FREAK JOBS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21180, 29 October 1938, Page 11

FREAK JOBS

CURIOUS TASK IN MOVIE STUDIOS Have you spent more time sitting on a flagpole than standing on your feet? Are you a person of normal height who looks like a midget when you sit down? Can you sneeze in forty diflerent languages? Then perhaps Hollywood has room for you, for in Hollywood can be found many persons I earning comfortable salaries on freak | jobs.

There is Bobby Bowles. He is the world champion back-seat driver. Bowles for ten years has been driving Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s high-geared camera car for those thrilling, breathtaking “running shots” that cause audiences to grip their seats and hang on while the theatre seems to crash into a telephone pole or something. Bowles’s camera car can reach a speed of 90 miles an hour. It has a platform in front and one in the rear, each large enough for complete camera crews while- the car is in motion. Thus, with six or eight men piled on the front of the car, 90 per cent, of Bowles’s vision is obscured while he is driving.

C. S. Pratt has a steady job of collecting black widow spiders. He has collected them from all parts of the United States. He began his collection by ridding the studios of them, and became so interested in his job that he expanded it to supply the black widows and other poisonous spiders to universities. He has two hundred and fifty bottles, each containing from two to six spiders. Egbert Barner’s job at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio is to collect bottles of every variety, from tiny serum ampulaes to great Mexican ollas. He has bottles of every nationality, of every age and for every possible use. Barner started his strange job when he was a set-dresser at the studio. He needed certain bottles for a set but found them scarce.

“From that day I found the job of bottle-hunting an interesting one,” he said. He found the beautiful antique bottles of Myrna Loy’s boudoir in “Man Proof,” the fine perfume bottles in Jessie Ralph’s suite for “Double Wedding,” the Chinese soy and medicine bottles for “The Good Earth.” In fact, in every picture filmed by M-G-M will be found bottles from his collection.

Ernie Tate’s job is to make new furniture appear old. He does this by his own ageing process, marring the new furniture with a blow torch and then rubbing various Ingredients into the scorched areas.

Freddie Wells does other things to new furniture. He makes shiny furniture dusty. The operation is done with a bellows of his own design, but he does not use dust. Instead, he uses brown talcum powder and causes the furniture to look even dirtier by application of soap—an anomaly in itself, dirtying furniture with a cleansing agent.

M. H. James is kept constantly busy painting “Old Masters,” centuries old. Should a director demand a Rembrandt, a Rubens or a Titian to be hung in one of his sets, James is capal'e of producing it overnight, an accurate copy that, at camera distance cannot be distinguished from the original. Albert Spurting until recently was the champion spider-web spinner. Spiders cannot be trained to spin their webs where directors demand them to be spun. So Spurting solved the problem. He spun them himself. His contraption consisted of an electric drill, the drill removed, a receptacle attached and the speed reversed. In the receptacle was a special liquid rubber which, within a few minutes was transformed into a realistic spider web. For his ingenuity, Spurling attracted the attention of the higner-ups and now he is an assistant director.

The newest of the freak jobs is now held by Hughie Hunt. He sits all day long in a row-boat in the middle of Lake Arrowhead. When he hears one toot of a whistle on the lakeshore, he raises a white flag. When he heats two toots, he lowers it. On the lakeshore the picture, “Of Human Hearts,” is being filmed. One toot means the scene has started. Two toots, the scene is ended. On the lake are scores of motor-boats. The white flag is a signal to the motor-boats to stop and go.