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Star-dust in Hollywood
On the stage the producer has but one background for a number of varying emotional scenes. Comedy and tragedy must follow one another in the same setting. But in the cinema an artist can fit his backgrounds to the moods of the piece as a musician fits his accompaniment to the melody. There has not yet been a sufficient amount of collaboration in this sort of production between the artist and the director. The latter is still apt to see the former only as a necessary visualizer between himself and the carpenters and plasterers who have to do the actual construction. The artists hand is still cramped ; in fact, Menzies himself told us that in many films most of his pet pictorial settings are either modified or cut out altogether.
Of course, many of the erections built for film production are really enormous. In the great hilly tract, several miles square, of the Universal lot stood an immense replica of the Paris Opera House, built for The Phantom of the Opera. In the galleries were numerous dummies that could be moved automatically. Lasky's owned the full-sized ocean-going liner, hired to any company for Hollywood sea-going purposes. Douglas Fairbanks for his Twenty Tears After had built a reconstruction of the central hall at Saint-Germain, no mean feat of lath-and-plaster construction. In one of the United Artists studios was a replica of a Swiss church, perfect in all its details, but the outside of the same building stood ten miles away on the Universal lot on a piece of hill-side hired for the purpose, where a whole Swiss village, measured from actuality, had been erected in facsimile. Almost a square mile of this hill-side had been covered with more than two tons of artificial snow, made from china-clay and mica, while imitation mountain-ranges, immense screens of painted hoardings, had been set up all along the sky-line. But previously, during the summer, this same village had been transported to and erected in the Canadian Rockies, whither the whole
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