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Star-dust in Hollywood
arch stood twenty feet high and overtopped the funnel of the boat. Thus the whole of this scene, which was to represent moonlight and a steam-yacht on the Seine, was built within fifty yards of ground. At one end was a derelict Venetian palace, while at the other were the ruins of a Russian castle.
Above the back-scene three big arc-lamps were helping the sun to play its role of the moon ; for here even the sun has to act and seem to be what it is not. In one view a number of curious objects were hung from an overhead railing so that they dangled close before the lenses as the cameras and boat moved along. These were small branches of a tiny-leaved shrub alternated with miniature lamp-posts, the lamp-posts so oddly distorted that they seemed the results of some Cubist painter's experiments rather than practical objects for use in movie scenery. This distortion was the result of their nearness to the lens and was corrective, for in the resultant photograph the cameras straightened out their odd eccentricities, and they appeared to be normal Parisian lamp-posts.
A violin wailed, a harp thrummed, and a 'cello grumbled as a passionate love drama was enacted on that odd segment of steamboat which groaned along under the impulse of its electric tractors, while behind us a clatter of cement-mixers and a forest of iron wire and wooden tubbing celebrated the hasty erection of the sound-proof movietone buildings. Possibly the Seine would next become a part of the Volga or a backwater in some Carolinian swamp.
Here two different effects were used in one scene. The small branches and miniature lamp-posts would appear as full-sized trees owing to their proximity to the lenses in comparison with the other objects, but the smallness of the far houses and the distorted perspective of the bridge would make the thirty-foot tank stretch out photographically as wide as the real Seine, for in judging distance the eye will estimate by size alone, provided there is no other factor for
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