Screenland (Nov 1929-Apr 1930)

112 SCREENLAND be shading your eyes from the moon for, Benny?" asked Mai St. Clair. "Say, that's murder up there. You can take another scene but I'd have a swell chance getting another pair of eyes," declared the sufferer. "Put a gobel on the sun!" shouted Johnny Mack Brown who looked so much like Dustin Farnum in the outfit he was wearing it actually gave one a turn. There was an important football game going on in Los Angeles during the afternoon and after much discussion as to how it could be managed, it was decided that Doug listen in on the hotel radio and after each score run out and signal to us. If a scene was going on we would give him a signal to hold everything, and if 'okay' he was to shout what the score was. Doug certainly was a busy boy that afternoon. He looked very handsome, too, in a pair of corn-yellow linen trousers and a blue shirt with a neutral tie around his waist secured by a neat knot which is the latest thing in belts out here for sports things. After work was over everyone scattered. Some took walks up through the mountains, the sad-faced cows watching the hikers attentively every step of the way. Some played games and some took naps. Joan gave herself a shampoo. Always when she is working she has a shampoo two or three times a week so her hair will always look and all the rest of it. Just listen to this and believe it or not, but it's true. This young enthusiast brushes all such 'bosh' away with one contemptuous gesture and gets $500.00 a dozen for pictures which he takes with a little Eastman kodak that was given him when he was ten years old and which cost about five dollars when new! He usually does his own developing and printing and enlarges" his pictures to eight by ten and eleven by fourteen inch sizes. The two pictures of his beautiful sisters, Nancy and Baba, were taken with this camera. But five hundred dollars a dozen! "Well, I suppose it is a lot — but I can get it so why shouldn't I ask it?" he said when he thought I might be going to faint. His sisters, Nancy and Baba, are two of the loveliest girls I have ever seen. The fair one, Nancy, is especially appealing. Mr. Beaton told me she expected to visit Hollywood soon, but when I asked if it was to start a picture career he laughed a little awkwardly and said he didn't think she'd be allowed. But to get back to his own work, some of the backgrounds he uses for his pictures are simple in the extreme. Silvered paper roughly pasted on a base of cardboard giving it a bumpy, uneven look. Orange oil cloth over which he throws a rumpled piece of white glazed tarlatan; lengths of chintz and cretonne of unusual design are also used and he throws them over a door or tacks them on a wall or anything that happens to be handy. Lighting never meant anything in his life until he came to Hollywood. His usual method was to take a time exposure in a sunlit room. Even out here he took time exposures and that is not an easy thing to do in Hollywood. After hours before the motion picture camera the film players are tired and it is very difficult for them to hold a pose long enough for a time exposure. Hollywood photographers snap their pictures as fast as possible, otherwise the publicity departments would never get the same throughout the picture. George Sweeney, the property man, is a born comedian. They gave him a bit to do in the picture and the actors declared they were going to the bat for him when they got back to the studio. "He's got a wife and three kids. It would be a godsend to him to step in on the big money," they declared. There are real cowboys in the picture picked from the ranches 'round about Keen's Camp. No small ranches cither, though one of the cowboys said a seven thousand acre ranch was just a 'Fair-sized ranch.' The cowboys' voices are the only ones doubled in the picture. The boys who sing didn't know anything about ranch life and the cowboys, although they have plenty of songs that they sing among themselves, knew nothing of ensemble work and would have died of self-consciousness had they been asked to perform before the camera. Some of the boys were very young, only twelve or thirteen years of age, and some looked as though they were well along in the seventies or eighties. But young and old they were all quick on the draw and tough as new beef. I don't mean tough in the sense of being common. Some of them gave evidence of having had a very good education. But tough in the sense of being hard-boiled and knowing their way around. They sometimes have cattle rust half they needed to fill the demands of the press. To please Vanity Fair, to whom he is under contract, Mr. Beaton used an eight by ten camera which he declared was 'too awful.' But for