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212 HOLLYWOOD WITHOUT MAKEUP
Sunrise was the first movie with a fog you could take your hat off to. That particular fog came right out of my head as much as it came out of tiny holes bored in pipes, but some of it must have stayed inside of my dome, because the patent on that invention would have been worth a quarter of a million bucks to me and I never did anything about it."
Today, Witte has fogs down to such a fine point he can give them to temperamental actors in a variety of flavors. "We make them with atomized chemical oils," he said. "We burn the grease away in advance, and when it comes out, we chill it with dry ice. The amount of chill determines whether it lies on the ground or swirls around. Our fogs are noninjurious to the lungs and mucous membranes, but sometimes we have to doll them up for sensitive players. Once we cooked up a fog flavored with wintergreen to smell like chewing gum for a child star whose mother was worried about the stuff. For Simone Simon we used incense fog. We found out what her favorite perfume was and smelled up a fog real pretty for her."
Witte still knocks on wood or crosses his fingers when he works on a picture involving gunfire or explosives. "Explosion effects were packed into Guadalcanal Diary like raisins in a fruitcake, but nobody was hurt making it," he remarked happily. "In that picture, when Tony Quinn escapes along the beach, you see Jap slugs kicking up spurts of sand and water inches away from him as he hurries along. But they weren't real bullets hitting at all. We laid a pattern of magnetically controlled compressed-air valves in the sand and water, and set them off in sequence to give a strafing impression. For effects like big shells, such as mortar shells going off when a landing party nears a beach, we mix up shellbursts and plant them in sunken oil drums controlled from a push-button board. We don't use dirt and rocks in them. We've found that when we put in chunks of cork that look like rocks, whiting, lampblack, fuller's earth, black loam and a magnesium flash, the explosion looks more like a real shell going off than a real shell does. And we don't have concussion trouble with it."