Came the dawn : memories of a film pioneer (1951)

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CHAPTER ii That short film settled my career from then on. I devoted myself entirely to production and stuck to it ever after until the silent pictures were drowned in a sea of sound and the Hepworth Company went down with them. Not that one was the cause of the other: the two things just happened together. But we must not hint at the end yet, for this is only the beginning — the turning point at which the company really began to find itself — began to think about making important and worth-while pictures. John Bunny, Florence Turner and Larry Trimble belonged to the Vitagraph Company of America — one of the oldest, if not the oldest, film company in the world. We had a tremendous lot of questions to ask one another as may be imagined. I asked John Bunny, among a great many other things, what they did about make-up. He said, 'Oh. Just fight it, fight and keep on fighting.' I gathered from this that he and I were very much of a mind about that as we turned out to be on many subjects. My practice was then and afterwards to discourage and indeed refuse all stage make-up of any kind except in heavy character parts. Special film make-up had not been invented then and when it began to appear I wouldn't have it used either. This was due to a curious belief I held very strongly then, though whether I should be able to do so now in the case of a 'dark' studio, with its multitude of arc-lights, I do not know. I held that facial expression, more important in the silent days than it became when sound was added to the pictures, was not a matter of the eyes at all, and in fact the actual eye, so far from being under the control of the actor, is entirely beyond his power of changing in any respect. I know it is a common belief that the eye can be made to show all sorts of different expressions but I hold that that is not so. Except in the matter of tears the actual eye-ball takes no part in delineating any of the emotions. It just doesn't change its shade or colour or anything. It is in the tiny 114