Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

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Hollywood — First "Days on the Movie Lot weather. On the morrow we found this scene in use, a block of night, of fog, and of drizzle sliced from the Californian daylight. " Three weeks ago," said Ornitz, " this was Venice, and gondolas were plying up and down these canals." In this immense, hollow-backed construction some rooms were completed, but usually the interiors were elsewhere. That door on the far wharf should have led to the saloon, but in truth it opened into nothing. The interior which they had photographed yesterday was a quarter of a mile away. We seemed to be in a strange world where the mathematician's paradoxes of space and time had become almost true, and where fourth dimensions were a commonplace. Here was the outside, but the inside was outside of it and elsewhere. Here was the dock, but in the stage barn we found a piece of it in replica, with to-morrow's fog already dense about us. Time was reversed also. Yesterday we witnessed Betty Compson celebrating her rescue from drowning with the brawny George, but only now had she just tried to commit suicide itself as we arrived on the set. Ornitz passed us on to Von Sternberg and returned to the Stenographic Department. The director in greeting waved a hand at the fog that closed us in. " Know what that is ? " he said. " Nujol. That's it, medical paraffin. Best stuff there is for fogs. Hangs in the air and doesn't smell. Good for us, too; we're a constipated lot anyway." The pictorial effect was magnificent. The artificial fog hung like an opal under the glow of the Kleig lights and the green mercury lamps. Through the slowly drifting vapour the tall moons of arc-lamps drove long columns of brilliance, cutting one another, blinding, striking wide pools of illumination on to the dripping dock, the slime-smeared piles, the actors and scene-shifters who moved in and out of the opaque [93]