Motion Picture Classic (Jan-Dec 1916)

Making Up ForThe Mamies .W. Chamberlain n the stage, where the footlights throw their artificial illumination upward, you behold, evidently, a beautiful girl. Her perfect, cupid-bow lips are ruby-red ; her neck and her bosom are like alabaster ; her cheeks are like the bloom of the peach, and her large, soulful eyes look out at you with an innocent, entreating gaze from beneath deepfringed eyelashes and perfect eyebrows. Put this same young lady, with exactly the same make-up on, out in the daylight, before the lens of the movie camera, and what is the result ? Those cupid-bow, ruby-red lips will have become jet black when shown on the screen. Her alabaster neck and bosom will look like the high-lights on a piece of polished steel — hard, ghastly white and cold ; her peach-blow cheeks will have become dark and sunken ; there will be ludicrous black circles beneath her eye ; her eyelashes will appear as tho whittled out of black whalebone, and her perfect eyebrows will have every appearance of having been cut from black court-plaster and stuck in place. This is because the art of making up for the stage to appear before the footlights in person is one thing, but to make up for the searching lens of the little camera that reds off hundreds and hundreds of feet of film, to appear before an audience on a Mov a dark gray ; pink means a light gray ; consequently, the ruby-red lips of the actress would appear jet black, the powdered whiteness of her neck turns out a ghastly white, and the peach-blow tint of pink on her cheeks shows upon the movie screen as a light gray, which gives her the appearance of one fading rapidly away into a living skeleton. To accentuate her eves — to make them appear large and soulful on the stage — they are penciled beneath with blueblack crayon. Before the movie camera this comes out like a charcoal mark. The thick grease-paint around the eyelashes shows in the film but not on the stage, and so it is that the best make-up man in the world for the stage would fall down completely in attempting to make up actors for the movies. Every big filmproducing concern has its make-up man and his assistants. Where there are immense crowds for some of the scenes, it takes the greater part of the day to make them up. Hundreds of them are, of course, only “supes,” but they all have to be made up with the greatest of care. The picture must be made in the daylight ; the “supes” cannot sleep in their make-up, as it would rub off, and so there are times when the make-up man has to start in as early as five o’clock in the morning in order to get his characters ready for a picture to be taken at three o’clock in the afternoon. When the picture entitled “Lincoln’s Speech at Gettysburg” was ing Picture screen, is quite another thing. There is all the difference in the world between making up the actor who is to appear in person and making up the actor who is to appear only before the camera in person. Each is an art in itself. Making up for the footlights is an ancient art ; making up for the movies is compara tively new, and as yet there are very few real masters of it. The reason is that the camera knows only two color values, ranging from pure white to jet black, with all the tones of grays in between. Red to a camera means black ; bright blue to a camera means white ; light orange means gray ; a light red means RALPH INCE AS ABRAHAM LINCOLN ( Thirty-nine )