HERE ARE SOME QUEER THINGS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21304, 25 March 1939, Page 16

HERE ARE SOME QUEER THINGS

HOLLYWOOD PARADOXES A collector of paradoxical facts, roaming in a Culver City studio, would find it a veritable paradise. At almost every step some strange new fact, apparently contradictory circumstance, or amazing revelation —ould greet his eye and ear. Hundreds of conceptions of the general public have been changed through modern progress on the screen.

One of the first things to strike the paradox-hunter would be the fact that, on a picture set, the cameraman never touches his camera.

He watches lighting, composition, action, pictorial effect, and make-up. It is his assistant who aims, starts, and stops the camera. When elaborate camera mechanisms are used, as many as eight men operate a camera. The cameraman never touches it, but only signals the helpers. The man who records the voices of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy never hears a note of their songs. It comes from the microphone to the recording machine as an inaudible electrical current, and the gauges it by a little red light signal, the needle of a microvolt indicator, and sees the “voices” in the form of almost microscopic grooves on the “check-up” wax record. Sound entering the microphone is changed to a vibrating current which actuates the actual recording apparatus, and the indicator needle the engineer uses is far more accurate than his human ear. Cobwebs seen in old houses or in dark comers in screen drama aren’t spun by spiders, but by a machine which fashions them cut of rubber cement much as a candy floss machine spins sugar into candy. SIDNEY TOLER CHOSEN FOR CHARLIE CHAN ROLE After a search of several months, 20th Century-Fox has found the actor to carry on the famous “Charlie Chan”

role, played so long and successfully by the late Warner Oland. The new Charlie Chan will be Sidney Toler, distinguished stage and screen charactor actor. Toler was not one of the hundreds interviewed and tested originally for the role. It was while his most recent picture was being screened for editing that Sol. M. Wurtzel was struck by Toler’s resemblance to the “Chan” created by Warner Oland. After subsequent screen testing, Darryl F. Zanuck agreed with Wurtzel’s opinion and Toler was signed. He will make his first appearance as “Chan” in “Charlie Chan in Honolulu."