HOME MOVIE INVENTION Reduces FILM COSTS

THROUGH an invention which enables motion pictures to be taken laterally as well as horizontally upon the same film, it is declared the cost of motion pictures for the home has been reduced 75 per cent. The reducing of film costs was worked out by means of a camera which takes pictures crosswise as well as lengthwise of the film permitting the operator to take four pictures where formerly only one picture was taken. The new camera is expected to be on the market this year.

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The Drive-In is Thrivin’

America’s newest major industry was regarded as a newfangled novelty a decade or so ago. Now it’s become strictly big business.

By I. B. Neer

WITHOUT leaving the wheel of your car you can spend the most amazing vacation of your life this summer. For the drive-in is really thrivin’!

Without sliding from behind the steering wheel, you’ll be able, to deposit money in a bank, do all your shopping in supermarkets, buy a bouquet of flowers, mail a letter, go to church, pay your gas and electric bills, have prescriptions filled, get your laundry and dry cleaning done, take out insurance, check into a hotel, visit a zoo, have your shoes repaired and buy a bottle of Scotch for the long cool nights.

The drive-in as a big business may appear to have burst suddenly on the American scene, but actually the trend was being developed for more than 20 years. A few roadside restaurants made their first inquiring venture into the feed-’em-on-the-run field in the mid-20s and found it paid off handsomely.

Then businessmen in the cities, searching for a solution to the parking problem, took a cue from their country cousins. They started to convert their facilities so that motorists would be spared the wearisome hunt for an open spot on the traffic-choked streets. Again car owners hailed the innovation and before long Yankee ingenuity had developed a new industry.

Look what happened at Jackson Hole Wildlife Park near Moran, Wyo. On hand was the nation’s largest assortment of native big-game animals—buffalo, deer, elk, moose and antelope, last remnants of the vanishing American herds. The officials thought long and hard and finally leaped on the drive-in bandwagon as the best way to give tourists a real close-up of the animals in their native habitat.

Accordingly, they veined the large wooded area with a network of roads and strung almost invisible fences through the fields which keep the animals constantly in sight of motorists driving past. The herds cannot escape the enclosure because of a tricky device at the entrances. Timbers, criss-crossed along the first few yards of roads, are easy for a car to traverse but impossible for an animal.

Four years ago the Rev. Norman L. Hammer of North Hollywood, Calif., decided to do something about the 40 per cent slump in summer attendance at his Sunday services. Making a sort of one-man Gallup survey, he’ found that his parishioners were tempted by picnic grounds, beaches and golf courses come Sundays. Dressing for church, then rushing home to get into play garb, took too much time. So the pastor met his flock halfway.

He fitted up a pulpit in a parking lot behind his church and spread the word that parishioners could drop in on their way to play. First outdoor service was held on July 6, 1947, and soon swank convertibles and wheezing jalopies were pulling in side by side for Sunday morning worship.

Says the pastor with a twinkle in his eye: “The outdoors gets them on Sundays, but we get them first.”

Perhaps the most surprising development in the spectacular growth of the drive-in industry is the fact that such conservative institutions as banks have joined the parade. Eyebrows flew upward in financial circles back in 1936 when the City National Bank of South Bend, Ind., set up a teller’s window facing an alley and announced it was open for curb-service banking. But the idea took root and, according to the American Banking Association, has now spread to more than 500 institutions in 18 states.

The country’s largest and most elaborate drive-in bank is the Exchange National Auto Bank of Chicago, 111., where an average of 600 cars purr past the tellers daily, making 40 per cent of the total deposits. It is constructed in the shape of a huge U surrounded by driveways with ten tellers’ cages in the center. Attendants funnel the cars to the windows and tellers push out metal drawers into which customers drop money, bankbooks and necessary papers. Tellers and depositors communicate through a loudspeaker and microphone arrangement. If the services of a bank officer are needed, the tellers shoot him the papers via pneumatic tubes.

Drive-in theaters have come a long way since the first was opened strictly as a novelty outside Camden, N. J., in 1933. Hit by an almost disastrous slump during the war, they bounced back to the point where in Denver 7,000 persons waited two hours to see a movie, the first world premiere ever to be shown in a drive-in.

Some drive-ins which know all about baby sitting and home-chore problems, cheerfully tell patrons not to stay home on those accounts. They supply nurses and bottle-warming equipment and even do the family laundry while the show is on. The patron deposits a bundle of wash when he enters and gets it back clean when he leaves.

Rainy, windy or foggy nights used to strike deep gloom into the ranks of drive-in owners, but they don’t any more as the battle against the elements is being won. Scientists have now developed a glycerine compound which is sprayed on car windshields to drain off the downpour in transparent sheets instead of driblets. Steel reinforcements keep the huge 50 by 60-foot screens from swaying or toppling in high winds. DDT has banished the mosquito plague and fog-filters have been perfected so that projectionists can sharpen the picture when the mists descend.

The drive-in-and-dine spots come in two models—those in which cute car hops clamp food-laden trays to the car doors, and fully automatic ones which do away with waitresses, tipping and leg work. Perhaps the world’s biggest and swankiest drive-in beanery is the $750,000 edifice near downtown San Francisco, which sprawls over one and one-eighth acres and employs nearly 200 persons, including four traffic cops who flag customers into spots along the 250-car parking area. It serves more than 7,000 meals a day from two huge kitchens, filling each order in an average of six minutes. Otto E. Straub, the builder, spent eight years in an intensive study of food drive-ins before launching his enterprise.

The Motormat in Los Angeles, the first fully automatic drive-in restaurant, served 10,500 meals in its first nine days of operation a few years ago. A motorist parks in one of 20 stalls which fan out from a central, glass-enclosed kitchen. As he slips into place, a bin shaped like an old-fashioned breadbox shoots out from the kitchen on a runner and stops at the car door.

Inside the bin are glasses of water, a menu, a pad and pencil. The customer writes his order, pushes a button and the bin scoots back into the kitchen. In less than a minute, back comes the bin with the bill which must be paid before the meal is served. On its third trip the bin brings the order plus change.

With skyrocketing demand, there appears to be no limit to the types of business flocking to cash in on the curbside gold rush. The National Institute of Cleaning and Dyeing reports that roadside dry-cleaning places are opening by the dozen each week. Laundry field experts say that ten per cent of the nation’s laundry business is now transacted at windows which open on a driveway.

In many communities you can roll into a supermarket and make all your purchases without leaving the car. A California market sports a huge sign at the entrance: “If you don’t see what you want, just keep on driving until you do.”

Even the U.S. Government has become aware of the trend and stepped into line. In many cities, the post office has installed curb-side mailboxes with large gooseneck openings into which drivers can deposit mail without dismounting.

There’s really no end to the variations. The Detroit Edison Co. has opened an office where motorists can drive in, pay bills, leave appliances for repair, arrange for service and drive out. A number of insurance firms have set up offices in driveways and a drive-in night club is doing thriving business in Los Angeles.

In Beverly Hills, Calif., a drive-in liquor store has one rigorous rule. When a customer drives up, the salesman steps out, takes a good look and a big sniff. If he detects any tipsiness whatsoever, he sends the driver on his way. The store won’t sell liquor to drunks.

So, if you’re planning to hit the road this summer, don’t worry about missing the comforts and luxuries of home life. You can get ‘em in drive-ins. All you need is the car, the endurance—and the money. •

Three-Dimensional Sound for the Home
Three-dimensional sound, the effect created for Walt Disney’s film Fantasia, now can be duplicated in the home with a new multi-speaker radio on the market. A portion of the audio output of the chassis in the new set is fed back into the lighting circuit; extra speakers then may be plugged in anywhere on the same meter circuit, to create the Fantasia effect if the speaker is in the same room, or to carry the program to the other rooms in the house without the need for extra wiring.

