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THE INNOCENT EYE
hint at his availability for larger assignments. Frances and the children were out of town and before the conference started, Newton Rowe, who had left New Zealand Government service and was working as a free-lance journalist, came along to dinner bringing with him E. Hayter Preston, the associate editor of the Sunday Referee. It was a typical Flaherty evening. The wine flowed at dinner and at the conference the whisky gushed.
After the journalists staggered down for taxis to take them to catch the last trains home, Flaherty detained Rowe and Preston. 'You stay,' he said.
With the night porter bringing fresh supplies as needed, they talked and drank and laughed and smoked and coughed till it was light next morning. Rowe says that men were already working on the road, when he and Preston left ; and Preston regaled them on the riches of his political understanding.
Who paid that bill, one wonders ? Certainly not Flaherty, who was broke. Not Mrs. Flaherty, who was out of town. So it must have been one of the first charges on Industrial Britain.
The Secretary of the Empire Marketing Board had managed to rustle up ^2,500 a fortune for the Empire Marketing Board to make a film about industrial craftsmanship. Anthony Asquith had been asked to make it, but he had refused, perhaps because otherwise committed or the money wasn't enough. So the subject went to Flaherty.
There had been a tradition in exterior photography, due partly to the insensitivity of early film, that one could only shoot in bright sunshine. This was something which the slender budgets of the E.M.B. could not afford. 'There remained to be destroyed the belief that the industrial life of Britain and her grey city atmosphere could never be portrayed on the screen,' said Tallents later, 'the real point of bringing in Flaherty at this moment was to destroy that fallacy.'1
1 In the B.B.C. Portrait of Flaherty programme, Sir Stephen indulged his aetiological fancy. E.M.B. cameramen had been struggling to shoot in all weathers long before Flaherty drifted on the scene.
In this programme, one of the most moving contributions came from Erich von Stroheim, who had contributed almost as much to film history as Flaherty and had lost his backers far more money. Stroheim, with a sob in his voice, described the meeting of the two masters for the first time in the flesh, though they had known and admired one another for years. It couldn't have happened any way but this, if they had ever met. Which they didn't.
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