The Film Daily (1930)

THE ■^Sl DAILV Sunday, February 9, 1930 Short Shots from New York Studios By HARRY N. BLAIR iContinued fiomParie 5) Brooklyn, to appear in a Vitaphone Variety entitled "Three Rounds oi Love," to be directed by Arthur Hurley. trvhig Kahal and Sammy Fain, Param,ount's talented song tvritinff team, don't allow a little thing like illness to interfere ivith their work. When Sammy developed grippe in the midst of composing "Good and Plenty," for "Young Man of Manhattan," Irving hied himself to the bed-side where together they finished the composition. Katherine Brush had the thrill of seeing her fictional characters come to life the other day when she visited the "Young Man of Manhattan" set at the Paramount studio. This popular young authoress expressed herself as well pleased with the selection of Norman Foster for the title role. Eddie Buzzell, the pint-sized comedian, who just completed a Vitajphone Variety at the Warner Brdh. studios in Flatbush, under Murray Roth's direction, is greatly elated over the swell notices given his first feature talkie, "Little Johnny Jones," which played the Strand theater last week. Slapstick Principals Chosen Louis Brock announces that he will feature Tony Martin and Nick Basil, Italian comedians, in "Barnum Was Wrong," the first slapstick comedy to be produced in color. Production will start ne.xt week at the Ideal studio, ClifTside, N. J., with Jilark Sandrich directing. il Leslie Austin in "Young Man" Leslie Austin, stage and screen actor, will make his talkie in Paramount's "Young Man of Manhattan," now being directed at the Long Island studios, by Monta Bell. He ibins a cast headed by Claudette Colbert, Charles Ruggles, Norman Foster and Ginger Rogers. "Heads Up" in Technicolor . The first feature-length Technicolor production to be made in the East will be "Heads Up." which Paran,iount will film at its Long Island sjudios within the next two months. I Another Specialist fl IVest Coast Bur. THE FILM DAILY Hollywood— Because of the number of blisters, bruises and sprains resulting from the fact that the platoon of soldiers used in "The Case of Sergeant Grischa" had to march five miles a day, RKO has added a podiatrist — otherwrise known as a foot specialist — to its studio hospital StafL.__. ,:srr-.i Optical Problems of Wide Film Processes Outlined by Rayton Difficuhies encountered in designing adequately optical systems to meet the problems of wide film motion pictures are outlined in the following article by W. B. Rayton, who in addition to being an associate editor of the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, is connected with the scientific bureau of the Bausch & Lomb Optical Co. The employment of film wider than the standard 33 mm. seems imminent. No one can say whether we will have to deal with one size or several, but, however that question may be settled, the ditficulties encountered in designing: adequate optical systems are of the same kind in all cases but differ in degree with the variations in width of film and size of projected image. It seems probable that they are of sufficient interest to this Society to justify a brief statement of them and of the degree to which we have been able to meet the requirements. It will probably not be out of place first to set forth the reasons which are impelling the industry to take a step involving such drastic changes in equipment while it is still struggling with conversion of equipment to permit sound pictures to be made and repro duced. While there may be other reasons. there are two, at least, discoverable by a 1)rief consideration of sound pictures. The first rests on the fact that in the sound-on film processes part of the area formerly avail able for the picture now has to be given up for the sound track. The second reason rests on the possibilities inherent in sound pictures which were lacking in the silent pictures of presenting entertainment more of the nature of spoken drama of the stage Although the second of these conditions leads to a demand for a larger picture area, the first results in an actual decrease in picture area. As soon as speech was added to the picture it was found that the picture area did not allow enough characters to be included in a scene if the projected images were to appear large enough to be commensurate with a sufficient volume of sound. The effect of a series of conversations between two or three characters appearing in a small, practically square frame in the remote distance is dis tinctly not entertaining after the novelty has worn off. Further, the producers are ambitious to attempt to record the stage settings as well as the music of opera and musical comedies. To meet the situation it is necessary to project a picture in which the figures remain of a sufficiently large size l)ut which includes more of them. This means, obviously, a wider included angular field of view and a larger projected picture. To accomplish this, two methods of attack occur at once. One method would consist in moving the camera farther from the set or in using lenses of shorter focal length there by reducing the size of the images of the individual components of the set and permitting more of them to be included. Now. if this picture is proiected through a pro iection lens of sufficient power to restore the figures to the customary size on the screen a much larger total picture size will result. It will be larger in height as well as in width. Since we are only infrequently in terested in any great amount of space aI>ove the heads of the human figures in the set we would be embarrassed with this superfluous space, in general. It would be possible, however, to reduce the frame height, let us .say. to the point wheVe its relation to the height of the human figures was restored to some thing like what we have been accustomed to. Mow this all sounds very good. Several more frames, possibly twice as many, could be recorded on a foot of film: film consumption would be decreased and film magazines re dnced in size or else hold a much longer record. This procedure, however, ij impractical, first because the resolving power of photo gr.nnblc emulsions of adequate speed is insufficient to permit a satisfactory screen imatjc to be obtained by such a process, (".raininess would be very pronounced and de tail would be lost. It would, furthermore. be impractical in the present state of de yclonment of the optical systems employed •n the sound-on-film processes since it would be impossible to get a satisfactory reprodtic•"Jt of sound because of the loss of high fre<)uencies.