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Hollywood — First TDays on the ZMovie Lot
intermingled and incomplete architecture, halves of rooms sometimes built inside other and larger rooms, a Bowery boarding-house bedroom within a Renaissance dining-hall, staircases that led nowhere, a clump of bushes planted against a backcloth. We passed across the terrace and through the hall of a French chateau. Beyond this was a Kaffir hut opposite the cells of a Moorish prison ; then came the whole ground floor of a Viennese villa, three bedrooms of the same plucked from aloft and laid alongside, then a modern art bathingpool. All were lying dark and deserted. Dimly seen backgrounds like veritable elle-maidens showed reality only on one side, the other being a lattice of lath, plaster, and sloping struts. Through this oddly tenanted gloom a fitful spasm of music lured us forward as though we were Peer Gynts penetrating into some trolls' troglodytic kingdom.
As we drew nearer voices mingled with the music. The words were unintelligible until during a pause of melody we heard a series of strange commands.
" Take your oil off over there. Pull your nine down harder. Silk that back wall a liT bit and kill that baby."
Round a long curtain of backcloth we came on to the set. We saw a row of tall, grotesque-looking instruments. At their feet clustered black figures silhouetted, paper-like, against a vivid cavern of brilliance scooped from the darkness by the powerful lights. Suspended from the invisible roof overhead were grids of mercury lights floating like immense square moons of powerful green cheese ; to right and left on tall tripods arc-lamps glared like tropic suns, and along the top of the scenery a line of tall-hatted ' scoops ' added a more diffused radiance. The cameras, like small machineguns, were perched high on massive legs, and the cameramen, self-respecting technicians forced into a certain dandyism by contact with the business, stood on piles of boxes to reach the level of their instruments. Electricians and scene-shifters
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