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HOLLYWOOD S INVISIBLE MEN 211
wind-blown right here in the Paramount studio. I can run wild grapevines, six inches in diameter, up a wall with the aid of a few nails, and it'll be strong enough for a Romeo to climb up without taking a bad fall. And I can ivy-up an English country house in no time at all with bundles of ivy in bales, and all I have to do is spray it with preservative oil paint. So far, I haven't been able to grow a nest of robins in a tree, but, after all, that's not in my department."
But there is more to trees than picking them up and setting them down on a sound stage. Sometimes there is need for winds whispering in their branches; or for a blizzard to blow them down; or for fire to run crackling up their limbs.
This is where Lou Witte and his kind come in.
Witte is Twentieth Century-Fox's blizzard wizard. For the past twenty-odd years he has made the elements sit up and beg, jump through hoops, watch the birdie. A rainstorm put on by an overburdened cloud may be an admirable rain for getting inside of a collar or turning a Los Angeles street into a shallow river, but for movie purposes it is usually a photogenic dud. Witte takes care of that.
When he makes rain, it is possible to light that rain satisfactorily for the camera. It is always under control. It wets the right people to just the right degree of soppiness. It can be turned off and on as readily as a needle bath. Witte can make drops of water look like mist, a shower, a torrential downpour. He can produce a fog that clings close to the ground or floats airily in space. Or he can whip up a five-hundred-foot river — he did it for Song of Bernadette — have it flow past the cameras, reach a sump, hustle into pipes, rush back to its beginning, and flow peacefully past the camera again.
Witte's river was not the greatest of the miracles in that miraclespangled film. But it was a miracle in its own right.
He is known in the flicker trade as an ace special-effects man, but since the days when he was a freshman wizard, the technical side of his profession has advanced amazingly. "When we made What Price Glory ? we went out and put dynamite in the ground," he said, "and it was just God's blessing that we didn't hurt anybody when it went off. Back in the early 20's we didn't know what a fog was.