America Loses A Screen Wizard

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 792, 12 October 1929, Page 27

America Loses A Screen Wizard

Career of Man Who Parted the Red Sea INVENTOR OF “MINIATURES” “The father of trick photography,’’ Roy Pomeroy has completed a recent sojourn in Europe that icas party holiday and partly a study of the motion picture markets.

HOMEROY is the mail who parted the Red Sea for Cecil de Mille; the man who first invented the use of miniatures for photographing railroad wrecks and such things, and who lately gave to the industry the successful apparatus for sound first used In “Wings,”’ and who still later perfected the sound apparatus for recording talking pictures used in “Interference.” All of the Paramount-Famous-Lasky sound devices are halfowned by Pomeroy. Overseas picture companies have had little of the success with trick photography that the American industry owes to Pomeroy’s inventions. Novel camera angles comprise practically the only phase exploited with success elsewhere. The close-up and fade-out, first perfected by D. W. Griffiths with his cameraman, was an ingenious 'arrangement done with clever manipulation of a cigar box. Pioneers in Camera Art Griffith and Pomeroy between them have done more for the development of camera technique than all the rest of the men in the business. Pomeroy started in film work after graduating as an engineer and spending several successful years in New York as a magazine illustrator. Cameras were a passion with him, and during the war he served in the Aerial Photography Corps. Following that, he received an -offer to do film work from Jesse Lasky. Three months pottering- around the West Coast studios gave him a liberal education in film methods, and he began supplying- the astonishing mechanical devices that have for the most part become the general property of the industry. Pie holds ten or twelve patents for devices. The idea of the miniature, and many other ideas like it, he worked out, hut they now are the common property of the film industry. When Pomeroy and director Herbert Brenon started work on “Peter Pan,” the agreement was that they were to co-direct. Brenon held out for plenty of drama, and Pomeroy wanted full scope for his mechanical device showing the fairies and other phantasy in the story. The compromise w-as that the English print of the film had all Pomeroy’s fairies and musical effects, and the A.merican had Brenon’s dramatic effects. Due to strife at the Lasky studio, Pomeroy made a cash settlement of his contract there, and it now is possible that American films will lose one of their greatest technicians.