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208 HOLLYWOOD WITHOUT MAKEUP
The chances are they won't. Thanks to such men as Hansen and Moulton and those in charge of the sound departments of other studios, the movies are one place where sound has managed to travel as fast as light.
There is a growing tendency on the part of Hollywood production chiefs to pack everybody lock, stock, and kaboodle into planes or Pullmans and keep on traveling until they bump into just the streets, buildings, backgrounds, and foliage they want. But there is still work for those who juggle jungles, cacti, and forests of trees around sound stages like a man in satin pants flipping Indian clubs on the old Keith circuit.
If a studio were doing Macbeth, the business of bringing Birnam Wood to Dunsinane would be no trick at all to such men as Paramount's greenery man, Loren Holmes. Shakespeare accomplished this chore by having soldiers, camouflaged with leafy branches, creep up on the place. Holmes would pick the trees up bodily and give them their marching orders. If their branches looked scrawny, he would put a crew of men to work pinning the right kind of leaves on them before he moved them.
Holmes is a slave to the shooting script and the art-department sketches for a set. If a cotton field is called for, he simply buckles down and produces one, conjuring it up by sticking a type of shrub that resembles the cotton plant into the ground, then pinning on bolls. Sometimes he uses paper cotton leaves, and sometimes he uses chrysanthemum bushes, which have a leaf similar to a cotton leaf. If the script calls for a rice paddy, he plants it, if he has time; if not, he buys real rice and sinks it into a watery-looking field, blade by blade. Cornfields are set up stalk by stalk in the same way, if none are available.
Says Holmes, "Every other winter it seems that some director wants to shoot a scene with a background of gigantic white oaks — trees a hundred and twenty-five feet high and with a spread of a hundred feet. The only catch to all this is that white oaks are dormant in winter, so we have to go out and put foliage on them. For one set we foliaged up thirteen of them. In So Proudly We