The world film encyclopedia (1933)

392 Round the Studios at Dulwich, now owns the finest studio in Great Britain. And that studio stands in Lime Grove, Shepherd's Bush. It is odd to think of films being made at all thirty-four years ago, but odder still to realize that thirty years ago Gaumont were making talkies. In igo2 tliey made films and played gramophone records of the artists synchronized by a method called the " Chronophone." These wcie shown '' at the London Pavilion and elsewhere. It is interesting to note that one of these primitive " talkie " players was George Robey, who in 1933' rejoined Gaumont interests in Marry Me. j Gaumont went on working at Dulwich until 1913, when The Life of Richard Wagner was made. Then they built a studio, the first buildings ever put up in this country solely for the production of films. This was the famous " glass studio " in Lime Grove, completed in 1914, and was the scene of the successful U litis, the Man from the Dead series of films, directed by George Pearson. Then came Sally Bishop, now re-made as a talkie. A new studio was opened soon after 1927, but in 1929 talkies came to revolutionize the film-industry. Gaumont had big ideas, which they have embodied in yet another new studio, opened in the summer of 1932, on the very site of the old glasshouse. It is a huge, modern, white-faced block, its fiat roof towering 90 feet above the pavement. Here are five production-stages ; dressingroom accommodation for 600 artistes ; stars' dressing-rooms, the last word in modern comfort and decoration ; laboratories with a minimum output capacity of 2,000,000 feet a week ; three private theatres ; an orchestration room ; nine film-vaults ; a 600-seat restaurant ; plasterers' and carpenters' shops ; property room.s ; monitor and recording rooms ; all the paraphernalia of the last word in modern film-studios is to be found at GaumontBritish studio in Lime Grove. They spent nearly half a million pounds on the studios, but still they were not content. Even as this book is being printed more floors and extra buildings are being added at Lime Grove. The production of four films simultaneously will shortly be a simple matter. Teddington Warner Brothers-First National Pvodiictions, Ltd., Teddington Studios, Broom Road, Teddington. \l/HEN the invading army of Warner Brothers-First National from America occupied the old studios at Teddington they did what might be expected of a powerful American film-company. They laid out ;fioo,ooo on enlarging and modernizing the place. But tliey refrained from committing the sin, sometimes attributed to American enterprise, of modernization at the expense of beauty and comfort. Teddington was a country-house studio, with spreading gardens, wide lawns of velvety green sloping down to the banks of the Thames. Did they dot the lawns with hideous outbuildings ? They did not. They added their laboratories, their ofiice-block, their extra floor-space, unobtrusively, cunningly grafting the new structure to the old. Did they line the pleasant river-bank with concrete or build stone walls where