The Motion Picture Director (Sep 1925 - Feb 1926)

24 November t_ X # MOTION W1UW director two youngsters standing on the sidewalk in front of a small theatre, blinking in the bright Texas sunlight and discussing the motion picture paraphrase of “what makes the wheels go ’round.” “The pictures sure moved,” said one of the boys, “but I bet that they were justed painted on.” “No, I think that they were photographed with some kind of a earner,” replied the other. “What’s your ‘bet’?” “I’ll bet you $5, even if I have to sell my bicycle to pay you,” King Vidor returned, “but I won’t have to because I know I am right.” The boys carried their dispute before the mayor of the town and it was explained to them that moving pictures were indeed photographed by a kind of a camera. After that nothing mattered to King Vidor but this fascinating business of moving pictures. He had to know more about them. The obvious place to turn was to the theatre where they were shown and he succeeded in getting a job at the Excelsior theatre in Houston, his first job in the movies. He took in tickets and acted as usher and because he worked faithfully and persistently for ten hours a day, he was paid the munificent salary of $2.50 every week. At that time a feature picture was a whole two reels in length and King Vidor has the pleasure of seeing it twenty-four times a day. The feature picture that marked his entrance into the film world as doorman and usher at the Excelsior theatre was called Ben Hur and he thought it was a pretty good show. But after he had watched the brick tumble down from the wall a number of times he decided that it might have been better, and gradually there was born in him the ambition to make a better picture. Now, that ambition to write a better story or make a better picture has started many a man in whom is the creative instinct upon the road that leads to success. Fired with this new ambition he started in to learn all that he could learn. He had the operator — they were called operators and not projectionists in those days — explain to him all the intricacies of the projection machine. While his patrons gropingly found seats for themselves in the dark, King Vidor diligently studied the technique of the silent drama, counting the number of scenes and analyzing the modus operandl. Then he began to write scenarios and when he had fifteen or twenty good ones he sent them away to various moving pic ture organizations. They must have been good ones, for they never came back. In fact he never heard of them again. Came a day when there was to be a parade of soldiers in the town and an advertisement appeared in the paper asking for someone to make moving pictures of the parade for a news reel. He promptly got the job, and then remembered that he didn’t have a camera. But that was soon solved. There was a movie camera in the town owned by a chauffeur with whom he promptly entered into business arrangements, agreeing to split the profits, if any. Things were moving smoothly until the chauffeur learned that he had to drive in the parade and if the picture were to be taken King Vidor would have to turn the crank himself. This was something different again, but here is where the persistency of the man becomes evident. Like most heroes of fact or fiction he was not to be daunted and he practiced that night operating the camera without film. The next morning, at least three hours before the parade was to start, he was stationed on the roof of the Odd Fellows Hall with his camera trained on the street down which the soldiers were to march. At last the procession came into sight. The drum major in all his glory whirled his baton just in the range of the lens and King Vidor began to crank. There was a crumpling sound inside the mysterious box. The handle jammed. The boy ran frantically with his camera into a dark corridor and with excited fingers straightened out the buckled film. But when he rushed back to the roof, the parade had passed. Thus ended the first episode, but like many episodes it proved but the beginning of another. He and the chauffeur organized a company. Vidor wrote the story, played the leading role and, with the help o f different colored beards, played other characters as well. A trip to New York followed and his introduction to that mysterious procedure termed Distribution. After New York, Texas lost its appeal as a moving picture locale. Besides Hollywood was then becoming the center of the film wold. And so to Hollywood he came. For a few years he did a little bit of everything: acting, writing, assisting as director and building sets. Every little while he insisted that he could direct pictures and finally was given an opportunity to make a kid comedy. It was a good one and he made nine more. But comedies didn’t satisfy his ambition. He wanted to create something more real, something more tangible, something more lasting. And so he quit making comedies. But getting a chance to direct a real feature presented many difficulties and a few weeks later he was sitting on the extra bench of a casting office. Tiring of the interminable waiting his imagination sought something to occupy itself with, he began evolving in his mind the plot of a feature production. It was then that he conceived the big idea, and sitting on the extra bench he worked out the detailed plot of The (Continued on Page 64) 44 TV /T EN in squads, in platoons, in regiments . . . \\ /I toiling through the sticky mud . . . falling J^Y X out bv the roadside to bandage blistered feet, or to buy food from sad faced villagers, onlv again to take up the interminable drive to the front. And with the men the guns, big guns, medium-sized guns, little guns . . . guns in column and guns in convoy . . . guns behind prespiring horses and snorting tractors . . . their muzzles lurching, dipping, careening through the gray fog like wave-tossed dories on a stormy sea . . . shiny guns, rusty guns; dripping guns, guns stuck in the mud and surrounded by swearing, sweating men, tugging, pulling, straining in that laborious, ominous purposeful crowding on and on in The Big Parade to the front. For the first time a director has caught and transplanted to celluloid, both the immensity of the World War and the underlying spirit of the American Expeditionary Force. In the foregoing lines one overseas veteran tells of his impressions of The Big Parade. On the opposite page Robert M. Finch, a man who was there, tells his impressions of this Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production in which King Vidor has created the supreme achievement of a brilliant directorial career. In his first attempt at motion pictures, King Vidor’s camera jammed when shooting a small-town parade, but when The Big Parade came along the camera didn’t jam and King Vidor has given to the world what is considered as the truest picture of the World War that has been filmed.