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A Man Who Disfigures the Players
Cecil Holland, make-up man for Metro-Goldwyn, is noted for the realistic effects he can produce, no matter how strange or unpleasant they have to be.
By A. L. Wooldridge
HE gave Mary Pickford a black eye ! The tip had come to me through underground channels. Yet it looked pretty straight. I called Miss Pickford on the telephone. "Why, yes," she replied. "Cecil Holland blacked my eyebeautifully."
I scurried to the Metro studios where the ogre was working.
"How did you black Miss Pickford's eye?" I asked.
"With some paint and part of an egg," he replied. "It was when she was making 'Little Lord Fauntleroy.' You may remember when she went to the . Earl of Dorincourt and described her fight with a boy. Fauntleroy''s eye looked as though it had collided with a truck or a mule's heel. I did it !"
Cecil Holland, in charge of make-up at the Metro-GoldwynMayer studio in Culver City, probably is the most widely known 'make-up man on the Coast, and many persons, even in the profession, have marveled at his accomplishments.
The greatest task he ever undertook, probably, was with the soldiers who played in Miss Pickford's film, "The Love Light," made a number . of years ago. It was necessary for them to appear blinded by that terrible growth known as cataract. It is a disease which gradually destroys the sight. Now eyes are not things to be toyed with. Mr. Holland did not
want to run the risk of impairing i the vision of any of the men. So, to accomplish what Miss Pickford desired, he courageously experimented on himself. ":
Cecil Holland as himself and, at the left, made up to look drunken.
He gave Mary Pickford a black eye for "Little Lord Fauntleroy and transformed "Bull" Montana into the ape-man of "The Lost World."
How do you suppose he made artificial cataracts ?
By putting the skins of eggs over the eyeballs !
Somewhere he had read that during the Civil War spies had carried messages on sensitized eggskins wrapped in tiny rolls and secreted under the lower eyelids. That gave him the idea.
In "Mickey" Neilan's "Bob Hampton of Placer," he put a bullet hole in a man's brow by building up a new forehead with putty, using a pencil to make the hole, and then finishing the illusion by placing red gelatin, slightly coagulated, in and around the hole. It was a gruesome sight but terribly realistic.
Strange as it may seem, one of the most technical tasks for a make-up man, is giving a black eye to an individual. It would be very easy to slam a fist or a chair leg into an optical orb and let nature take its course. But that isn't done. The upper and lower eyelids must be painted, not a jet-black color, but a combination of black, blue, green, and red, with a slight film over the eyeball. In cheap comedies it is the custom to throw on a lot of black and let it go at that. But where realism is desired, a black eye is a difficult thing to imitate.
"A sleepy effect about the eyes is produced by using a very light-colored paint, instead of black," Mr. Holland explains. "The same light shading will aid in producing the appearance of drunkenness. To make small eyes appear large, the lower lid is pulled down and painted white above the Continued on page 106