The international photographer (Jan-Dec 1936)

October, 1936 The INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER Twenty-nine get in the director's eye; the star will be looking with an horizon eye while planning, no doubt, a better way to deliver some dialogue "business" while the hurrying laborer and office boy hastily dart in and grab a sandwich. All mix and elbow each other whether high or low. The lunch room is no place for glamour and names in lights do not mean so much. A check of "call Sheets" indicates the movie stars get up and report for work before the world believes they get home from the mythical Hollywood party. Claudette Colbert got up on this day at 5:30 o'clock; Glenda Farrell at 6:30, and so forth, and there is no luxurious arrival at nine or ten with a fanfare as the fans love to believe. When the movie star first gets to the studio she reports to the makeup department when for anywhere for half to three hours she sits to get the makeup applied. Then she must get into costume, then the hairdresser, and then here and then there. All the while they are studying a script. She quits about six o'clock and many, many times, if things go wrong they work all night. (Of course, some lowly fellow whose name never hits the credit title must get there ahead of her to unlock the doors, while the makeup artists, lunch counter guy, and so forth have been getting things polished for the arrival.) With Hollywood going into a cycle of costume films, the Wig Department of Max Factor has had to go without lunch and take up its belt another notch or two in order to get the thousands of wigs ready on time. The many recent costume films have each required a special type of wig made to fill both the camera needs as well as the historic authenticity. One camera need that was solved recently was the Technicolor wig. All grey hair when filmed in Technicolor photographed with a bluish cast, and of course, that would not do. So the collective heads of the Max Factor wig department turned grey to find out that a slight off color would photograph right. The hairlace wig that photographs like real hair and the line at the edge of the wig is not picked up by the camera was also developed by them for the movies. Into a lace is tied each individual hair. The workers in making the lace wigs earn their paycheck by spending the hours fixing and knotting hair after hair into a piece of lace. In doing this their hands do a quick twisting motion and there the hair is all neatly tied into place. I tried to count the hair one of the girls tied in a hour but when I got around 200, I became tired. To me the work seemed like monotonous drudgery, but they hum and sing at it. Bell & Howell is shipping on order, a $200,000 order mind you, of motion picture printers to Hollywood. This is the largest order of movie apparatus of any one shipment, and it is for sixteen automatic sound and picture printers which are going to the Paramount and Columbia film laboratories. M. G. M. is already using a battery of ten of these printers. These new printers which print the sound and the picture at one operation without loss of detail and definition of picture quality, operate at higher speeds, are automatic, and equipped with foolproof devices and eliminate manual control. They clean the films and so forth while the printer may take a nap. Five years and a cost of $300,000 were spent in the development of the apparatus. About a new movie theater. Glen Duerfeldt, visiting here from Nemaha, Nebraska, told me about a novel way of getting the films to the public. The merchants in this small town which is too small to sport a theater get together and chip in a couple dollars each for a free Saturday night show. The county officials furnish rough planks which are used for seats and the money collected from the merchants goes to hire a travelling showman to run his films, which are not too old. On Saturday night the farmers come to town early to visit and stand around and "chaw" until showtime when they migrate en masse to the free open air show. Of course while visiting and the waiting is going on they spend the nickels with the merchants. Before the free show idea came along, the farmers went some miles to a neighboring town that had a show. Glen, who told me this also told me he had to buy twenty gallons of gas when he was here in order to find the home of Bing Crosby because his wife is a Crosby fan. He thought her fandom was o.k. because it gave her something besides waving corntassels to think about. School has opened and the world's smallest school at Columbia Studios with its two pupils also started the fall semester. One pupil, Edith Fellows, thirteen years old, and second, tiny five year old (Turn to Page 30) A NEW SYSTEM OF PERSPECTIVE (Continued from Page 19) By taking a convenient point on the horizon (in this instance the horizon is eight feet below the base of the sketch) extend a line from this point through e" until it intersects the line at the top of the sketch: Knowing, from the plans and elevations, the dimensions between f" and e" are twenty feet, so must the distance between 0 and 20 be the same measurement. Divide this space into any desired divisions — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5—10—15 and 20 feet. By converging all these divisions to the point on the horizon and ticking off the intersections on the vanishing line e" f", gives the proper diminishing of these spaces. By connecting various other diagonals (only partly shown in the sketch) any number of vanishing lines and measurements may be had. By measuring the spaces between the horizontal vanishing lines, from the bottom to the top of the sketch, we see that these spaces diminish properly in the ascending perspective, and prove that the building is correctly fore-shortened, as the result of shooting upwards. We may here offer the objection that this system may be well enough for projecting a perspective rendering from ground plans; but what if we have to design a sketch without a plan? The answer is simple. Practise shows that in executing a perspective sketch we must either resort to the accepted rules of perspective or start out by faking. It is simple enough to secure that first vanishing point, but the second point must be accurately established in order to give a perfect illusion. Faking means a great deal of juggling of lines, many erasures with an accompanying loss of time. TV takes but a few minutes to layout a simple plan of the proposed sketch, establish the various points of that plan, in perspective , after which the rest is comparatively simple.