HOLLYWOOD’S MISSING LINK
NEED a blind date for your mother-in-law? Steve Calvert, Hollywood’s gorilla man, is your answer because he’s really handsome when he’s all dressed up in his $1,500 hirsute suit. Actually he makes a nice living using it in horror and jungle movies. And it’s a work of art. Each hair, human and yak, is sewed and tied individually. Gorilla curves are achieved by rubber padding. Hands, feet and face are molded rubber. Wires, levers and rods enable him to make his brows beetle, his lips curl, snarl and talk, and can even make his nostrils dilate when he’s real mad.

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The Outlaw

Here’s why this thrilling new picture has been kept off the screen for two years!

1944-HOWARD HUGHES,WORLD FAMOUS FLYER AND MOTION PICTURE PRODUCER, COMPLETES HIS PICTURE THE OUTLAW.

HOWARD HUGHES DISCOVERED JEAN HARLOW, PAUL MUNI, GEORGE RAFT, AND PAT O’BRIEN. NOW, IN THE OUTLAW, HE PRESENTS HIS SENSATIONAL NEW STAR DISCOVERY- JANE RUSSELL

JUNE, 1944-THE OUTLAW WORLD PREMIERE IS HELD AT SAN FRANCISCO. THE PICTURE BREAKS EVERY EXISTING RECORD!! HELD OVER FOR 8 WEEKS! PLAYS TO MORE THAN 300,000 PEOPLE!!

THE OUTLAW IS TRIGGER-FAST ACTION COMBINED WITH DARING SENSATION TOO STARTLING TO DESCRIBE!

THEN… THE OUTLAW IS BANNED BY THE CENSORS! BUT RATHER THAN CUT A SINGLE SCENE FROM THE FILM, HOWARD HUGHES WITHDRAWS IT FROM THE THEATRES OF THE WORLD!

I’M GOING TO FIGHT THIS BATTLE TO THE FINISH AND MAKE SURE THAT THE PUBLIC SEES MY PICTURE EXACTLY AS I MADE IT!

NOW, AT LAST, AFTER A TWO YEARS FIGHT WITH THE CENSORS HOWARD HUGHES BRINGS YOU HIS DARING PRODUCTION, THE OUTLAW… EXACTLY AS IT WAS FILMED… NOT A SCENE CUT…AND INTRODUCING A NEW STAR, JANE RUSSELL!

Howard Hughes’ daring Production THE OUTLAW

introducing Jane Russell

Mean… Moody… Magnificent

EXACTLY AS IT WAS FILMED! NOT A SCENE CUT!

TITLE WRITER BOON TO AMATEUR MOVIE FANS

Amateur movie-making enthusiasts may prepare their own titles, including animated ones, with the aid of a new title writer. This device, an illuminated stand with an easel at front and a place for the camera at the rear, works in three positions. When set at an angle, as shown above, it permits a hand to be photographed drawing a title. A vertical setting films movable letters for an animated title.

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How Mechanics Make Your Movies

by H.H. Dunn

All of the money made in the movies does not go to the big stars and directors. Queer jobs in the studios support a small army of expert technicians.

A LARGE and shiny car pulled onto the lot, and an active young man ran from it into the main building of the RKO Pathe Studio at Culver City.

“‘Big Shot’ director?” I asked.

“Best shot in Hollywood, also director,” answered Bill Rice. “Gets paid every time he misses a star, and he has missed hundreds of them. That’s George R. Daly. He fires machine guns, rifles and revolvers at grim heroes in war and fair heroines in gang pictures—and his guns are loaded with real bullets. He is the only marksman in the world who is paid to miss what he shoots at.”

During the last two years he has shot at such stars as Helen Twelvetrees, Ricardo Cortez, Bill Boyd, George Bancroft and Richard Barthelmess. The director tells Daly what he wants in the way of shooting. Daly takes the stage away from the director and puts his bullets just where they are wanted. His guns are good for $15,000 to $20,000 a year.

Yet Daly is only one of some 12,000 per- sons who hold good mechanical and technical jobs in the movies. They play essential parts in every production, yet seldom if ever appear in a picture, though Daly, disguised as gangster or as “John Law”, has been seen by millions. Charlie Gemora, who imitates a gorilla so realistically that he has fooled big-game hunters, is another who appears in the films.

There are 127 classifications of technical work—simple mechanics, arts and sciences —entirely apart from the actors and actresses, in the business of making a motion-picture. Approximately 40,000 persons are dependent on these jobs for their The payroll of the 12,000 runs high in the millions, for the best and most permanent positions “in pictures” are off the stage, not on it; back or at one side of the cameras, rather than in front of them.

For every girl who is seen on the film, there are fifty in the business, arts and traits of the movies who draw almost as good salaries, and draw them all the year ’round. For every man who gets onto the screen, from mobsters to stars, there are fifty others, from carpenters to zoologists, who actually have and hold better jobs than the average of the players.

Making a Model Train Puff A model-builder—there are about 100 of these specialized workers in Hollywood— saw the director trying to get a model locomotive to puff as it pulled a train of miniature cars up a distant background grade.

The modeler went home, watched his little boy playing with a toy pistol which used percussion caps strung on a string of paper. He found a smoking mixture to replace the caps, put a clockwork in the engine, exploded the tiny smoke-bombs at regular intervals through the stack, and has received more than $5,000 for the use of his invention. Incidentally, he also applied it to model airplanes, dirigibles, motor-boats, steam-ships and cannon.

There seems to be no limit to the financial returns to the inventor in the picture studios. The only demand is that the invention must “work”; perpetual-motion and other freak machines are barred.

A camera-man idly watching ironworkers doing their stuff five or six stories above him, developed a steel arm, of girder-truss formation, to carry a camera and two men on the front end, while the base was elevated or depressed as it was carried on a truck in front of the set or within the studio. The purpose is to make pictures at unusual angles—”slants”, the camera-men call them, and the device has been found invaluable for banquet, boudoir, hospital and similar scenes. All the studios are paying this young man good royalties on his patent.

At least a score of manicure girls in Hollywood are well able to retire on what they have earned, with their tips, and the still more valuable investment information they have received at the studios. The majority of them never stepped on a movie set, far from appearing in a picture, though virtually all their work has been done on the lot.

“Stand-ins” and Doubles Then, there are the “stand-in” girls and men, who assume the exact positions of the stars and starlets, while lights are being adjusted or cameras focused and other details attended to, while the players relax and rest.

Somewhat similar to these, but more dangerously employed, are the men and women who substitute for the stars when the script puts the heroine or the hero in a dangerous spot. Their names are unknown to any but the casting directors, and they range from parachute jumpers, like pretty little Mary Wiggins, to deep-sea divers, like Charlie Johansen, with stunt-plane dyers, wild-horse riders, bull-fighters, animal-wrestlers, auto-crash drivers, engineers who will take a locomotive into a collision or “ride” a boiler explosion, in place of the actor or actress.

The pay of these daring “stunt” performers ranges from the $3,500 given Dick Grace or other aviators for crashing a plane nose first into the earth, to $250 handed to Mike Mercier for getting himself out of a sunken submarine.

Building-Trade Boom Most of the best-paid jobs in the movies, however, carry no hazards. There are nearly 700 plain and fancy carpenters, cabinet-makers, home-builders and similar mechanical crafts, who receive from $5 minimum to $25 maximum a day. Cement, stucco, plaster, concrete and stone workers number about 200, and each studio maintains its own department for this work, a part of the general arts and buildings division.

Wrought-iron workers have and keep well-paying jobs, though there are only about 50 of them employed in the studios. Taxidermists, three in number, find plenty of work in Hollywood, and a Mexican Indian clay modeler has a continuous, well-paid job, making ornamental and useful pots, vases, dishes and so on for Latin-American pictures.

There are script-girls, complete dictionaries of every play on which they have been employed, whose salaries would make a bank cashier leave his cage. One of these developed a soul-rending scream and a maniacal laugh. She adds about $250 a month to her income by making these noises off stage for the “taikies.”

