We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
The Dream Factory
By G. Harrison Wiley
ALONG time ago, when I was a small kiddie in school, I learned a rather pretty little song, wherein a child of the Orient expressed his wonder at our strange customs :
"If I could but visit the land
That lies away over the sea, Perhaps I might very well understand Some things that seem strange to me."
So I know, many students of the photodrama, way off in Kalamazoo or Keokuk, feel that if they might visit the land where photoplays are made, some of the mystery that surrounds the craft would be torn away. Without doubt, a year spent in the studios would lessen the difficulties that beset the path of every ambitious writer.
However, Frederick Palmer, in his text books and his many splendid lectures has smoothed many of the ruts and stones from this path which is at best long and toilsome. With this in mind, I sometimes liken him to the genii of the lamp in Aladdin's story, working incessantly efficiently.
And the studio, around which so great a skein of glamour has been spun, is after all only a great Dream Factory, in which your dreams and others' are woven into a tiny ribbon that is carried half way around the world to be dreams for the tired little shop girl next door and the rich old man in the mansion who has lost all his own. There is Romance and glamour herein to be sure, but the same romance of DOING you will find in your work-a-day world if you seek it.
In this vast Dream Factory, a place of
ENTER LASKY'S!
See how your screen story backgrounds and atmosphere are materialized in the cities, streets, and houses designed by architects, approved by the Research Department, then built by accomplished artists and skilled artisans. G. Harrison Wiley, in the Art Department of the Famous Players-Lasky Hollywood Studio, "shows you through" in this article.
and
hustling, bustling activity, a phase of the making of dreams of which the gossiploving press agent rarely chatters and yet which seems to me full of glamour and interest, is the spinning of backgrounds on which the gossamer thread of fancy is embroidered.
Making the background of a dream is the task and the delight of the studio Art Department. Perhaps if you have written a story of Afghanistan, you have realized, more or less vaguely, that a street or building in or upon which your action will be played, must be built at the studio; whichif a replica, must be so exact that a native will be fooled; or if imagined and created will be so accurately typical that it might exist, before the camera man can begin turning his crank.
At the Famous Players-Lasky Studio in Hollywood, Mr. Max E. Parker, a well known architect and designer, is the Art Director, and has a staff of four skilled architects and an accomplished artist.
Briefly, their work falls into two general classifications, the creation or design of settings in period or character style, which while created to suit the action of the photoplay are typical of the locale, and the duplication or reproduction of certain existing structures called for in the story.
In some countries, such as Italy, France and England, the style in Architecture, Decoration and the kindred arts has varied greatly during many distinct periods of the countries' history, and these variations in design are called the period styles. In other
21