Untitled

Waikato Times, Volume 109, Issue 18229, 17 January 1931, Page 16 (Supplement)

with tall houses, and all the traffic of a busy town. So, by a proper adjustment of the camera, an actor may seem to be hanging hundreds of feet above the pavement while he is dangling no more than one storey from the ground. On the other hand, there are human flies and daredevils who are ready to risk their lives for comparatively small sums. Lions, guaranteed harmless, are supplied by the “lion farm," which breeds lions like puppies. However, even harmless lions occasionally revolt, and while we were in Los Angeles a class of growing lions suddenly uprose and in a climax of .furious protest fatally injured their schoolmaster.” On the “lot” of one of the film producing companies these two authors found a strange piece of mechanism. “A segment of a steamboat, from the funnel to ihe after-cabin, was being pushed to and fro on rails by electric tractors. At its side travelled a large light shade, on which were grouped the cameras, arc lamps, director with megaphone, and script clerk. On the other side of the steamboat was a shallow tank some six inches in depth. It was perhaps 30 feet across, and its waters were silvered over with a coating of aluminium- powder.

Eight Feet High

On the far side of the tank was a backcloth 15 feet high, against which, had been built a line of miniature Parisian mansions, their five or six stories being reduced to 8 feet in height, while between them and the tank that did duty as the Seine River branches of trees were stuck to represent the shady water-side avenue. On the backcloth itself was painted Notre Dame, though in an impossible position. Across the tank was the Pont N'euf, its full length compressed into 30 feet. The whole of this scene, which was to represent moonlight and a steam yacht on the Seine, was built within 50 yards of the ground. At one end was a derelict Venetian palace, while at the other were the ruins of a Russian castle.” “Of course many of the erections built for film production are really enormous,” continued the authors. "In the great hilly tract, several miles square, of the Universal ‘lot,’ stood an immense replica of the Paris Opera House, built for ‘The Phantom of the Opera.’ In the galleries were numerous dummies that could be moved automatically. Douglas Fairbanks for his ‘Twenty Years After’ had built a reconstruction of the central hall at Saint-Germain, no mean feat of lath-and-plaster construction, in one of the United Artists’ studios was a replica of a Swiss church, perfect in all ' its details; but the outside of the same building stood ten miles away on the Universal ‘lot’ on a piece of hillside hired for the purpose, while a whole Swiss village, measured from actuality, had been erected in facsimile.