A smart gardener, who directs one of the fifty or more studio flower-gardens in Hollywood, trains canaries, so that they will sing or whistle on signal. He tells me that he picks lip about $1,500 a year renting these birds for sound pictures. A smart Chinese and an equally clever Japanese have organized groups of their country-men and women, with costumes, to appear as “atmosphere” for Oriental plays, and also to stand about the lobbies of theaters making premier showings of these films.

With all the camera-men on the various lots, the ordinary portrait photographer would seem to have small opportunity in Hollywood, yet he, and she, thrive to the number of about 100, coupled with half as many “personality movie” makers.

When a girl, or man, is trying to get into the movies, she or he present themselves to the casting director, equipped with a set of still photographs, in various costumes and positions, a reel of about 100 feet of action on stage, and a phonograph record of her or his voice. All these are made by “outside” artists at the expense of the person using them. Such an outfit of stills, movie and voice record costs from $100 in the cheaper commercial studios to $500.

The growing of whiskers is no new pastime, but there are 112 men in Hollywood who can be depended upon to pre- sent a luxurious “crop” at the director’s call. They receive from $10 a day on a long picture, to a flat sum averaging more than this, on a short.

Some fifty bald heads earn good livings for their owners. Shoulder-length hair and fierce mustaches, needed in pioneer pictures, support fifteen or twenty men in more than comfort.

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The 1951 MODEL BLONDE

By ROBERT CAHN

She’s filmdom’s Marilyn Monroe: Miss Cheesecake to GIs, whistle-bait in the studios—and an actress on her way up.

IT WAS the kind of family party that Hollywood studios periodically throw for their outlying salesmen and picture-exchange executives in order to whoop up enthusiasm for the company’s forthcoming product. The Cafe de Paris, more simply known as the 20th Century-Fox commissary, was crowded with a cheery assemblage of studio bigwigs and freshly manicured salesmen. For five days, in an atmosphere of backslapping camaraderie, the guests had watched the celluloid unroll, the same films which they were expected to describe as colossal and mean it. Now as a final lift to their morale the visitors were meeting, over highballs and hors d’oeuvres, such marquee names as Susan Hayward, Jeanne Crain, June Haver, Anne Baxter, Gregory Peck and Tyrone Power.

The party had fallen into small groups, one star per group, and at the bar a weary press agent was asking for his fifth highball when he glanced toward the doorway where Marilyn Monroe, a recently acquired studio starlet, had just arrived. Amid a slowly gathering hush, she stood there, a blonde apparition in a strapless black cocktail gown, a little breathless as if she were Cinderella just stepped from a pumpkin coach. At that moment, the salesmen’s esprit de corps took a sudden leap upward.

The press agent put down his drink. “I’d better get over and get the introductions started,” he remarked to a colleague. “Stand by for the massacre.”

He was too late. Already a studio vice-president and two producers, suddenly self-designated Prince Charmings, had converged on the late arrival. A moment later she was wafted off by the upper echelons, her progress punctuated by the popping of flash bulbs as the visitors pressed forward to have their pictures taken with her. Finally, as the guests sat down for dinner, the blonde was installed at the head of the No. 1 table, at the right hand of company president Spyros Skouras.

While the long-established female stars silently measured her, young Marilyn Monroe, who has logged less than 50 minutes’ screen time, stole the show.

Sitting there, her chin resting prettily on the backs of her fingers, Marilyn looked the part of the standard Hollywood Blonde, traditionally equipped with automatic batting eyelashes, a vague smile that seems to include everybody, and a head filled with sawdust. Certainly her 118 pounds, handsomely distributed throughout her five-foot five-inch frame, are from the classic mold—bust, 37 inches; waist, 23 inches; hips, 34 inches. So sumptuous are Miss Monroe’s dimensions that long before most people knew her name, her anonymous body was used to exploit the pictures in which she briefly appeared.

But all that is misleading. Marilyn is a beautiful blonde, but she is not a vacuous one. Her film experience is sharply limited, but her potential as a sensitive actress is not. Unlike many of her assembly-line predecessors, Marilyn has given clear indications that the 1951 model Hollywood blonde is custom-built.

This has been apparent in her movie appearances, brief as they have been. Only once in a producer’s blue moon does there appear a blonde who brings to the screen a special indelible vitality, and not simply the empty prettiness that the audience forgets as it leaves the theater. Marilyn Monroe is not a girl anyone quickly forgets. While Hollywood blondes are generally considered the industry’s most expendable item, Miss Monroe’s value during the past year has risen faster than the cost of living.

scribed by one observer as having “hardly enough room for the polka dots.” Miraculously gathered by the grapevine, so many studio employees crowded the set that Director Joe Newman, without enough space to move his actors, was forced to bar all visitors.

The following day another scene required Marilyn to enter her apartment and leisurely disrobe for a shower unaware that the hero, Bill Lundigan, was asleep on a couch in the room.

Just as Marilyn had stripped to her flimsy underthings, director Newman bellowed: “Cut!”

Marilyn looked startled. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked innocently.

“No, honey,” replied Newman. “You were perfect. But Lundigan was peeking.”

Warmed by these spontaneous demonstrations of Miss Monroe’s appeal, Fox executives are eagerly searching for new Bit Role Attracts Notice After looking on Marilyn merely as whistle-bait for four years, the film capital became abruptly aware of her last year at the first screening of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle. Audiences of professional people perked up noticeably when the camera switched to a sofa filled by a recumbent blonde in tight-fitting, one-piece lounging pajamas. When the reclining form stirred enough to walk, talk and even kiss “Uncle Lon,” played by Louis Calhern, there were murmurings in the projection room, as the watchers tried to discover the identity of the newcomer; she had not been listed at the beginning of the picture. This same lack was to trouble many another audience. Soon after the picture’s release, Marilyn received a fan letter from a Midwest college fraternity.

“A bunch of us fellows went down to see Asphalt Jungle,” they wrote. “And when you came on the screen we almost lost our eyeballs. We didn’t even know who you were.”

People have rapidly been finding out. Even in All About Eve, surrounded by one of the best casts Hollywood has assembled in recent years, Marilyn won more than her share of attention in the small role of the dumb blonde introduced by George Sanders as “a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts.” More recently, with ears cocked to the whistles and wolf calls that have greeted Miss Monroe’s appearance as the provocative secretary in As Young As You Feel, shrewd exhibitors have begun for the first time to put her name on their theater marquees.

Hollywood’s hearing is no less acute. Today, spurred by Marilyn’s impact on audiences. Fox press agents are in the midst of the biggest publicity build-up since the Jane Russell campaign. During the past 12 months, the studio’s press department has sent out more than 3,000 pictures of Marilyn to newspapers alone. In Germany the editors of Stars and Stripes have selected her “Miss Cheesecake of 1951,” and in Korea her pin-ups swiftly were rated as the choicest wallpaper obtainable.

Like a famous predecessor, Jean Harlow, Marilyn’s name is rapidly becoming the current Hollywood definition of sex appeal. After reading a Soviet attack on poems which have romantic ardor without social significance, one Hollywood columnist, Jim Henaghan, boldly suggested, “Let’s drop a handful of pictures of Marilyn Monroe on them and see what happens.”

Even on a sound stage among actors, to whom there is little new under the sun, Marilyn is a disturbing influence. During the filming of Love Nest, scheduled for release in a few weeks, Marilyn caused a small crisis when she appeared in a red and white polka-dot Bikini bathing suit de- and combustible roles for her. Proceeding cautiously by placing Miss Monroe in smaller roles to gain experience, the studio chiefs are keeping their fingers crossed. They hope they have another Harlow. Even production chief Darryl Zanuck has gone on record: “Miss Monroe is the most exciting new personality in Hollywood in a long time.”

