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22
Photodramatist for September
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T F you have not been actively engaged in the pro-" duction of motion pictures and more or less directly connected with the studio, you most likely have an indefinite impression that some sort of photographic process is necessary before the film can be placed on the shelves of the exchange ready for exhibition. It may then startle you to know that almost half of the work of producing a cinema play lies between the camera and the screen.
In such a bald, apparently statistical statement there seems to be little evidence of Romance. Believe me, though, there is. The Romance of the camera and the laboratory man ! Here are two men on whom rests a major share of the responsibility for the success of any cinema offering.
So closely are the camera and the laboratory departments related, that it is difficult to dis-associate them. As a matter df fact, in many of the small studios the departments are under one head. Modern business methods demand, however, a specialist in each line ; and in an effort to reduce the overhead expense of maintaining a laboratory for a limited amount of work, favor the centralization of laboratory equipment and facilities, preferring to send the exposed film to an outside laboratory for developing, at a fixed footage charge.
The Standard Film Laboratories in Hollywood, for example, is an outgrowth of this demand. In the form of a modern, completely equipped and efficient laboratory, it represents the "happy ending" of the romance of two men, the culmination of vears of endeavor for the achievement of an ideal. That ideal was and is: that the shadow picture
which reaches you across the screen, should be an accurate and perfect representation of the picture in the writer's and in the director's minds. The two men are Mr. S. M. Tompkins and Mr. John M. Nickolaus. The new modern plant of the Standard Film Laboratories is perhaps the best testimony of the deep study and wide experience in the motion picture industry of these two men, of their actual knowledge of the conditions desirable and necessary for the proper handling of the motion picture film.
"jV/TAY I have the pleasure of letting Mr. Nicko"* laus speak for himself:
"Way back in the period when movies were yet a novelty thrown on an improvised screen in a vacant store or somebody's barn, the developing and printing of the film was largely a matter of guess-work and luck. That one object might be distinguished from another on the screen and that they moved was cause for congratulation to the camera man.
"I had been a photographer for some years previous to this time, so that it was natural this new toy should attract me. So, I entered the "movies" as a camera man. This was, I will remind you, before any individual or firm had engaged extensively in the manufacture of equipment designed especially for the making of motion pictures. It was therefore, largely up to the camera man to design and actually construct his own equipment as occasion demanded ; his camera, means for developing and printing the film, or whatever else he might find necessary or useful, he had to devise from odds and ends at hand.