Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Hollywood — The ^Artist of the Film reference. Size means distance. In a picture the big house is a house near by, and the small house is one far off. Thus the small houses at the far side of a thirty-foot tank will seem to be full-sized houses at ten or twenty times the distance. So dominant can this latter hallucination become that even if a corrective is suddenly applied the latter seems to be false. In the actual filming of this scene a ludicrous incident occurred. Some of the window lights of the houses had failed, and a workman was sent over to remedy the defect. In a short time the error was put right, and at once the filming continued. But the electrician, ignorant that work had begun again, suddenly poked his head over the roofs of the houses and shouted out : " Is that all right? " The resulting photos had a curious effect, for the illusion of distance was so positive that the appearance of the electrician's head could not destroy it, but he himself took on illusion and seemed to be some gigantic intruder from another world. In Fairbanks' Twenty Tears After were several uses of the miniature. In one scene the king and queen were watching from the balcony of their apartments a rush of patriotic citizens into the palace-yard. The courtyard was merely a truncated line of buildings. The palace itself was only a tall tower of wooden lattice, on the top of which were two arches of the supposed balcony. Projecting from the top of the tower, from an overhead support in miniature, calculated exactly to scale, hung the top storeys of the buildings opposite. In a reconstruction of the Grande Place of Saint-Germain all the upper storeys of the buildings and the castle showing over the roofs were no more than miniature. These had to be calculated exactly to size, constructed with the greatest care, and then placed so that when the lens of the camera was set in a certain position and clamped there the miniatures seemed to fit exactly on to the N [193]