Moving Picture World (Mar-Dec 1907)

THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD. 235 One of the recent series in the canned stories was one called “The Miners,” the scenes laid apparently in the wild and woolly West. There were comments innumerable from the various audiences on the ruggedness and wildness of the scenes amid which the thrilling situations developed. The wildest of them all was taken somewhere on the edge of Brooklyn, and was in reality an excavation made for some flats. In the picture it looked like a deep, jagged gulley. The author had seen the place and noted it as a good thing and with the stage manager and the actors and the camera went there and had the tragedy of the wild West accomplished in short order. If the camera had swerved so as to take in a few feet to the right the Western scene would have included a row of commonplace city flats. That is part of the camera’s duty, not to swerve, to take in just so much of a scene and no more, or the whole effect would be ruined. The miner’s hut in the story was a little shanty that the author happened on out on Fort Hamilton avenue, a tumbledown old squatter’s shanty — not without its picturesqucness. The place was rented for five dollars a day and pictures were secured of the exterior and of the interior, which was furnished for the time being in true Western style. ' The picture-story author had an experience in Central Park that stirred up no small excitement. He was working up material for an Indian story, a thrilling, hairraisng tale that ends with the Indian seizing the villain of the story by the hair and plunging him into a chasm. The author was a little 11011-plussed just where to find his chasm, he confessed, but finally he found it in Central Park, at the upper end of the lake near the bear’s den. where the water juts up among some high rocks. By focusing the camera at just the right angle he knew he could make the scene as realistic as he needed for his purpose. So one day, with the actors in his drama, he journeyed to the park. He took pictures of the Indian approaching in his canoe to the spot where the tragedy was to take place. Up to this point in the story the villain had been a real man, but, obviously, the Indian couldn’t seize a man and plunge him over the rocks into the waters of Central Park’s placid lake, even for the sake of securing realism for the audiences that gaze on the moving picture stories. So at this point in the story a dummy was used, a dummy dressed just as the real villain, or the real man, had been. The actor-Indian went through the performance of throwing his dummy dramatically into the fake chasm and the dummy floated on down the lake until it was picked up by the vitagraph man in a boat. The daring act itself had not been seen by any of the park visitors, because it had taken place in a secluded spot, but the floating of the body on the water and the rescue was observed and some five hundred excited, trembling people gathered at the boat-house to see the “remains” brought ashore. Every one of those five hundred was certain of some dark tragedy and waited breathlessly to find out, all sorts of surmises and rumors taking definite shape while the boat wdth its dummy villain made for the shore, leisurely enough to tantalize the waiting crowd. There was a sickly laugh and a hurriedly dispersing crowd when the truth was made known among them. For this same exciting romance a cane-brake scene was needed, for the Indians were of the Seminole tribe and their home in Florida. The cane-brake was some time being found, and when it was the author discovered it very near Coney Island, as wild a bit of scenery for a tiny stretch right within the sound of the Coney bands as one could expect to come upon in some of those old haunts of the Indians down in the Southern State. The old mansion in Prospect Park was used as the scene of the famous card game in “Monsieur Beaucaire,” when that book was illustrated and turned into moving picture form, with a few slight changes to meet the tastes of vaudeville lovers. The costumes and materials used to give the proper reality to the story, by the way, amounted to a matter of $500. These are some of the “fakes” of the business of which the author told me, but there are many, many cases where the pictures are exact reproductions and many instances where the cinematograph plays a serious part in the business, the educational and the scientific world. Its usefulness as something beside a means of light amusement is coming to be recognized more and more. Wherever there is anything of big interest happening in the world, anything of historic value, the cinematograph companies have their representatives as surely as the newspapers. At San Francisco the moving picture man was one of the first on the scene collecting views to reproduce in all parts of the world and show to people in far distant places an exact reproduction of conditions in the ruined city. At the inauguration of President Roosevelt there were thousands of views taken so as to show the scene to those that could not see it and to preserve it as a record of history for a later time. At the Battery, when W. J. Bryan landed, the cameras were pointed at him so as to get every phase of that event, and likewise at the Madison Square Garden meeting. A man is now in Siberia getting pictures that will reveal to Americans and to the people of other nations just the conditions there. Representatives are sent to evrey part of the world to collect material for these moving picture machines, which are coming to be used in the study of history and of geography and in various studies in the class rooms of large institutions. Bioscopic records of surgical operations are beginning to have an important place in the study of medicine. The rarest and most difficult operations, which a student might wait years for an opportunity of seeing performed, are caught in every phase by the camera and held for reference at any time through this method of photography. The action of the muscles can be shown, the growth of a plant pictured, the eclipse of the sun reproduced, the history of ants and bees revealed, the working of intricate machines, etc., all these things may be had right at hand without the necessity of a student waiting indefinitely for various manifestations of nature to show themselves. The medical student doesn’t have to linger in the neighborhood of an epileptic to see the phase of a fit, but by turning a button, he can “throw a fit” at any time. In the commercial world, too, the motion pictures are beginning to be used very extensively to show the processes of manufacture. An order from a big match factory in the West to have a man visit the factory and secure pictures of every stage of the process of making matches, showing the almost human working of a machine that starts with a log of wood and turns it out in boxes of matches, all counted and labeled and ready for the market. The factory wants to send the pictures to Japan in order to make a bid for a big contract over there. It would be an expensive thing to send the great, heavy machinery over, and then, too, there is some fear of the craftiness of the Jananese, who might secure measurements and copy the machines. The moving pictures will be sent, instead, illustrating perfectly the workings of the machines, and yet saving expenses and giving no opportunity for copying.