Officials at Fox are quick to change the subject, however, when it is mentioned that the studio discovered Miss Monroe five years ago, dropped her contract after one eventful year, and then scrambled to return her to the fold after a rival studio had proved in The Asphalt Jungle that she could do more than adorn backgrounds and pose for cheesecake.

Wrong guesses about Marilyn are nothing new. Her greatest handicap, odd as it seems, is her face and figure, which automatically have typed her as the brainless sort. A few persons who have looked a little closer have seen, behind the panchromatic make-up and the studied, protective starlet mannerisms, a face on which 23 years of living have written several anguished chapters. Sometimes, behind the false eyelashes, comes the look of a lost child.

For most of her life, Marilyn was a lost child, with no family of her own—just a long succession of strange households that offered her food and shelter of various sorts, and little else. During the greater part of her childhood she was a public ward; her name then was Norma Jean Baker. She was a thin, sad-faced little girl of five, living with foster parents in an industrial suburb of Los Angeles, when she was first told that her father had been killed in an automobile accident before she was born, and that her mother had become too ill to take care of her.

This first household was a religious, austere one; dancing, smoking, movies and playing cards were considered “works of the devil.” Yet a few months later, transferred to the equally modest home of a pair of Hollywood extras, she was taught to play cards and taken to picture shows. Eager to discover her talents, the movie-struck “parents” asked if she could dance. Norma Jean obligingly wiggled through her versions of a Spanish fandango, a hula-hula, and a sailor’s hornpipe, all of which movie theaters on endless Saturday afternoons, seeing the movie over and over until long past her bedtime. It required no special clairvoyance on her part to understand that her successive “parents” cared little about her. Once she remembered passing a closed door and hearing a woman say, “I’ve got to get rid of that quiet little girl, she makes me nervous.” As her childish efforts to win love and acceptance were repeatedly rejected, she gradually withdrew into the world of fantasy.

She invented solitary games. Once, as a Christmas present, she asked for a flashlight. With this as a prop, Marilyn for weeks afterward played detective, prowling up and down the nearby streets in full daylight intently jotting down the numbers of license plates. On the way to school she composed lengthy fantasies, and even in the classroom spent much of her time dreaming about an imaginary father who was kind and good and looked like Clark Gable.

Once, when no family could be found to take her, Norma Jean stayed for several months at the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home Society, a temporary refuge for children from broken families. She tried to run away, but was caught and taken before the superintendent. She stood there rigid and silent, awaiting her punishment. Instead, the superintendent remarked how pretty Norma Jean looked. Taking out her own powder puff, she gently patted it across the youngster’s shiny nose. The little girl looked up, baffled by this unexpected kindness.

“No one ever before had noticed my hair, or my face—or even me—I guess,” says Marilyn of the occasion. “For the first time in my life, I felt loved.”

She soon moved on to another foster home, however. As she grew older, Norma Jean became tall and gawky, with short strawlike hair, hesitant, sometimes stuttering speech, and a shy, scared manner. One family called her “little mouse,” and the only way in which boys noticed her was to sing out “Norma Jean—string bean.”

looked alike. She was desperately hurt when her new guardians laughed aloud.

Although little Norma Jean tried often and hard to please her assorted parents, she was to meet with many another rebuff. During her nomadic childhood she was to confront the restrictions, prejudices and peculiarities of 12 different families before she was sixteen.

There was the Christmas when Norma Jean was given a part in the class play, only to lose it when her current foster mother, fearing she would forget her lines and embarrass the family, asked the teacher to give it to someone else. Or the Easter when she was on a stage for the first time, as one of 50 black-robed youngsters forming a cross at Hollywood Bowl.

“We all had on white tunics under the black robes,” Marilyn recalls, “and at a given signal we were supposed to throw off the robes, changing the cross from black to white. But I got so interested in the people, the orchestra and the hills that I forgot to watch the conductor for the signal. And there I was—the only black mark on a white cross. The family I was living with never forgave me.”

She came to expect rebuffs or the indifference of a new guardian, who, on the first day of school, took her to the door and pointed: “Go down two blocks, turn left and keep going till you see the school.” She got used to being left in neighborhood A Home with Motherly Care At about the time she entered junior high school at the age of twelve, Norma Jean underwent a startling physical change. She began to fill out. The change in the attitude of the boys was no less startling. Their gibes changed to whistles. In the same yea.” she moved to West Los Angeles, where, in the home of a childless widow, Mrs. Ana Lower, Norma Jean found for the first time the warmth and maternal affection she had never had.

When boys would walk Norma Jean home from school, “Aunt Ana” would invite them in for a cold lemonade. When a crush on a neighboring twenty-five-year-old aircraft worker received no response, Aunt Ana compassionately understood. And when they could afford only one change of school clothes, Aunt Ana would wash and iron every day so the girl at least could be clean and fresh.

Norma Jean began to blossom. At school she developed a hero worship for Abraham Lincoln and spent hours at home doing unrequired extra work. She even won a prize for writing a short story, which the teacher said was the best he ever had received from a student. Her work was so good that she skipped a grade, the high seventh.

After two years, Aunt Ana’s job began to take her away from home much of the time, and it again became necessary for Norma Jean to move on. Nonetheless, she made frequent trips back to the West Los Angeles home until Aunt Ana’s death three years ago. Today, Marilyn still remembers Mrs. Lower with the attachment most children feel for their real mothers.

At sixteen, when her twelfth set of foster parents prepared to send her to another home because of a trip East, Marilyn impetuously married a twenty-three-year-old boy friend in the Merchant Marine. The hasty marriage soon broke up”, and Marilyn found herself compelled to earn a living.

With no training for any career, she turned to modeling. She stayed at it for a couple of years, and by the summer of 1946, her appearance on several magazine covers had brought talent scouts from both Howard Hughes and Fox studios in her pursuit. Suddenly, things happened fast. Within a matter of days, she had been tested at Fox, been signed to a contract beginning at $125 a week, and had had her name changed to Marilyn Monroe.

From a Cameraman’s Angle “When I first watched her,” says Leon Shamroy, the Academy Award-winning cameraman who made the screen test, “I thought: This girl will be another Harlow —and I still do. Her natural beauty plus her inferiority complex gave her a look of mystery.”

Marilyn was rushed into a small role in a Technicolor film called Scudda Hoo. Scudda Hay, but her part failed to survive the economies of the cutting room. During the next few months, while she gradually lost some of her shyness posing for pin-ups, Marilyn had only one other opportunity to gain an audience. One March day the publicity department set up a shot in which she posed clad in a flesh-colored negligee. Afterward she had to walk a quarter mile back to the wardrobe department to get her clothes, and a strong wind had arisen as she strolled up the company street past the administration building. Word of what was happening passed around like lightning.

“It was like the Lindbergh home-coming,” recalls a studio executive. “People were leaning out of every window. And there was Marilyn, naive and completely unperturbed, smiling and waving up at everybody she knew, didn’t know or hoped to know.”

Unfortunately, the one executive who missed the display was Zanuck. Soon thereafter, still not having met Miss Monroe and apparently unaware of her charms, he failed to pick up her option at the end of her first year, and Marilyn returned to the limbo of forgotten Hollywood Blondes.

Signed on at Columbia a few months later, she was given a role as a burlesque queen in Ladies of the Chorus, a B picture made in nine days, which few people saw and even fewer remember. Her only other appearance in a six-month stay at Columbia was on the wall of a Western set, as a pin-up serenaded by Gene Autry.

The first time most people in Hollywood recall seeing Marilyn Monroe on the screen was in an eight-word part in the Marx Brothers comedy Love Happy, made for United Artists shortly after she left Columbia. The scene called for Marilyn to walk into an office dressed in a tight-fitting, silver lame evening gown and anxiously tell private eye Groucho Marx, “I need your help.” Groucho was then to set up the gag with an innocent, “What can I do?” Whereupon Marilyn was to hip-wiggle out of the door replying, “Men keep following me.”

