Motography (Apr-Dec 1911)

July, 1911. MOTOGRAPHY W onders of the "DiamoncUS' Plant By Eugene Dengler IF you take the Irving Park boulevard car in Chicago and travel toward Western avenue you will presently see, a little ways off to the south, a group of buildings, chimneys, and various queer-looking structures, scattered over several acres of ground, and all surrounded by a high board fence. The tallest and most commanding member of the group is a building some four or five stories high, with a peaked roof, all of glass, looking like some large and lofty greenhouse. You immediately wonder what they are raising up there, and your curiosity is more augmented than satisfied when somebody replies that they are '"raising" motion pictures — that this whole fenceenclosed domain is a motion picture plant. Then you notice somewhere the sign "Selig Polyscope Company" — it is emblazoned in several places — and you realize that desks, some for clerks and some for bosses ; and the regulation drinking stand with its inverted jar of filtered water. So far the place looks like any busy industrial establishment. Not until you mount to the second story do you begin to breath the atmosphere of stage-life and theatricalism. The whole second floor is given over to the producers, actors and camera men. Each of the producers, Otis Turner, Joseph Golden and William V. Mong, has a private office, and there is a library for their use in common. Here they plan and write their scenarios, each producing at least one a week, and sometimes two. These men are skilled by long experience in their line of work, having graduated from service on the legitimate stage. Otis Turner, a veteran of stage directing, served twenty Comparative View of the New and Old Studios. this is the home and breeding ground of Selig photoplays. Then you understand a thing that has puzzled you all the time — those queer low structures just raising their heads above the fence, which from one angle look like the tops of mountains, castles, towers, and houses, and from another just plain piles of canvas and lath. You realize that these are open air settings for film plays. Of course you want to go right in and look around. You enter by the main office, which is on the first floor of the large building with the glass roof — the studio ; it is a spacious, airy, tastefully decorated room where the administrative' enas of the business are brought to a center. Mr. Selig's private office is off to the left, and in this outer room sit several of his lieutenants. There is a private branch exchange telephone switchboard near the door ; an elaborate time-clock system with pockets for four hundred employes against one wall ; various five years with Savage, Jacob Litt and Frohman prior to his connection with Selig. Kindly, genial, and unassuming when. off duty, Mr. Turner is in action a whirlwind commander — a' veritable Napoleon in handling difficult scenes and large groups of actors. His attention seems to be everywhere at once, commanding, urging, suggesting, coaxing, cajoling — a human embodiment of omniscience and omnipresence. Such films as "The Two Orphans," "Rose of Old St. Augustine," "Back to the Primitive," "Captain Kate," and those wonderful Boer war dramas taken at Willow Springs, 111., where 250 actors under military discipline performed before the camera, are Otis Turner's special province. A conversation with Mr. Turner when he dips into the stores of his comprehensive experience is an education. He is a firm believer in the uplift of the business, and bases large hopes on the rapid advancement of the past two or three