Talking pictures : how they are made and how to appreciate them (1937)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

Talking Pictures concern does not sell one tenth of one per cent of its output in Hollywood. But its products are good and are used by stars, and its facade, and its Hollywood headquarters, make excellent advertising. Down Hollywood Boulevard, a street on which, if one stands long enough at one corner, he will see all the "great" of filmdom, comes a highly polished delivery wagon with barred sides. It is filled with yelping dogs. Its owner is a professional animal trainer, and he can deliver udog actors" by the score, on a minute's notice. What is that terrific report? It is a huge five thousand watt light globe which has rolled from a passing truck. It was on its way to be used in a night scene. Look at any light globe used in homes. Think how that globe would sound if it were broken. Then recall that the one just heard is about the size of two watermelons. Nowhere in the world — in the early morning, at noon in cafes, at night on the way home — can one see so many hundreds of people wearing grease paint, beards, and mustaches. But no Hollywoodian gives such people a second glance. They are as much a part of the local scenery as workers in blue denim overalls are at the time of any change of shift in the vicinity of the Carnegie steel plant at Pittsburgh. Here is a huge warehouse, one of several that holds film for use at the studios — a total of two billion feet for a single year, or a little less than thirty-eight thousand miles, or one and one-half times around the world. A modest plaster building proves to be the headquarters for a company which sells camera lenses. A [32]