When they started shooting, Marilyn sashayed into the room with the impact of a 50-piece brass band. Groucho stared, said his line, “What can I do for you?” as scheduled. Then suddenly he turned to face the camera, raised his famous eyebrows and ad-libbed, “Am I kidding?”

So effective was Marilyn Monroe’s brief appearance that she was featured in all the advertising and sent on a personal appearance tour to exploit the picture.

Aside from these short-term chores, Marilyn lived a hand-to-mouth existence. Once, after several good modeling jobs, she bought a small convertible, but lost it quickly to the finance company. At another time, dead broke, she found sanctuary and a helping hand in the home of Lucille Ryman, talent department head at M-G-M. Another friend, and a top Hollywood agent, the late Johnny Hyde, tried to help her career along. But a short stint as a dancing girl in the Fox Western, Ticket to Tomahawk, merely paid off old grocery bills.

It was not until early last year that Mari- lyn got her first big break, when Miss Ryman recommended her to John Huston for a role in The Asphalt Jungle. Despite his doubts as to her acting ability, Huston promised her a tryout. After working with her coach, Natasha Lytess, for three days, Marilyn returned and read through the scene for the director. Before he could say a word, she asked: “Please, Mr. Huston, let me do it again? I know I can do better.”

When Huston nodded assent, Marilyn got out of the stiff-backed chair, kicked off her high-heeled shoes, and sat cross-legged on the floor, to read the part with childlike ease. She got the role.

Before its public release, Fox director Joe Mankiewicz saw The Asphalt Jungle at a private screening and decided Miss Monroe looked like the type he needed for the dumb blonde in All About Eve. She got the part, of course, and did well with it. That was her second big break, and it led directly to the third, and biggest yet.

After Zanuck saw the first day’s rushes on All About Eve. he put in a hasty call for Miss Monroe and her agent. Slightly embarrassed when Marilyn told him she had tried without success to see him while working for Fox three years previously, Zanuck made up for it with a new seven-year contract that started at $500 a week, with options up to $3,500 a week. Marilyn, at long last, had her foot firmly planted on the ladder.

Off the screen. Marilyn Monroe has managed to maintain an almost Garbolike secrecy about her private life. At the studio, she makes friends easily and is well liked, but her only really close personal friends are Natasha Lytess and Lucille Ryman. She is rarely seen at night clubs, and her refusal to follow the approved starlet custom of being seen with as many different men as often as possible has puzzled even the usually clairvoyant columnists. Their bewilderment, in turn, puzzles her. “If there were someone I was really interested in, I’d go out with him all I could. But why go out on dates just to be going out?”

Marilyn doesn’t even show up at formal premieres, normally considered compulsory attendance affairs for starlets. When the publicity department demanded that she make an appearance at the premiere of All About Eve, she flatly refused, explaining that she had to study her lines for a screen test the following morning.

But at the studio and in her public appearances Marilyn eagerly fulfills all the requirements expected of a starlet. She is particularly concerned with looking her best, and spends hours at the make-up table in preparation for even commonplace engagements. The people at Fox who are responsible for seeing that she gets to appointments on time are certain that if each day had 30 hours, Marilyn would use them all in getting ready. No matter how much advance notice she is given, she is always late. Her “I’ll be just a minute” can range anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours.

Actually this concern stems from her childhood eagerness to please. For in her unguarded moments, Marilyn is still a shy, uncertain girl, who takes solitary pleasure in long early-morning walks up and down the vacant Beverly Hills alleys, clad in old shirts and faded blue jeans. She has an oppressive awareness of the swift passage of time and of her own perishability. She works long hours at home over her lines; beside her is a large wall mirror—waxed so that her own image will not distract her. On the mirror is scrawled the one Latin word she knows—nunc—meaning now.

“I’m twenty-three now,” said Marilyn recently, in the tone of someone who has discovered she has an incurable ailment. “Soon I’ll be twenty-five. Before I know it- I’ll be twenty-eight.”

Marilyn lives in a small Beverly Hills apartment, with few of the fairy princess trappings that she once dreamed about and can now afford. Her wardrobe is modest, and the most notable furnishings are an exercise board, a phonograph with records ranging from Beethoven to Jelly Roll Morton, and a multitude of books.

In the past, it has been standard operating procedure for some press agents to suggest that the harebrained cuties they publicize are really 14-carat intellects who furrow their brows nightly over Albert Schweitzer, Leo Tolstoi and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The astonishing fact is that Marilyn does just that—not because she is an old friend of those writers, but because she would like to be. On a shelf over her bed and in her three-tier bookcase is an impressive array of well-thumbed volumes by such people as Walt Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Milton and Lincoln Steffens (plus Schweitzer, Tolstoi and Emerson).

Without any hullabaloo, Marilyn quietly enrolled last fall at the University of California’s night school in downtown Los Angeles for a course in “Backgrounds of Literature.” She appeared at the sessions without make-up and in informal jacket and skirt, and it was several weeks before anyone in the course knew that “Miss Monroe” was in the movies. When Marilyn was absent one night, a student brought to class a movie magazine with her picture in it. At first the teacher. Claire Seay, refused to believe it. “Marilyn was so attentive, so modest and so humble that she could have been some girl who had just come from a convent,” Mrs. Seay said later.

Aside from the two-year period when she was with Aunt Ana, Marilyn never paid much attention to her studies. Today she has an insatiable desire to make up for it, to learn new things. At night school she is_ constantly pestering the student next to her to find out what certain big words mean. Quite often, like other pretty actresses, she finds herself at parties among famous people like William Saroyan, California’s Governor Earl Warren or Irving Berlin. When the conversation switches to topics like the use of the veto in the United Nations, Marilyn becomes the most attentive listener. The next day she is likely to go to a bookstore for a volume on the subject.

Drab Childhood Seen as Asset Marilyn has long since resigned herself to the fact that whenever she tries to explain her genuine interest in new subjects or ideas she runs into a wall of disbelief. This problem is well understood by her coach: Natasha Lytess feels that Marilyn’s unhappy childhood may one day help her to become an actress of unexpected depth.

“There’s more to Marilyn than meets the eye,” says Miss Lytess. “The trouble is that when people look at her they immediately figure her as a typical Hollywood Blonde. It’s not their fault, though. Marilyn’s soul just doesn’t fit her body.”

Understandably, after being around Hollywood for five years, Marilyn is impatient to prove herself in something more than supporting parts. At Fox, where they are building her up gradually, she has just completed her biggest role yet, assisting Claudette Colbert and MacDonald Carey in Let’s Make It Legal, scheduled for November release. The Monroe glamor gets full display in this film: she appears in two varieties of swimming suits, one brief tennis costume, a sweater-tight golf outfit, two slinky cocktail dresses and one low-cut evening gown.

Other studios, realizing what even one minute of Monroe can do for the box office, have requested her for parts in their forthcoming productions. Most persistent has been RKO, which wanted Marilyn for the lead in High Heels, a story of a dance-hall hostess. But so far 20th Century Fox has refused all loan-out requests.

Meanwhile, like Topsy, who “just growed,” Marilyn believes in letting her curiosity lead her. After the innumerable parental restrictions of her childhood she cannot bear the sense of being cramped by authority or set patterns.

Perhaps that explains what she means when she says, “Someday I want to have a house of my own with trees and grass and hedges all around, but never trim them at all—just let them grow any old way they want.”

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Mechanical Tricks make Fowl Actors Perform

TWELVE chickens, sitting austerely in a miniature jury box, nodded silently in agreement when asked whether the accused rooster was guilty.

An ostrich opened its mouth as though carrying on a conversation with a white trader.

A myna bird shouted, “Hello, how are you?” to a fisherman.

A rooster dashed into a scene, stopped and crowed. A crow with split tongue talked with apparent intelligence for the sound camera.

