Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

10 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE Volume Xll, No. 3 BEHIND THE SCREEN CREDITS Only God can make a tree, but at MGM Studios He gets wonderful assistance from Walter Fabel and his crew of 38 men who have been known to “plant and grow” a giant eucalyptus or a Sequoia redwood overnight. Fabel and his “greenmen” are experts in the art of “naturizing” movie sets so they look as if Mother Nature herself had been on the job. Sometimes these men have to go Nature one better. Give them an order for a set requiring gaunt winter oaks, adrip with plaster icicles, and they can produce it before you can say Jack F'rost, on one of the year’s hottest days, as they did for Anna Karenina, set in snowbound Russia. Or ask them during the California rainy season for an arid desert, abloom with wild shrub and cacti, as required for Billn the Kid, and they’d have it before you can remember that the plural of cactus is cacti. From their stockpile of 1,000 different kinds of plants, shrubs, vines, branches, tree stumps, limbs, and grass, plus ten acres of growing things that they tend near the studio, they dress the sets, inside and out, of the 40 to .50 pictures made by MGM every year. This may and does include anjdhing from ivying Mrs. Miniver’s house in England to growing rice in terraces on Wang’s farm in The Good Earth. One of greenery’s biggest jobs in recent years was to dress the sets for The Yearling, recreating the lush, tropical, thickly vegetated terrain of the Florida Everglades. Part of the picture was shot on location there, and BY HELEN COLTON the camera crew sent back pictures to Fabel, whose men reproduced almost all of the vegetation for studio scenes. For the ground around young Jody’s house, they had to grow corn (in three different stages, to denote the passage of time) , tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and cow peas. Seeds were planted and nurtured in 40,000 individual jars and cans, which were hidden behind low walls and in sod when the picture was shot. Not all of these are used at one time; some are replacements for plants close to the camera, which become dry and sere after several days of “acting.” For the greenmen, many of whom used to be gardeners or farmers, tending Jody’s crops was a pleasant change from treeplanting, and they gave them as much care and devotion as a tenement resident might give to a single rose bud in a windowbox. Fabel’s recipe for How To Make A Tree goes : Take one telephone pole, and fasten it to a square, wooden stand so it can be moved around and “planted” at will. Call in the plaster department and tell them what kind of tree it is to be. They will then plaster around the pole, making ridges to look like bark, making it long and thin, or short and stumpy, according to your specifications. Pick out branches, and nail them on in realistic positions. If it’s a winter scene, your job in done. If it’s a spring or summer scene, find out from research what this tree looks like in bloom. Will it have leaves? Buds? Berries? Are they pink, blue, white, lavender, green, peach, red, yellow? Are they round, oval, curled, or flat? Wire on the proper artificial leaves or buds. Is the picture in Technicolor? If so, colors should be deeper than the real hues. Natural colors would fade to paleness under the Technicolor camera. Spray the whole with a thin varnish mixture to gloss it up. Not all of Metro’s trees hide hearts of telephone poles. Many of them, especially for close-ups like the Central Park scene in The Clock, are the real thing bought from green vendors in California or from privatelyowned acreage. The studio also has its own little forest of several hundred oak, pine, cypress, hemlock, pepper, joshua, and maple trees on a back lot. This “forest” serves several purposes. It provides extra trees when green vendor supplies are low occasionally because of fires. It is also a standing set for forest scenes. And it blocks out the ugly oil wells not far from the studio. At least two men on the green staff never objected to tending the family lawn when they were kids. That’s all they do, six days a week, in a big square where they grow oblong patches of five different kinds of grass. Why different kinds? As Fabel explains, “The grass in a poor neighborhood looks different from the grass, say, on the well-kept lawn of the rich Lord family in Philadelphia Story. The swanky Lord stuff is different from the grass on a golf course, which gets walked on more often.”