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scenery and furniture so as to be true to the period of the play, 1836, or thereabout. It was a delightful play and I think we made a good film of it. Alma gave a wonderful impersonation of the humble actress-girl and her strange entry into a preVictorian household, with all its prejudices and inhibitions, and she made the most of the dramatic situations which it involved.
The strangeness of her entry into that household was much accentuated, made more dramatic perhaps but certainly even less auspicious by the fact that she and her escort were caught in a tremendous downpour of rain just as they were arriving. The 'rain,' of course, was produced artificially as it is in modern studios but, needless to say, we did not originate the mistake which nearly all modern studios perpetuate by setting the rain shower in brilliant sunshine. Perhaps I should not write 'needless to say' for that sounds rather rude, but it is a fact that with all our crudities we did not make obvious mistakes of that sort. Rain does sometimes come in sunshine but only very rarely. Thunder does sometimes sound at the same time as its flash, but only when the flash is within a few yards of you. Perhaps these are details which do not matter, but to fastidious people they are annoying and it is much better to be correct when you are attempting to create an illusion of reality. (That's why I don't like a full band accompanying a heroine when she wanders out alone into the Siberian Steppes or the wastes of Sahara.)
The people who insist upon brilliant sunshine in spite of pouring rain have this much excuse for their defiance of the verities, that it is exceedingly difficult to make the artificial rain get itself photographed unless there is specular light to show it up. We had the same difficulty in Trelawney. The rain soaked the hero and heroine quite thoroughly and their consequent discomfort was sufficiently obvious, but the rain itself was invisible on the screen. So we resorted to a very drastic remedy. We laid the negative out upon a long bench, gelatine uppermost, and stroked it slantwise with two grades of sandpaper, fine and coarse. It was a truly horrible thing to have to do but it was extraordinarily successful. We had tried simpler things first, though even when milk was added to the water it wouldn't photograph like rain. But we had been in the film business from the beginning and we remembered that the very early films always showed 'rain' after a little while of use and we knew that that was due to surface scratches. There was the clue we had been looking for.
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