Mark Sandrich, a Hollywood director who has put many birds through their paces for the screen, has learned that birds are the dumbest actors ever to show their faces to the camera; yet, because they lack intelligence, frequently they will perform their bits better than the more intelligent animal family.

Directors Must Know Animal Psychology “Direction of birds for the talkies requires a combination of patience and resourcefulness,” Sandrich explained. “It involves a knowledge of mechanics and animal psychology. Some birds are directed by purely mechanical means.”

The twelve chickens nodded when two long wooden strips, on which were tacked twelve grains of corn, suddenly were dropped down. The chickens pecked at the corn. Others are cued by surprises.

“The Australian magpie,” said Sand-rich, “is the most intelligent bird with which we work. Yet its criminal tendencies make it a difficult subject. The magpie, like the myna bird and the parrot, can be taught to repeat sounds; and, as the parrot ‘talks’ with no intelligent knowledge, so with the other ‘talking’ Chickens, the director has learned, can be made to pose by stroking the back of their heads. Roosters enliven scenes with plenty of action. Ducks and geese are “plain dumb.”

And an ostrich once provided some of the funniest bird scenes ever recorded. Sandrich was directing “Trader Ginsberg” and wanted the ostrich to swallow a tiny radio set, about the size of an apple; but the set must lodge half-way down the bird’s neck.

How Ostrich Was Made to Talk Here’s how it was worked: The director cut an orange square to represent the radio, tied a thread around the bird’s throat about half-way down and permitted the bird to reach down with its beak and swallow what appeared to be the radio set.

The orange stuck at the prescribed point. Now, the bird must open and close its beak as though words flowing through the radio actually were emitted by the bird itself.

Glue, stuck in the top of the bird’s bill, failed when the ostrich swallowed it. Spirit gum similarly failed. Then a wad of chewing gum stuck inside the upper-bill accomplished the result, and the ostrich “talked” during a long scene.

Unique Film Trebles Width of Movies

MOVIES three times as wide as usual are made possible by a new lens invention. The principle of the lens designed to widen the photographing capacity of the average movie film three times is much the same as the distorting mirrors at the circus. Set into a copper frame which fits into the front of the camera are finely ground cylinders of glass, one concave, the other convex. This arrangement contracts the image two-thirds and is called lateral condensation as no perpendicular contraction is necessary or desired by theater owners and picture producers. In projection the same principle is applied, except that instead of condensing the image it increases it two-thirds to take up the distortion in the original negative.

The idea, originated by Leon F. Douglass, has taken the movie industry by storm. It is an outstanding contribution.

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Crashing a Zeppelin for Fun

by DICK COLE

who gives you a look behind the scenes of the most spectacular air thriller ever made.

Jealously guarded secrets of the amazing Zeppelin crash in “Hell’s Angels” now revealed to Dick Cole by Howard Hughes, the producer of this spectacular movie.

“Wasn’t it marvelous! How in the world did they ever take it?”

Such exclamations and questions are heard on every side as a teeming crowd pours forth from a theater after seeing “Hell’s Angels” -—the outstanding aerial war picture of the day. And it is little wonder! For several hours the spectators have been soaring 10,000 feet above the earth in a huge, wartime Zeppelin, or they have been sky-riding in a giant bombing plane.

As on a magic carpet, the spectators are carried from the Zeppelin just before a heroic, Allied pilot—his machine-gun jammed—dives his plane into the gas bags of the airship. The aerial juggernaut comes hurtling out of the skies, a huge, flaming hulk; crashes to the earth with a deafening roar—-a twisted mass of glowing wreckage.

This is but one of the breath-taking scenes from “Hell’s Angels.” Again the puzzling question: “How in the world did they take it?”

Of course, anyone’s ordinary reasoning power tells one that it was not a full-size, man-carrying Zeppelin that fell from out the skies. But, to believe so, is no more erratic than to believe the know-it-all, wise guy, who tells you in tones of belittlement: “Huh! It was just faked! I know! That was just a toy balloon that they used.”

Both beliefs are wrong. It was done by scale model photography. This is not comparable at all to the crude miniature stuff that is injected from time to time in pictures, and which often changes a tragic situation into a comic farce. Nor are scale models employed solely to keep down production cost. The primary purpose is to put across a scene with greater realism and finer photographic values. The use of scale models should not imply belittlement.

In producing “Hell’s Angels,” it was entirely within the range of the pocket-book of the producer, Howard Hughes, to buy and to wreck a full-size Zeppelin. But, even so, the film record would not be comparable with that recorded with the use of the scale model. In the latter case, the entire set was under the complete control of the director; the set was lighted to give the best photographic values; close-up shots of the Zeppelin falling in flames and its ultimate crash to the earth were taken with precision; all of which would have been impossible if a full-size airship were used, to say nothing of the hazard to life and property.

To produce the Zeppelin scenes, Mr. Hughes gathered about him a staff of the cleverest technicians in the United States. A model Zeppelin was built—an exact replica of a German, wartime dirigible. This was built to a scale of one foot equals one inch. So the model was approximately 60 feet long and 6 feet in diameter. Quite a sizeable “miniature”! Even the framework followed closely the true Zeppelin design.

The huge dirigible hangar at Arcadia—-adjacent to Los Angeles—was leased from the government, and in this building all the scenes of the Zeppelin were shot. Lights giving millions of candle-power were installed. Miniature sets were laid out on the floor to give suitable back-ground for vertical shots of the “Zep.” Chemical apparatus was installed to create clouds. A steel cable was stretched from one corner post to the middle of the opposite wall. The Zeppelin was suspended from a trolley which traveled on the cable. It could move along the cable about four times its length. Other cables permitted the Zeppelin to be raised or lowered at the will of an operator at an electric winch. Runways—or balconies—completely around the inside walls of the hangar, were vantage points for the numerous cameras. In addition, portable, parallel platforms could be moved anywhere on the floor. A cat-walk near the roof of the hangar was utilized for vertical shots.

In presenting the picture on the screen, the Zeppelin makes its first spectacular appearance emerging from a fleecy, cumulus cloud. The clouds are seen to roll back as the nose of the airship pushes through. This is a close-up shot, and so real that it seems the Zeppelin must leave the screen and soar into the auditorium of the theater.

How was it done? The Zeppelin is at the end of the cable farthest from the camera. Immediately in front of the airship a dense cloud of “liquid smoke” is released. This is the chemical used for laying down a smoke screen or for “sky-writing.” This gas remains as a gaseous mass for some time before diffusing into the air. The Zeppelin is slowly drawn through this “smoke.” Vivid lighting effects reproduce the smoke as a cumulus cloud.

Next, the spectator is permitted to ride in the “Zep” and see its inside workings; the skeleton framework; the gas bag; the power gondolas.

The motors are running—real motors. One sees the rocker-arms rock, and hears the clicking tappets. On the model Zeppelin, the propellers are turned with quarter H.P. motors. The interior sets of the Zeppelin were built full size.

The “Zep” cruises on its way. London is its objective. A member of the crew is lowered thousands of feet in a gondola suspended by a slender cable to get their bearings. The object is to drop bombs on Trafalgar Square. The observer revolts at bombing a sleeping city. He telephones misinformation to the Zeppelin, and the bombs drop and explode harmlessly in a lake. But the Allied flyers are aroused. They take to the air in their fighting planes to battle the Zeppelin. A terrific aerial battle rages. The “Zep” fights off all planes — but one. This one climbs high above the Zeppelin. The pilot’s machine-gun jams. In heroic desperation, he dives his plane into the vitals of the Zeppelin. The giant dirigible buckles up with a broken back and bursts into flames.

How was it done? Part of this scene is a sample of exceptionally clever double exposure. A drawing explains. First, a miniature airplane is swung from a wire against a flat black back-ground. This is shot with a high-speed camera—about ten times normal. When reproduced at normal speed, this would represent a full-sized plane in the distance taking a power dive of several thousand feet.

