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Bowed by responsibilities he leans
Upon his shears and gazes at the film,
With threats of countless censors at his back,
He cuts the stars' long kisses to a flash.
— With apologies to Edward Markham's famous poem The Man with the Hoe.
The fans who sit in the orchestra chairs probably know little about the actual work of preparing the film, after the action has been shot. The process is much the same as that which your kodak films undergo; the exposed film is developed and dried. From this negative a print is made. The print, or positive, is in turn developed and dried, and it is this positive with which the cutters work in the beginning.
How Scenes are Shot
The scenes of any picture, whether it be a dramatic eight-reel feature or a two-reel comedy, are never shot in sequence. Perhaps all the interiors are shot first, or all the scenes in which a certain actor appears, in case that actor is hired for only a short time. The film, when turned over to the cutter, is a seemingly incomprehensible mass of film, without beginning or end, rhyme or reason. There are several shots of each scene, called "takes." In dramatic features, each take is numbered, the corresponding numbers being marked on the script, so that the cutter is aided to some extent in piecing that apparently unrelated mass of footage into a coherent story.
But in comedies, often no script is used. A slap-stick comedy, such as Mack Sennett turns out, is usually a sequence of "gags." It is the cutter's duty to put these "gags" together in the smoothest possible fashion, to switch them around, to cut and prune and perform all manner of mutilation upon them, so that the maximum of laughs may be injected into a minimum of space.
There is more to this than meets the eye.
How the Cutter Works
The best of each set of "takes" must be selected. The scenes must be matched perfectly. If one "take" shows a gentleman in a morning coat about to receive a custard pie in the mustache area, it is a breach of professional etiquette for the next scene to show the gentleman wearing golf togs, for instance. The least error will smite the eye as forcibly as a fly in a jug of cream.
When the positive has been pieced together in the form considered by the cutter to be the most logical one he calls in the director. After the director has said his piece, when the film has been pieced and {Continued on page 82)
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