Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

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Hollywood — The Director shops. Here these little minutes of motion and emotion, in reality represented by long ribbons of films, were to be set in sequence and made to form a coherent story. The coarser part of the work was done by highly paid women, the cutters, but the final finish had to be carried out by the director himself. Here he must become an artist in mosaics, with each separate little piece to be fitted in place. There is no rule by which he can work. Exactly how much of the scene to use of distant, how much of middle, how much of close-up ; how much of each would show the emotional quality of the scene at its best advantage ; when should he use a piece of landscape, where introduce pattern? Such questions can be decided only by the exercise of a peculiar instinct which is the gift of the artist. The director and his assistant, the cutter, were thus artists of motion, weaving these little strips of movement into a consistent whole. They had always to bear in mind firstly the narrative value, secondly the emotional value, thirdly the value of contrast, fourthly ease of vision, and fifthly novelty of conception. In these small cubicles of cutting-rooms problems such as these are wrapped up in hundreds of festoons of film hanging from hooks or already spun round deep-flanged bobbins. Screwed to the bench was a small electric bioscope into which a piece of film could be slipped ; a button is pressed, and with a whir the tiny figures, lit from below, sprang into action. By the side of this was a sheet of illuminated glass over which the strips could be stretched and cut at the exact spot necessary. The separate strips were then fastened together by small clips. Each small strip of scene could be compared to a written paragraph, so the task became as though the director had been presented with a box filled with a thousand detached paragraphs and told to arrange them as a completed book. He would have two or three variants of each paragraph, he must decide which one was the most suitable, and, finally, the ["5]