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5S
SCREENLAND
Filming of Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece, "The Emperor Jones," restores to the East its vanished cinema glory
Paul Robeson, singing star of "The Emperor Jones," plays a convict in the chain-gang sequence. Director Dudley Murphy is seated under an umbrella at left.
By
M.ortimer Franklin
Righ t, The Emperor Jones on his throne, with all the pomp with which he overawes the simple natives of his empire. Left, above, producers Krimsky and Cochran examine the script.
BETWEEN close-growing trunks of palm, mango and guava trees, lush tropical foliage crowded up from the warm jungle earth. Leaf-laden vines crept lazily around the ancient tree-trunks ; a slight swish, that might have been the darting of a bird or the sibilant ;crawl of a snake, was faintly audible.
Through the stillness of the somnolent forest a barbaric yell rang out :
"Okay for sound! Number Eight-Four-Two!'' A breathless hush ; then came an answering chant : "Cam-er-ah !"
And Brutus Jones, in the magnificent person of Paul Robeson, plunged through the underbrush on his last frenzied dash through the jungle.
Such episodes have been frequent in a score of motion picture studios. But this one was different. It did not take place in Hollywood, under whose fervid sun nothing ever is new. It occurred at the other end of the continent, just twenty minutes from Broadway and 42nd Street, where no less a pair of showmen than Messrs. Krimsky and Cochran, American sponsors of "Maedchen in Uniform," had leased the old Paramount eastern studio at Astoria, L. I., to make a cinema version of Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones" as their first film producing venture. A venture, you are hereby given fair
warning, which threatens to go down in movie history as one of the leading steps toward the emancipation of the films from Hollywood's apron-strings.
While the lights were being adjusted for a retake, John Krimsky, senior member of the firm, confessed to me his hopes for an Eastern revival in motion pictures, in which he and his equally youthful associate, Gifford Cochran, are to play a starring role. Extremely serious they are about it, and extremely confident of their ability to produce their own motion pictures in Astoria. Mr. Krimsky, in his quiet, restrained and smiling way, admitted as much.
"New York," he insisted, "isn't merely a favorable place for making good pictures. Developments of the past few years have made it the logical place !
"As everybody knows, the stage and the screen have been coming closer and closer together from year to year. A good stage play becomes a movie almost as a matter of course. The actors have become interchangeable to such an extent that today there is hardly a single player of any note who belongs to the stage exclusively. The same thing is true to a large extent of the writers, and even the directors. And since New York is the center of the stage world, and the stage is more or less a proving ground for the cinema, the (Continued on page 84)