TALKIE INVENTION

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 24 April 1935, Page 11

TALKIE INVENTION

ELIMINATING THE SCREEN.

W. R. Lotinga, pioneer British film producer ,is now making , a film which he proposes to .show' without , a screen. “It is really a very simple idea,” he says. “Briefly, the audience see a talkie show without a screen, so that its

impression will be four-dimensional and as though it were watching real actors on a real stage. The curtain will rise on a .perfectly normal stage, and actors and actresses will walk on and do their show. It will think it is seeing them in the flesh; but everything will come from a strip of film as it does to-day. “Nothing but the screen will need to be changed. All the rest of, the appai’atus, projectors, lighting and so on, will remain the same.

“My invention is'really of great simplicity. Over 3000 years ago the Egyptian high priests used exactly the same principle to produce, magic manifestations of their gods in mystic ceremonies. They also reproduced the voices of their gods. They realised that sound can be reflected. They realised several other scientific details, which I also use in my screenless cinema. The same principle has for years been used by fraudulent mediums to produce manifestations—so far as I krtow it is still being used.” Mr Lotinga will not at present reveal his secret, but it is understood that the players are being photographed against black velvet.

The Argentine sequences in Mao West’s “How Am I Delin’?” are being supervised by Scnor Ramon Gil Jorge Jaime Manuel Enrique De Valdez y Murillo. He used to be a newspaperman in Havana.

Ned Sparks has admitted that his long face is due, not to the demands of comedy, but to a long-standing bout of indigestion.

Ben Bernie, the dance-band leader, has just been paid £7200 for three weeks' work on a Paramount picture. The film took eight weeks to make instead of the stipulated five —and Bernie received £2400 a week “overtime”!