The New Movie Magazine (Jan-Sep 1935)

1,000,000 LANDSCAPES Modern talkies take us to half the countries of the world for their backgrounds. And modern conditions demand that they be made economically. How is this question of locales solved? PICTURES pour out of Hollywood. One is against a background of China. Another Africa. Others Alaska, the South Seas, the Soudan, the gas-house district of New York. The studios can't pack up and move to those places. They can't send companies of stars touring around the world, year in and year out. The stars wouldn't stand for it, even if the studios could afford it. So — what do they do? THE peculiar topography of the state of California makes carelessness in reproducing natural settings for our movies inexcusable. Just as stuntmen double for our movie heroes, so Miss California herself doubles for Dame Nature. That the state of California contains somewhere within its borders exact duplicates of every famed beauty spot known to world travelers is no idle boast of the local Chamber of Commerce. Every major studio in Hollywood has a location department manager, well traveled and trained in topography, who has at his finger tips maps and whole libraries of data by means of which he can at a moment's notice name a California location that will accurately double for almost any region in the world, regardless of climate or altitude. When a recent Will Rogers script called for scenes set in a Middle West farming community, Fox studios didn't go to the unnecessary expense of sending stars and production crew all the way to Dane County, Wisconsin; they simply ordered the outfit to spend a few days north of Hollywood in the little town of Bishop. Bishop is a valley town nestling at the foot of the snow-crested Sierra Nevadas. Its surrounding farm country looks exactly like that of Dane County, Wisconsin; yet Dane County has no mountains. So the photographer simply avoided long shots where he could, and in the remainder of the scenes he filtered the mountains out, and you saw nothing but Middle West farm country. Studios seldom strew sound stages with corn flakes to represent snow scenes; rather, they pile their outfit into trucks and motor busses, and send them packing off to Big Pines resort, a short drive into the mountains just east of Hollywood, where honest-togoodness snow carpets the forest almost the year By POTTER BRAYTON around. Here the movie companies take their Austrian Tyrol scenes and their shots of the wilds of winter-bitten British Columbia, and unless you are an expert botanist or a geologist with an eye for minute detail you'd never know the difference. Loretta Young and Clark Gable didn't get a free trip to Alaska during production of Twentieth Century's "Call of the Wild." But Clark has been to Alaska, and of course he's been to Truckee, in the High Sierras near Lake Tahoe, California, where the picture was photographed, and he says he couldn't take the blindfold test on which was which. And he's right. Truckee has the identical snow peaks, the dense hemlock and spruce forests, the grassy valleys, and the wide, flat, rocky river shores typical of Jack London's Alaska. In this palm-tree infested sunny California one would suppose Hollywood picture producers would be stumped when the script called for a scene in Central Park or any other expansive outdoor vista along the Atlantic seaboard. Not so; for in the beautiful Busch Gardens of Pasadena are acres of just such un-tropical verdure which have served the movies as eastern settings since the industry's very infancy. Then, again, if you climb Mt. Lowe in Pasadena or Lookout Mountain in Hollywood — after dark — you have a night panorama over Hollywood, Los Angeles, and its vast number of suburbs, which travelers agree is an exact duplicate of the famous night view from Sugar Loaf over Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The white shore and stubby pine growth surrounding sparkling Lake Arrowhead make it an ideal location for Scandinavian settings. When you saw Janet Gaynor and Lew Ayers putt-putting across a lake near Copenhagen, Denmark, in the picture "Servant's Entrance," their motor boat's Danish flag was the only thing, animate or inanimate, that was an unfamiliar sight at Arrowhead, California, U.S.A. IN the Malibu hills directly north of Hollywood are several of filmdom's favorite locations. Along Ventura Boulevard on the inland side of this coastal range we arrive first at the grassy slopes, dotted here and there with oak trees that are frequently represented as "somewhere in France," as in Warner Baxter's "Hell in the Heavens." Then we come to Shadow Valley, the location site representing northern New York state for RKO's "Return of Peter Grimm." A little further, your guide will point out Sherwood Hills Estate, which has been used to represent Germany's Black Forest, and Canada's Ontario, the latter which is to be seen when "Jalna" comes to your neighborhood theater. Portions of this region have in turn represented rural England and Ireland. Even Thrums, Scotland, wherein were laid the scenes of Katharine Hepburn's "Little Minister," was photographed in this lovely acreage of gnarled old trees and elfin dells. Only two or three miles distant from this spot is the violently contrasted arid region which stood in for Mother India in the exotic Khyber Pass shots and other scenes of Gary Cooper's "Lives of a Bengal Lancer." And across the Malibu Hills on the ocean side is Huenema Beach, just north of Malibu, celebrated film colony, which because of its swampy dikelands is frequently used as a background for pictures having Holland as their locale. Of course, the same California site cannot always be used to represent a certain country. For example, when a studio wants shots of the African veldt, the location crew is sent to the rolling sparsely vegetated foothill country just west of Mt. San Jacinto. (You can locate it on the map by putting your finger on the Catalina Island side of the peaks representing the Alps.) But when jungle country is desired, most studios have ranches neighboring Hollywood which serve the purpose. An example is the vast Lasky ranch where Universal made "Call of the Savage," starring Noah Beery, Jr., and Dorothy Short. Here again the studio "designers" must necessarily improve on Dame Nature's double. Certain areas of the ranch have been planted with tree ferns and breadfruit, and the trees native to the region have been "inoculated" with the jungle parasite known commonly as tree moss. So you see, it's real — and yet it isn't! Likewise, a story laid in the Holy Land may require groves of date trees and artesian wells. Such pictures are filmed in California's date-growing region just north of the {Please turn to page 46) 18 The New Movie Magazine, September, 1935