Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

December, 1 945 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE n Henry Barbier, M-G-M studio florist, purveys photogenic flowers and fruits. Comes the call for a particular type of grass, and the men go to work with a machine which goes down two or three inches into the sod and slices off a nice green strip with the ease and dispatch with which you’d slice a piece of bread. To supplement this real stuff, there are several thousand mats of artificial grass in assorted conditions and shades of green which, laid out 20 feet from the camera, could never be detected on the screen from the real thing. Now worth $100,000, the green department started about 25 years ago as a 50-x-50-foot patch, where Stage 18 now stands. Fabel’s late father was head greenman, with two assistants. Not until the studio made its first Tarzan picture, set entirely in jungle, did it build up a large stock of horticultural commodities. Many of these, like long-lived p alms and tree stumps, are still being used. From Stage 18, the green department grew to a larger area, now occupied by Stage 23. Later, and until a half-dozen years ago, it occupied the territory now taken over by the standing set of a modern New York street. During many of those years, artificial flowers and foliage were part of greenery. But as the studio expanded and made more films with bigger budgets, all those details in one set-up were too much for a single department head to handle. So now there’s a separate artificial flower section, headed by Henry Barbier, whose two assistants do nothing but make flowers, wreaths, bouquets, and corsages full-time. Perversely, when they want flowers to wear in their hair, they buy them in the fiveand-ten ! Their workshop looks like the hothouse of the world’s most gigantic florist. The only thing lacking is the fragrance. We shall undoubtedly have that, too, when the time comes, in the creative evolution of movies. Copyright 1945, Helen Colton