Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood proportion to a normal castle as the star had cost in proportion to a normal man. If Publicity could advertise the huge costs of the scenery we should have found no obstacles in our path. But the incongruity of the fact that the £1000 hero has to clamber up the walls of a thirty-pound-six-and-eightpenny castle, built of lath and plaster, does give a shock that robs the £1000 of some of its natural magic. Furthermore, the castle-wall is seldom a castle-wall at all, but a piece of moulding laid at a small angle up which the expensive hero must crawl on his tummy, while, from above, the tilted cameras stare down at him. Under such circumstances the £1000 and the super-humanity almost fade into nothingness. Yet that wall is not a haphazard thing. It was cast carefully by skilled workmen from a real piece of wall, for only a reproduction of actual stones and mortar will give a realism that can face the camera close-up. And behind the workshops, where the skilled men, powdered white with plasterof-Paris, like millers with flour, would shape you anything from a medieval cathedral in miniature to a facsimile of the Colosseum full sized, was the artist's studio. Although the movies are necessarily based on illusion, we can nevertheless admire the ingenuity, art, and invention employed in their construction, though the castle is but little more than lath and plaster, and the hero is in real life not much more of a hero. Yet as the latter must have a vividly dramatic personality and a power to simulate moments of intense emotion, so the castle may be the invention of a capable and often gifted artist. Indeed, the art of the movies sometimes demands that the imitation shall be more apparently natural than Nature herself. One movie climax was the blowing up of an old hulk. The effect asked for was for something grim, mysterious, yet unhurried and impressive. The studio artist constructed a model, with the surprising sense of reality that is character [i76]