very largely — comics, dramas, news, actualities, comedies and stories of all kinds from books and plays.
In Rover Drives a Car (though I don't think that was really the name of the film), a dog steals the kidnapper's car and actually drives the baby home! That car was a wide open one with no such thing as hood or windscreen, but it had a fairly deep apron in front under which I was just able to conceal myself and put up an unobtrusive hand to hold the lower edge of the steering wheel.
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