Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1938)

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Everybody drank quite a lot except Barb and me, because we had to keep our wits about us. About 10 P.M. Mr. Carrington, or rather John, arrived looking a cross between Clark Gable and Ronald Colman with just a touch of Fernand Gravet. He wore striped pants and the red carnation and oozed glamour. I introduced him to mother and he bowed from the waist and said: "It is impossible! I cannot believe that you are the mother of a grown daughter." Of course mops lapped it up. He followed her around like a puppy, adoring her with his eyes. Everybody asked who he was. Barb said to pops: "Look out for your wife, Mr. Lyons, John is a dangerous man and I can see he's smitten." Pops laughed and Barb thought she detected a sinister note in his laughter, but she wasn't sure. We waited and waited and no Miss Thayer. Every time the doorbell rang I ran out. Mother noticed it and asked me whom I was so anxious about. Then I told her I had sent an invitation to Miss Thayer. I thought it just as well that she should be prepared. "Miss Thayer?" she gasped in astonishment. "Why Miss Thayer is expecting a baby. She wouldn't come. What made you send her an invitation?" "Oh," I said, nonchalantly. "I just thought it would be nice to ask her because I believe in being democratic and not showing class distinction." She looked at me queerly. "Didn't you know Miss Thayer's mother went to college with your Aunt Grace? She's a lovely girl, the best secretary pops ever had. I sent her some booties and things for the baby. Tom being out of work it will be a little difficult, but of course your father is continuing her salary." "Who is Tom?" I asked. "Tom Blake, her husband. Nice boy." "Well, I'm glad to hear it," I said, thinking of my lost album. "Jane, dear, you know I don't believe in prying into my children's affairs. But your father and I have been wondering what's been troubling you lately. I want to have a nice long talk with you tomorrow, and I want you to be absolutely frank with me." I said yes, but the heck I will. Horses couldn't drag it out of me. At that moment Mr. Carrington came up to do his stuff. "I wonder," he said rather loud so everybody could hear, "whether you would come with me to tea sometime when I can really talk to you, Mrs. Lyons. We have so much to say to each other and there are so many people here." I wanted to stop him but I didn't know the laying-off signal. I grabbed Barb and dragged her into my room which seemed empty without the album. I told her everything. "I've got to get that album back at all costs," I said. "We must raise thirty dollars at once." "You'll find a way," she said. "You always do." Barb thinks I'm very clever. I told her all about poor Miss Thayer whose husband is a rotter and lets her support him, just like Joan in "Mannequin" and it brought tears to Barb's eyes and she is going to knit a sweater for the baby. We went back to the party and picked out all the caviar sandwiches and drank punch and then had cake and coffee and candy. I told Mr. Carrington he could go any time he liked as he had performed his duty and I would be glad to give him a reference. Everybody has gone home. Father and mother are sitting on the couch before the fire having a drink and talking. I wonder if they are talking about me. Hollywood's Greatest Enigma — Television (Continued from page 36) nificant. I think it will. When it does, will it have any effect on the movies? That's a different and a better question. Let me say at once that for a long time, whatever effect television may have will not touch the essential parts of a movie program. I foresee— on the basis of current experiments in television — two reasonable effects on the movies, one being only partial, the other, I sincerely hope, an improvement. Before giving you the details, I propose to pause and bring the readers of this magazine up to date in regard to recent television equipment and uses. As you probably know, television is a name given to several methods for the instant transmission of visual effects — just as radio is a method for the transmission of audible effects. When you talk into a microphone, you set up certain disturbances which are transformed and transmitted electrically and are changed back into sound when they reach your radio receiver. When you move in front of a television camera (or scanner) you create certain disturbances which go through much the same process, and are turned back into pictures on your television receiver. Because these pictures follow one another at a certain speed, they seem to have motion, just as the quickly changing pictures on your movie screen seem to have motion. The scanners and receivers may be of various types, but the end result is pretty much the same. You get what seems to be a moving picture. About a year ago, the average size of this screen was eight by eleven inches, or seven by ten — about the size of an ordinary business letterhead, turned sideways. This is still a common size, but two experiments are being made: for a table-set in which the picture is almost miniature, about half the regular size; and for a screen about two feet by eighteen inches; and, in addition, television pictures have been projected, by an ingenious invention, on a screen ap proximating the usual movie-house size. I know of no advantage claimed for the smaller size, except economy. The larger sizes are important. The small screen of television distresses people considerably at first; and, even after a year, the British public has registered its opinion that a larger size would be agreeable. I have a hunch that something approaching the middle-large size may become standard. DUT size alone is not important. The picture that comes on the screen has to be clear; the moving figures have to be sharply defined; and those in the background must not blur (unless you use blurring for a special effect) . Remember any movie you have seen lately and think of a long shot in a cabaret or on an athletic field. You have seen quite clearly little figures in the far background; you knew what they were doing and why they were there. Television is slowly working up to that same clarity and definition, but it has some distance to go. If you want close-ups in television, you can get them, at the expense of the rest of the cast; if you use semicloseups, you may get three characters comfortably into your picture, but a fourth may not be clear, and you won't get any of them from head to foot. For that, you have to move them a little farther into the background — or wait for new cameras which are being perfected regularly. Already cameras are in use which are reported to be ten times as sensitive as those of a year ago; and a year ago the cameras were vastly better than those of 1936. So progress is made — and remains to be made. A "mob scene" of ten or fifteen has been televised, with reasonably good effect. But a lot remains to be done before the television director can handle a group of people as easily before his scanner as a movie director does before the camera. I DON'T suppose the technical details about lights and tubes, upon which television scanning depends, are of great interest to the layman. But one thing has proved of overwhelming interest: the new use of the latest cameras. They are mounted on trucks, and, accompanied by an ultrashort-wave transmitter, roll to an appointed spot. Then one of the true miracles of modern days occurs. Because these mobile units can be set up near a grandstand and transmit to you a baseball game, pitch by pitch, hit by hit, errors and runs and put-outs — not a few hours later, but at the very moment they occur. Tennis matches, parades, inaugurations, boat races, horse races, prize fights, naval reviews, and any number of stunts are made instantly available, and the scanner gives you events completely, including accidental excitements. Last year during the two-minute silence at the cenotaph in London, on Armistice Day, a man broke through the crowd and shouted out that the King and his ministers and all the notables assembled were hypocrites, planning another war — and he was seen and heard, at that very moment, thirty miles or forty miles away. Familiar as I am with the workings of television, that still strikes me as miraculous — and exciting. Now this portion of television (which the British call "outdoor broadcasts") obviously competes with the newsreel, and this is one of the two points at which the movies will be affected by television. Not that the newsreel becomes superfluous. Let us say that you are busy on Tuesday afternoon — and are interested in the World Series game played that day. You can't watch the game on your television receiver, so if you want to see what happened, you go that evening (or the next day) to the movies — and you want the newsreel just as much. Television, in short, loses by being immediate and instantaneous, just as it gains. But a rival for the news 94 PHOTOPLAY