Film and TV Technician (1957)

166 FILM & TV TECHNICIAN December 1957 'Take Our Rice Pudding' Little do the members of the great viewing public realise the blood, toil, tears and sweat which have gone into the production of the packshot they briefly glanced at, while gulping down their tea and sandwiches before the play they are waiting to see is due on the screen. The luscious packs of chocolates, biscuits, cakes, cigarettes, etc., which click on in casual perfection, in no way betray the days of drama that have gone before in order to get them that way. Take our rice pudding for instance. Our studio had been commissioned to do a series of films advertising a certain brand of this nourishing food. Following the cartoon action was to appear a sizzling pyrex dish of the most tempting rice pudding man has ever seen before or since. Our director's wife kindly brewed uj) the pudding in her oven, and the director, with his own hands, bore the result to the studio next morning for shooting. Once under the lights, though, the thing seemed to pale, as does the complexion of the healthiest actress when under the unflattering glare of the arc lamps. A little make-up was obviously needed. They dusted the surface tenderly with a little Shell lubricating oil and left it during tea-break to ... a little lubricating oil brown under a powerful bulb. Even the best cooks are apt to mistime their confections and when the model cameraman hurried back to his work he found his charge suffering from acute sunburn. There was nothing for it but to make another pudd. CADMUS i continued) is made more urgent by the Government's desire to double production to some sixty films a year. One must admire the boldness of their producers in not taking welltried subjects from novels, from the theatre or from other entertainment media, but in making a major proportion of pictures from original screen stories — Hcrr JungAlsen estimated about 90r; were specially written for filming. Kurt Jung-Alsen talked of the successful surmounting of many, but not all, of the problems that faced the film business In the German Democratic Republic after the war, which appeared to me to be epitomised in the startling economic achievement of now be coming self-supporting. There used to be a Government subsidy for producers, but now box-office takings from home-produced and foreign pictures pay for the thirty features East Germany makes annually. With their own films as a basis they exchange them on a film-for-film arrangement with other countries, so building up a rich variety of international screen entertainment for the eighteen million inhabitants of his half of Germany. With a population three tunes that size this gives us hope that we should be able to put our own industry on a healthily sound basis, but before then we shall need a Declaration of Independence — from America, ami a few other of our bonds will have to be broken ! By this time the director's wife was showing a tendency to display her emancipation rights, when instead of a reply of ' yes. thank you ' to her query ' Had a good day at the studio, dear? ' she heard: 'Just make another rice pudding this evening, would you ? ' So the stills photographer's mother took over the job. Still it didn't look quite as a rice pudding should to the aesthetic gaze of the director. ' Rip the skin off ', he demanded, ' it doesn't look anything like a rice pudding skin.' ' But it is a rice pudding skin ', said a voice daringly. The owner was quelled by a terrible glance. ' Rip the skin off and take it over to the snack bar for re-browning.' With the sigh of a frustrated artist, the stills photographer did as he was bidden. The snack bar was clever at dishing out steak and two veg. at cut price, but when it came to re-browning rice puddings — — . The charred remains were mournfully deposited in the dustbin, and the quest for the director's ideal began all over again. Tension ran high. By the time the eighth creation, looking more or less like a rice pudding in a pyrex dish, was ready for shooting, nobody was speaking to anybody else much. When, during >Hc . . . rip that skin off afternoon tea-break, someone said jokingly to somebody else: ' Rice puddings to you', the look he received froze him to the marrow. Usually he is a gentle, kindly man. Still, it is always darkest before the light, as some old bore of a philosopher said, and sure enough the eighth pudding was a success. I expected a great shout to go up. the sort people give when their horse is first past the winning post, but no. They all just quietly went home to supper. I know what they were thinking, though: 'If it's rice pudding for afters I'll — .' Priscilla Bryant