The undeveloped negative of the miniature plane is rewound into the camera magazine, and a shot of the Zeppelin, moving slowly, is recorded on the same film. The composite picture is shown in the enlarged frame. The moment the airplane hits the Zeppelin the film is “cut,” and the sequence of the picture is resumed when the Zeppelin is fired.

During part of the heroic dive toward the Zeppelin, seemingly the spectator is riding in the plane. This illusion was created in the hangar. The Zeppelin was suspended about half way between the roof and the floor, and the camera-man was lowered toward it. A miniature, pictorial set on the floor gave a suitable back-ground; the high-speed camera did the rest.

Now comes the big, breath-taking scene— the fall of the flaming Zeppelin. To make sure of suitable film, fourteen cameras shot the scene.

The covering of the gas bag is sprayed with kerosene. Everything is ready. Comes the director’s cry: “Camera!” A special prop in the “in’ards” of the “Zep” is jerked out. The dirigible sags in the middle, and then bursts into flames. All the cameras are in action. The man at the electric winch slowly lowers the flaming hulk. It passes into and out of the range of the cameras. When the flaming wreck is about eight feet from the floor, it is dropped with a crash. To make the falling act very vivid, a pair of cameras are in a pit in the floor covered with plate glass, and shoot the vertical fall. And the fall of a burning Zeppelin from the skies is a celluloid record. In the cutting room, the best of the shots are compiled into the finished film which the spectator sees on the screen.

Be it said that all those in the hangar during the “fire” were not sorry when it was all over. The camera-men up on the cat-walk had no occasion to take a Turkish bath for six months.

“Hell’s Angels” is an outstanding example of the far-reaching possibilities of the model technician’s art. Because a real Zeppelin was not used, and the crew not incinerated in the fire, should not detract the spectator’s interest in the picture. In the wild and wooly “westerners,” one knows that the Indians are not really shot off their mustangs. But if they tumble off and “bite the dust” in realistic fashion, the spectators howl their delight.

For realism, “Hell’s Angels” stands out alone in its class.

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Puppet Movies

ACHIEVING a third-dimensional effect by combining puppets with actual sets. George Pal, 32-year-old Hungarian, has brought to America a new form of movie presentation. First of his color cartoons reached the screen recently as a nine-minute show.

Instead of drawings, Pal uses wooden characters which perform on tiny sets, with synchronized music, songs, and special effects. Although the actors are puppets, there are no strings; for no Pal puppet ever moves. Instead, the artist places on the set a complete stationary figure for each phase of a movement. When the heroine makes eyes at the hero, 28 individual heads are fitted, one after another, onto her body, the first showing her eyes wide open, the last with them closed.

First step in preparing a “pup-petoon,” the word being derived from puppet and cartoon, is the writing of the script, followed by composition of the music in order that movements of the characters may be properly timed, and designing of the sets. Pal then makes color drawings of the first, middle, and last phases of each movement, while assistants complete 25 or more intermediate drawings.

From these rough cartoons, the puppets are built. Finally, they take their places on the tiny sets, which may be a miniature railroad, or a model of a mountainous mesa against a painted cloud background. Frame by frame, each puppet takes a new position, or his head and hands are changed.

Pal was a successful cartoonist in Berlin seven years ago, and in 1935 formed his own studio to experiment with the puppet-cartoon idea. Later he produced similar pictures in Holland. Trained to be an architect, he is applying at his Hollywood studio principles learned in that profession.

IN CINECOLOR —SEE and HEAR the latest release of POPULAR SCIENCE-ON-THE-SCREEN

the glamorous story of Hawaii’s Pineapple Industry

Produced in Cinecolor by FAIRBANKS AND CARLISLE
Distributed by PARAMOUNT PICTURES.

Double Movie Gives Odd Effects

SPECTACULAR movie effects are made possible in a dual projection system devised by a California inventor. For example, a trapeze performer may be shown apparently leaping from the top of a theater into the arms of a fellow acrobat at stage level. In the new system, the standard screen is supplemented by another that forms a vertical extension. Movies are simultaneously projected upon the main and auxiliary screens, from alternating frames of a single film passing through the projector. The latter employs a special rotating shutter, with an open sector for direct projection upon the lower screen. The opposite sector of the shutter holds a mirror that directs the projector’s beam, with the aid of a second mirror, to the upper screen. Thus the trapeze performer may be shown disappearing from his swing, to reappear a moment later in the arms of the man below. By trick photog- raphy and an arrangement permitting the second mirror to be turned with a handle, like a spotlight, the inventor maintains it is also possible to “follow” the simulated leap all the way down. Both “straight” and “trick” effects can be applied equally well to scenes including airplanes, high buildings, or other elevated points where part of the action takes place. Loudspeakers behind upper and lower screens make corresponding sound effects come from the right directions, thus heightening the realism of the pictures.

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Life Size Radio Movies Are Coming

C. Francis Jenkins is inventor of the original movie camera and holder of more than 400 patents, many of them in the field of radiovision. He predicts for the near future life size radio movies and radiovision of news events which may be projected on theater screens at the actual instant they happen. Jenkins describes the present status of television and the lines along which he is working.

by C. FRANCIS JENKINS Famous Inventor

WITHIN a short time, possibly within a year, I expect to see movie screens showing life size pictures of news events as they are happening. We are working now on that problem. We may not be first to solve it, but it is only a question of time until some one does, and it is quite possible that we may be first.

When the sun gets far enough north this summer to provide the necessary actinic lays I expect to broadcast, from an airplane, a radiovision view of the ground and cities beneath me. The apparatus is already built, but was completed too late last fall to permit trying.

First, though, I should explain the terms radiovision, radiomovies and television. I demonstrated both of the first two in June, 1925, in Washington, but it was not until April, 1927, when the American Telephone and Telegraph company transmitted visual images by wire that the public became interested. In prepared press matter the A. T. & T. called this “television,” meaning vision by wire, just as telephone means voice by wire and telegraph means graphic symbols by wire. The public has since used “television” to mean any picture, whether still or moving, transmitted either by radio or wire, and received at the other end in a form in which it could be instantly seen.

That’s a rather loose definition, because it covers many things. I prefer to call movies transmitted by radio waves radiomovies, and actual vision of a thing or person, when sent by radio broadcast, radio-vision. That makes for clearness and intelligible discussion of the various processes used.

To produce pictures which can be projected on a large screen, we will have to abandon entirely the principles which have been used so far.

There isn’t, at this date, a single system of picture transmission, whether by wire or radio, whether movies, vision or even transmission, whether by wire or radio, whether movies, vision or even still photographs, which actually reproduces a picture at the receiving end.

A lady visiting my laboratory and watching the radiomovie receiver in operation said: ‘-But Mr. Jenkins, where is the picture formed? Is it on the enlarging lens, on the mirror which changes the angle of projection, or is it farther back in the machine?”

I tapped the back of my head and said: “It’s here. There is no picture except what your eyes and brain form. You think you see a picture in the machine, but all you really see is a rapidly fluctuating point of light.” That’s hard for lots of people to understand. When we broadcast one of our silhouettes you see little figures going through their pantomine, and when we broadcast an ordinary film you see half tones like pictures on the movie screen. But actually neither picture exists outside your brain.

To explain why that is let me first recall a childhood amusement. Did you ever lay a coin under a sheet of paper, and with a pencil cause the image to appear on the paper? That’s what all present systems of picture transmission do. Instead of a pencil the lines are drawn by a point of light sweeping across the picture screen. They move so rapidly (forty-eight lines to the picture and fifteen pictures per second) that the eye continues to see them after they have actually disappeared, and, seeing 48 lines at one time, sees an entire picture.