reproduction the larger plates are better because they can be retouched to greater advantage. You still may want to know why Mr. Beaton's opinion is important? Well, a young man who has photographed so many lovely ladies from all parts of the world, and whose life has been devoted to the study of beauty, must be something of an authority, mustn't he? When he decided to compile a book on beauty, taking as examples fifty of the world's loveliest women, with a chapter descriptive of the type of each one of them, he thought such a book would not be complete without including some of the Hollywood girls. He came out to California with John Emerson and Anita Loos, was a guest at Marion Davies' house for a week-end, and the other ten days he photographed madly, dozens of Hollywood beauties and interesting types both male and female. He has a very odd way of working. With his little camera he perches himself upon a stepladder, or sits on a desk or kneels on the floor, sometimes lying flat on his stomach better to steady the camera which he holds at an angle of forty-five degrees. He did these strange things to try for unusual camera effects and from the look of some of his studies he certainly achieved his purpose. In Hollywood, working with the unwieldy still camera, he could not be quite so erratic. "But I am having a lot of fun with lights and that is something I have never tried before," he told me. I spent an afternoon at the United Artists Studios watching him photograph Edmund Lowe, Dolores Del Rio, Mr. and Mrs. Irving Berlin and Mary Ellen Berlin, their daughter, and Mary Loos, Anita's young niece. Truth compels me to state lers to deal with. Mr. St. Clair told about one of them going home and entertaining his family and friends with accounts of his experiences in the movies. One of the older men couldn't understand about the love making between Johnny Mack Brown and Joan. Finally he called his wife and said to the boy, "Here, show me." The cowboy, nothing loathe, put his arms about the lady and kissed her. "Not sure 'nough," chuckled Johnny Mack. "What did she do? Did she like it?" "Like it? She loved it!" cried Mai. We played a lot of jokes that evening. It seems that if you double up your elbow and bang a book right square on the bone you won't feel it. And you can also take the loose skin on the end of your elbow and pinch it as hard as ever you like and you won't feel that. The elbow, apparently, is a very remarkable part of one's anatomy. After dinner the flapper contest continued and several tables of bridge sprang into existence, while some of the boys went bunny hunting again. But I had to be in Hollywood next day so shortly after dinner, I reluctantly started on my two hundred and twenty-five-mile drive home. But there was a full moon, and oh, how beautiful the world looked! 4_ ' Continued from page 27 that Mary Ellen Berlin did not share her parents' respect for the young photographer. She was too polite to say so, but she thought having to hold still for longer than a second a terrible waste of valuable time. "Look in the camera, Mary Ellen," implored Mr. Beaton. "What for?" she wanted to know, and with some reason when you come to think it over; for after all, a camera isn't a very exciting thing for a little girl of three to gaze at for any length of time. A point of light striking the camera lens gave her mother an idea. "Look, darling, at that star. Look very closely and you may see two stars. Think how wonderful that would be." Mrs. Berlin was kneeling on the studio stage with one arm about her little daughter. This didn't seem right to Mary Ellen — why, she was as tall as her mother! "No, mother. you be the big one," she said crouching down so that her mother towered above her. But when all four of them had about reached the breaking point some fine pictures were taken of the young lady. "Oh, Cecil." said Ellen Berlin after her small daughter had been sent home with a nurse. "Do take one of Irving and me together, will you? We haven't been taken alone since we were married and everything was so hectic then." The pictures of the group were taken in front of a ten-foot parallel with a strip of rose cloth under white glazed tarlatan thrown over it for a background. There was a prop light on the side and the only spot used was held over the subject's head by a long-suffering electrician. Considering the strain he was under, kneeling on a parallel and holding a fifty pound or more lamp over the edge of it for ten and fifteen minutes at a stretch, it was no joke. But he was so interested in Mr. Beaton's method of working that he didn't mind a bit and several times reassured Mrs. Berlin, who was sitting directly beneath it — had he lost v ' Hollywood^ 6 Most Beautiful Women—