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Talking Pictures
the film business depend on getting new photoplays before as many people as possible while they are new.
If it is to succeed financially, some accountants set an arbitrary figure of 80 per cent of its cost as the amount a film must make the first year of its life. A national "release date" is set on which each exchange begins renting these positive prints to the theatres in its geographical area. With 250 prints, 250 exhibitions at top of "first run" prices are assured during the first week.
Once making this great quantity of positive prints (250 prints of a ten-reel picture would require 2,500,000 feet of film) was a laborious, dirty, wet process. Positive film, sensitized by "printing," was wrapped, 200 feet at a time, around wooden racks about four feet by four feet. These were worked rapidly up and down first in a tank of developer, and then in a tank of "fixing solution," or hypo, in order to stop the developing action and permanently "fix" the photographic image. Then they were given a final washing in a tank of water to remove the hypo. In absolutely dark rooms, men in rubber clothes slipped and slid in a world of wetness.
Today developing is done by an almost human machine. This machine, sixty feet long, occupies a room brilliantly lighted at one end, and semidark at the other. In the dark end sensitized positive film which has been through the printing machines enters a series of tanks which descend partially through the floor.
The film as it comes from the printing process is yellow, but one or two loops through the developing tanks brings out the varying degrees of black, white, and gray which are the light values of the picture.
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