Screenland (Apr-Sep 1924)

32 SCREENLAND Q The Man With the Shears— from page 65, re-pieced, the Big Boss is called in to view the film. If his okeh is forthcoming, the negative is cut, using the positive as a sample. As many prints as are necessary are made and the picture is ready for release. The difficulty of the cutter's work is intensified by the huge amount of film shot. The waste is appalling and accounts, perhaps, for the increasing production cost of pictures as well as the high admission prices at the box office of your favorite, if any, theater. Some directors, or perhaps I should say, most directors simply wallow around in footage. They shoot scenes that they must know will never be used. Eric von Stroheim is the prince of film-footers. Griffith, too, shoots an enormous amount of film. So do many of his disciples who seem to figure that the greatness of the picture depends upon the number of thousand feet of film from which the completed film can be carved. Shooting Susanna In Susanna, the Sennett feature starring Mabel Normand, 350,000 feet of film was shot. This means a mere trifle of 350 reels. This was cut down to 6,000 feet, or six reels. Some 344,000 feet of film was junked. With raw film costing three cents a foot, and negative film twice as much, you can figure for yourself the tidy sum of money paid out for just that raw film alone, not counting the cost of developing, or printing, or overhead! What becomes of the rejected film? Some few feet, such as "animal stuff," is filed away in stock. The rest is sold for junk, and fetches about ten cents a thousand feet. The Extra Girl, another Normand feature, was cut from 200,000 feet to 6,800 feet, a little over six reels. Probably only Heaven and Abe Lehr know how many hundreds of thousand feet of film were shot by von Stroheim in his production, Greed. Von Stroheim himself cut the enormous mass of film to 48 reels, begging and imploring Goldwyn to run the picture at that length as a serial. Before she left for Italy, June Mathis tentatively scaled the film down to 12 reels. If Greed is released at that length, it will be a stark skeleton of the marvelous drama etched on the film by von Stroheim. The heap of rejected film will be a symbol of the heart-break that actors and directors of that drama will suffer. Eric von Stroheim does not know the art of brevity. The short story is not his forte. Were he a novelist, he would be of that vanished school that brought forth four-volume novels. But the silver sheet is not the medium for drama of such length. Greed will come to the screen an emasculated remnant of the picture he created. Dale Fuller's superb and tragic characterization will probably be cut to a mere flash. Zasu Pitts and others who rose to the heights under the fiery inspiration of the Austrian will see, perhaps, their best work lost. Kerry Cut to Pieces IT was that way with Merry -Go -Round. They say, the wise ones of Hollywood, that it was the disappointment of seeing his exalted work as Phoebus cut to the quick by the relentless shears of the cutter that turned Norman Kerry into a cynic whose motto henceforth is "A quoi bon?" But there is the semi-humorous side to this matter. There is the story of the school-girl who ran away from her home in Sioux City, Iowa, to become a star in pictures. By the time her anxious father located her, she had appeared in a picture with Claire Windsor. Proudly she told him of her start toward a career, how the director had said "Good!" as she finished her little bit, and how surely, surely she was on the highroad to fame. Her eloquence induced her father to promise that she might stay in Hollywood, if her work in that picture convinced him that she had talent. The picture was opening that night at a theater in Los Angeles. The girl and her father were the first ones there. The program went on as programs do. The prologue seemed never-ending. The educational film exposing the domestic habits of the tadpole stretched out its weary length. The Floozy Sisters, vocalists, warbled and retired reluctantly. And finally the feature picture was flashed on the screen. Eagerly the girl searched the background. Claire Windsor probably never received so little attention from any two fans in all her ornamental career. But the fadeout clinch with the lovely Claire in the honest embrace of the Arrow Collar hero found our heroine stricken and her stern parent adamant. That heartless cutter had cut the girl and her bit entirely out of the picture; she was sunk without a trace. Our heroine is now studying algebra and spelling in the Sioux City high school, perhaps dreaming dreams of what might have been, had a certain cutter been less handy with his scissors. The Cutter Had It In for Her Then there is the classic tale of the extra who spent a day's pay check' taking all her friends to the theater to view her triumph in a Negri picture, finding to her chagrin and her friends' amusement that she was about as prominent as the potted palm in the lobby scene. Only the palm was further down-stage. "The cutter had it in for me," she wailed, and to this day she is convinced that personal animus directed that cutter's shears. But it is not only extras who suffer anguish of spirit from the cutter's activities. James Neill still harbors the hurt from a slashed part in Joan the Woman, which Lasky made for Geraldine Farrar years ago. Neill created a fine characterization as a demented old man Who doubted the voices that the Maid heard. He put his whole soul into that part, and used every ounce of dramatic art that his innate talent and long experience had given him. It took him months to finish his work. And when the picture was cut, because of the vital need to condense the action into six reels, his characterization was cut to a few feet. Sessue Hayakawa used to have fixed notions on the proper length for his close-ups. Try to find a star who hasn't. But Sessue owned stock in the Haworth Company, which fact gave weight to his words. When the cutting did not give his close-ups satisfactory length, he would come to the cutting room and measure off the film himself. "Now thees one, seex feet," he would say. Then, designating a close-up of his wife, who played opposite him, he would say, "Three feet, plentee." Picture Made in the Cutting Room More than one picture has been literally made in the cutting room. Don't Tell Everything, a Paramount picture featuring Gloria Swanson and Wallace Reid, was supposed to have been made from the film left over from The Affairs of Anatol. Recently, a Sennett comedy was rejected by the distributing organization. The film was turned over to the cutter to be resuscitated, if possible. The cutter, William Hornbeck, rummaged around in the film library, brought out some old shots of Marie Provost and Phyllis Haver, cut out some of the old gags and switched others to different positions, jazzed up the tempo and turned out a good comedy, The Hollywood Kid. Hornbeck is head-cutter for Mack Sennett and one of the cleverest in the game. He cut The Extra Girl, as well as scores of comedies, and is studying the game from every angle with the ambition of becoming a director sometime in the future. Nineteen-year-old Blanche Sewell, who cuts all of Marshall Neilan's films, is another clever wielder of the shears. The growing importance of cutting, in the minds of producers, is evidenced by the hiring of famous free-lances like Frances Marion to cut special pictures. Miss Marion is cutting Colleen Moore's new picture, The Perfect Flapper. For weary moons, the cutter has been a prophet without honor in his own country, but his star seems to be rising. The scissors and paste pot may yet be mightier than the megaphone. Delight Evans and Anna Q. Nilsson got off in a corner at Screenland's party. Nothing of the professional interview about it. Nothing formal, you know. Just a heart to heart talk. That's the way real personality sketches are written. The result will be apparent in the August Screenland, ready July first.