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It Wasn't So In the Old Days
Comparing the picture industry of to-day with that of a few years ago. Ten thousand dollars is now spent where less than a hundred once sufficed.
By Sanford Stanton
NOW, let's see — we'll have to allow at least five thousand for our leading woman ; then we'll have to figure it'll cost us about three thousand to build that scene from Palestine. And of course— — " It was, as you have probably already guessed, a director talking over a new picture on which work was about to begin.
"And of course," he went on, "I don't see how we're going to avoid taking the company down to St. Augustine for a week or ten days, figuring it just as close as we can."
"All right," said the business manager of the company resignedly ; "but I
can remember "
"Yes, and so can I remember," broke in the director, "when we didn't go South for tropical stuff, and when we didn't build sections of cities for a bit of added realism; but I can also remember the pictures we turned out then, too," he added, with just a note of scorn in his voice.
"It surely wasn't like that in the good old days," said the business manager regretfully. "But then you know best,"
he supplied hurriedly as ominous evidences of a cloud on the otherwise peaceful sky loomed alarmingly. Nor was it.
A newspaper man who had "covered" a motion-picture company out on a day's location in the good old days when a troop of movie actors furnished good "copy" for a Sunday special chanced to meet Tom Ince one day during the last visit of the latter to the East. Seven years before, the newspaper man had stayed up all night that he might be on time to join a company from the old Imp Studios for a day in Jersey.
The newspaper man had been tipped 'off that the movie actors were going to burn up Leonia, just over the rise of the Palisades from New York, and it looked like a good story to him.
''Do you remember the day I went over to Jersey with you when you were going to burn down a town ?" he asked the famous director.
"Indeed and I do," was the quick reply. "And I've got the clipping of your story and the drawing the artist made
There were no elaborate settings in the early days of the motion pictures, such as the above, which was erected for a single production — Theda Bara's "Cleopatra."