--FHrally, h'Ts not at all sure that such a picture could be projected with anything like a satisfactory degree of bright ness. A modification of this solution was demonstrated at the meeting of the Optical Society of America at its meeting in Washington in Nov., 1928, which is interesting enough to justify examination. You have probably all observed that if you hold a telescope of any kind before your eve in a reversed position all objects seen through it are apparently re duced in size and look more remote. If you hold a telescope before the lens of your camera you will Ije able to observe the same effect on the ground glass. If the telescope be held before the camera lens in its or dinary operative condition" the image on the ground glass will be lafger than the image formed by the camera objective alone. To be more specific, if we hold a 2X Galilean telescope in front of the camera lens with the objective lens of the telescope facing the camera the size of all the individual details in the image, on the ground glass will be just half as large as they are without the teles cope. If you try this experiment do not be surprised, however, if the total image fails to cover the who'e ground glass area ; the ordinary Galilean tclescon. optics ser\»e only to demonstrate the principle but will not give results of any value. Provided, however, the optical system was satisfactory we would have achieved a result identical with the result we might have obtained with a new camera objective of just half the focal length of the original. You will remember that this is one of the expedients mentioned a moment ago for increasing the angular field of view. The proposal under examination, however, is unique in that instead of lenses with snherical surfaces it employs lenses with cylindrical surfaces so that the added telescope, if we may still call it such, has magnifying power in one direction only, while in the direction at right angles it has no optical effect at all. If such a system be addeil to a camera lens it will have the effect of apparently altering the focal length of the latter in one diameter while having no effect on focal length in a second diameter perpendicular to the first. If the added system be located such that its active plane is horizontal we would }ye in effect taking a picture through a lens of, let us say, two inches in the vertical plane and one inch in the horizontal. The result would be that all vertical lines would be brought closer together and more space could be covered in the horizontal plane while the height of the figures would be normal for a 2 in. lens. The image on the film would be a very unusual looking image but projected through a projection lens with a similar added cylind rical system it will be restored to normal proportions and theoretically the projected picture would give no indication that it has been subjected to such unusual treatment. If an optical system of this type could be designed to work satisfactorily in respect to speed and image quality, a task bristling with difficulties, it would overcome the difficulty mentioned earlier of poor sound reproduction and it would proTiably be somewhat easier from the illumination standpoint. From the standpoint of image quality, however, even neglecting the effect of aberrations in the added system itself it is not obvious that we would obtain results of any better quality than we would secure by photographing with an ordinary photographic lens of correspondinglv short focus and projecting with correspond ingly higher magnification. We would, to be sure, have the great re duction in photography and the extraordinary magnification in projection in the horizontal plane only instead of in all directions but it does not seem likely that this would reduce in any appreci.nb'e degree the difficulties due to grain and limited resolving power of the film. The successful application of the nietho<ls previously outlined imposes problems on both the lens designer and on the emulsion maker. There is one possibility, however, which leaves the film manufacturer free from embarrassment in so far as his emulsions are concerned but which still depends for its sitccess (Continued on Page 10) Newspaper Opinions "Glorifying the American Girl" Paramount Paramount, New York AMERICAN—* * * turns out to be a very weak sister, which is saved from utter banality by the introduction of an Eddie Cantor skit in which the comedian makes fhe audience laugh so heartily as to forget everything else. There are the same old ballet shots, unremembered songs, and some technicolor th.at is not so good. DAILY NEWS—* * * the long-awaited spectacle which isn't really much of a spectacle at all. ♦ * * The colored sequences are lavish and lovely. They've injected any number of silent scenes into a talkie movie, and you know how dreadful that seems. And they switch quickly from colored episodes to black-and-white, and back again. Millard Webb has given us a sloppy piece of direction. EVENING JOURNAL—* * * a spotty mixture that resembles nothing so much as a -cries of Movietone shorts weakly strung together with an inept story that has in it bits of "The Broadway Melody" and other back-stage yarns. GRAPHIC — * * * a familiar and often feeble tale of the rise of Mary Eaton from small-time vaudevillian to a Ziegfeld star, garnishing its story weakness with gayly decorative sets of imposing grandeur and sprinkling feminine pulchritude over its final reels. HERALD TRIBUNE— * * * the result is hardly worth all the effort. At least the picture is entertaining in its revue scenes. WTien it gets to the story, though, the film is hardly triumphant. The cast, gathered from the local stage, is less than exciting. • * • MORNING TELEGRAPH—* * * Starting off with the handicap of an unattractive title the picture presents a trite and poorly written story, childishly directed and amateurishly acted. Obviously, the whole thing was thrown together carelessly to provide a framework for production numbers. POST — * * * there is nothing about "Glorifying" that has not been done in the talkies many times before. Its plot fairly reeks with familiarity. * • * TELEGRAM — * * * an outmoded and dismally tiresome film, with only one or possibly two short sketches that are worthy of any particular attention. * * * a long drawn out affair, that gasps pitifully for breath as it staggers along. The photography is bad; the color sequences are even worse; the direction is neither fresh nor imaginative; the acting on the part of all the players concerned is pretty amateurish, and the tnusic is from several seasons back. TIMES — The only really bright spots in this production are the episodes in which Eddie Cantor, Helen Morgan, Rudy Vallee and Mary Eaton officiate in "Ziegfeld Follies" numbers. Some of the Technicolor ■sequences are rather impressively staged, but the coloring is never especially striking. WORLD — There is nothing noticeably Ziegfeldian in the production with the exception that it is ample and that its music at times is catchy and agreeable. The grace and pictorial beauty of Mr. Ziegfeld's stake is nowhere upon it. And still, "Glorifying: the American Girl," unwieldy as it is, i* as acceptable as are most of the musical' comedy films wTiich to date have reachedBroadway. It is just a fair show, made now and again spirited by the introduction of one or the other of the Ziegfeld celebrities. I Manager Making Local Film Bradock, Pa. — Sam Byler of the Capitol is making a community comedy picture. Manaeing New Haven House New Haven, Conn. — Morris Rosenberg Jiow Is managing the Yictory here.