Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Jul 1929)

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Water-front Stuff A colorful description of San Pedro Harbor, California, where many sea pictures are filmed. B)? H. A. WoodmanSee Illustrated by LuiTrugo AN old schooner wallows in tremendous seas. Huge waves intermittently crash aboard, carrying all before them. The fretful flare of the lightningpicks out the creeping forms of mutinous seamen, intent on murdering their tiger of a captain. Then a whistle shrills. Instantly the seas subside, the hurricane and the lightning end. The doomed captain borrows a cigarette from one of the seamen, and mutters that it's a devil of a business when a guy has to go on location to San Pedro on fight night at the Hollywood Stadium. They are making one of those sea pictures, and it is a clear, starlit night, with the schooner securely tied to a pier in the sluggish waters of San Pedro harbor. Men are tinkering with the machine which furnishes the 'lightning" and the airplane motors that furnish the "hurricane." Others are filling an improvised wooden reservoir on the dock with water. When they drop the side of the tank in the middle of a scene, the sudden flood registers as a great sea coming aboard the schooner. The pier, back of the jumble of cameras, wind machines and studio lights, is crowded with onlookers. Men of the sea, ashore after long cruises to Shanghai, Singapore, Yokohama, Constantinople, Melbourne, and Cape Town, gape at the novel spectacle of movies in the making. In the outer circle of light looms the bulk of a Japanese merchantman, loading cargo for South American ports. The deck rails are crowded with masklike Oriental faces, watching. The twin towns of San Pedro and Wilmington, lyingsome thirty miles to the south of Hollywood, and forming the Los Angeles harbor district, are favorite resorts of picture-makers. They have served as backgrounds in hundreds of films, great and small ; with the artful aid of studio technicians, they have furnished the atmosphere of many of the world's great harbors. To Hollywood they mean water-front stuff. Water-front stuff! Oil tankers filling with California petroleum for their long voyages through the Panama Canal to the refineries of New Jersey; lumber schooners stacked with redolent Oregon pine ; coastwise freighters and passenger ships ; excursion boats plying between the harbor and semitropical Catalina Island, with its isthmus famous in many a South Sea picture ; grimy tugs and ferryboats darting about, and heavy-laden fishing boats coming in from the sea ; transpacific liners bound for far-away Australia and the Orient; oil docks and mud flats, where abandoned schooners rot, and thousands of sea gulls perch; the traffic of the murky harbor, and the blue glint of the open ocean, where white yachts cut the water and send flying fishes skimming over the surface ; where hell-divers and pelicans swoop down on their prey. Set up your cameras here ! On the streets of San Pedro men of the sea stroll, with legs accustomed to the roll of ships in all the oceans of the world. The Pacific fleet, periodically anchored in the outer harbor, pours in boatloads of uniformed men to swell the ranks of the shabbily dressed men of the merchant marine. The window of a Japanese steamship agency is filled with pictures and booklets luring one to explore the farflung lands of the Pacific. Pawnshops invite the seaman who is "on the beach" to exchange some of his belongings for ready cash. They are filled with curios sacrificed by the casuals of the ocean. Men straggle in and out of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific — "members only admitted" — the Y. M. C. A., the Salvation Army Men's Hotel, the Peniel Mission, the Steel Locker Club, the Seaman's Institute. The rumble of bowling and the click of pool balls, supreme luxuries to the prisoners of the sea. sound from dingy halls. Men perch on stools in cafes bearing such names as The Silver Lion, The New Ship, The Anchor, The Golden Gate, and, down among the squalid shacks of Happy Hollow, the dingle of the dinner bell is heard from the Filipino boarding house. In every other window one sees on display a model of a full-rigged ship, or that indispensable accessory of the American seaman, a pair of dice. On casual glance, the street life seems uneventful. Marine police patrol the sidewalks, giving visible warning to shore-going Jack to restrain his exuberant spirits. The young and restless spirits go farther afield than San Pedro to seek their amusements. With their wages in their pockets, they board the interurban trolleys and Continued on page 106