A motor driven shutter, usually a revolving disc with 48 tiny holes, located in a spiral, sweeps past in front of a neon lamp, which is constantly fluctuating as the incoming signal strength varies. The fluctuations paint bright, shadowy and dark spaces, and when the eye assembles them as a whole you see a picture.

All picture receivers operate in the same general way, but there are two types of scanners, as they are called. One is the disc, and the other is the drum type. With either the possible size of the picture is the square formed by the distance between the inner and outer, or first and last holes in the spiral, and the first and second hole, at the inner end, where the holes are closest together. On a twelve-inch disc, for example, you can construct a scanner that will produce pictures about three-quarters of an inch square. The size of the disc increases so rapidly, as you increase the size of the picture, that it soon becomes too big to be used in a machine of any reasonable size, and likewise takes too much power to turn it at a constant, and relatively high, speed.

So I invented a drum scanner—a hollow drum, with the holes arranged in helical rows around its circumference, and the neon lamp inside. Then I went a step farther, and, instead of having a drum big enough for 48 holes in one helical row, I added more targets to my lamp, and arranged several rows of holes. Thus with a six-target lamp—the same as six ordinary lamps built in one, it only takes six helical rows of eight holes each. To get the maximum amount of light from each target to the hole in the drum I fitted little eighth-inch thick rods of quartz or glass rod, leading from the hollow hub, in which the light was located, to the holes in the drum. It is a curious fact that a rod of just ordinary glass will transmit more light than the same amount of air, while a quartz rod is so peculiar that it will even transmit light around bends without losing any of the rays.

Because of the multi-target lamps and drum scanner I can produce a much larger picture in only a fraction of the space taken by a disc machine. An eight-inch drum with a four-inch face will produce a two-inch square picture, which would require a disc at least thirty-six inches in diameter.

Several persons have asked how many radio fans are receiving broadcast movies and pictures today. Our fan mail indicates about 20,000 receive the broadcast from our two stations, one here in Washington and the other at the factory in Newark. There are many more receivers than that in use, however, for not everyone is so situated he can pick up our broadcast. The manufacturer of one type of neon glow lamp used in an inexpensive amateur machine I designed told me not long ago that they had sold 50,000 of the lamps.

How are we going to project the picture on a movie screen? Certainly not with any existing equipment, for the neon lamp has a dull, pinkish red glow, and even with a ten or twelve-inch magnifying lens in front of the screen the best we are able to get is a picture that appears to be about eight inches square.

To produce projected pictures we must substitute a powerful arc or incandescent for the relatively weak neon lamp, and, since we can’t vary the light to paint the picture, we must make the broadcast signal operate some sort of shutter mechanism, in other words just reverse the present process.

Next, instead of just transmitting one line at a time, we should have an entire picture, on a flat surface, just as a magic lantern projects a scene on the screen.

Way back in 1894, the year before I built the original motion picture projector and demonstrated it before the Franklin Institute, I suggested, in an article in The Electrical Engineer, that pictures might be transmitted by electricity and reproduced on a flat surface by assembling huge squares of thousands of selinium cells at the sending end, and a corresponding square of small electric globes at the receiving end, each cell being connected by wire to the corresponding light. The light sensitive cells would receive an image of anything placed before them, just as a photographic plate “takes” a picture, and, by transmitting varying amounts of current, light the lamps to varying degrees, so that a picture would be painted on the receiving board.

Nothing ever came of that suggestion, but in searching for a new method of receiving radiomovies, we tried a variation of it. On a large square board we assembled 48 rows of flashlight lamps, with 48 in each row, a total of 2,304 three-volt lights. The lamps were wired to a commutator, which distributed current to them in proportion to the strength of the incoming radio signals.

It was an interesting experiment, but it failed, for a curious reason. Remember, the flashlight lamps were all the standard three-volt type. The first problem was how much input voltage do we need to light three-volt lamps, with one-fourth ampere input, when the commutator speed makes contact of 1/35,000 of a second for each lamp. And we found the answer was 95 volts.

So we bought 2,500 lamps, screwed 2,304 of them into our sockets, and started to work. But it wasn’t long until we had run out of spares, as lamp after lamp burned out. The trouble was that it took 95 volts to light the lamps, but with that much pressure instead of the current flowing 1/35,000 of a second, the contact points arced, and the arc didn’t break until the contact had traveled some distance, so, instead of a 1/35,000 of a second flash, we were actually getting a contact lasting 1/15,000 of a second, and hence the lamps burned out. If we reduced the voltage to shorten the arc the lamps would not get enough current, and if we furnished enough current the lamps would burn out.

We were still convinced that the flat picture theory was good, but the method was wrong.

We are now experimenting with something quite different. Instead of lamps we have built up a square of glass cells, something like a honeycomb, with square instead of hexagonal cells. Each cell is half an inch square, from center of one thin glass wall to center of the other, and they are four inches deep. When a powerful lamp is placed behind the cells, the rays pass through them, and, if we can open and close the cells fast enough, using radio signals to do the work, we can create a picture by blocking them out, either completely or partially.

It is too early to say whether that experiment will succeed. If it doesn’t, we will keep on trying. At present we are using the attraction and repulsion of changing current to lift and lower little sheets of foil in each cell. As they flap up and down they act as valves, alternately admitting and barring the light rays.

If our present line of research succeeds we will have a square of light cells 24 by 24 inches. Behind that will be a powerful light, and in front the necessary lenses to gather the light rays forming the picture, and project them on a screen. With refinements in construction the size of the cells could be reduced, and a home receiver, with a large incandescent light instead of an arc, built on the same principles.

Whether we will succeed remains to be seen, as I have said. But if we don’t some one is bound, sooner or later, to solve the problem. It may take a new idea, but given time the human brain is going to solve the problem.

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Movie Stunt Men Risk Their Lives to Thrill Millions

By John E. Lodge

NINE times, a movie stunt man plunged into the swirling rapids of a Washington river, swimming forty-five minutes in water twenty degrees below the freezing point. In Southern California, another demolished nine new automobiles in spectacular crashes within a week. A third member of this strange fraternity jumped an untrained farm horse sixty feet into a pool of water; three others walked leisurely in asbestos suits through seven gallons of flaming oil, scattered over a steep stairway. Still another pulled the pin to unloose the tongue of an old-fashioned western stagecoach and plunged down a mountain canyon in the runaway vehicle.

Every day, somewhere on location or within the walls of a Hollywood sound stage, dare-devils who follow the world’s most bizarre and dangerous occupation, tempt fate with their courageous feats. Although hundreds of young men offer their services to the studios, willing to undertake the wildest stunt that any director may conceive, seven ”old-timers” —veterans in their middle thirties—perform nine-tenths of all the hair-raising episodes you see on the screen.

They “double” for famous actors and actresses whenever the stars’ safety is threatened. In Hollywood there are, too, a number of “bump men,” athletes who undertake less hazardous swims, fights, falls, and rides. But when any of these “doubles” declines some job which means death if he misses, the casting director calls for one of the veteran stunt men.

These seven are a small remnant of the scores of stunt men who have come and gone with the years, 130 of whom have met death during the performance of difficult stunts for the screen.

Their names—Duke Green, Bob Rose, Gordon Carveth, Cliff Lyons, Yackima Canutt. Frank Clark, and Matt Gilman— you never see on the screen. They appear on a set for a day or two, thrill actors and technicians with their daring, and move on to another job, frequently without knowing even the name of the picture they have helped to make.

Yet, the veterans in the game have evolved a science by which they face serious injury, or perhaps death, a hundred times a year. “Timing and nerve” is the formula a stunt man will offer for his freedom from hurts. He applies principles as exact as is possible to make sure he will emerge unscathed from a four-story fall, an underwater struggle with a man-eating shark, or a plunge off a trestle in a locomotive.

Yet the best-laid plans, skill, and experience do not always save a performer from injury. For instance, consider Gordon Carveth’s experience when he answered a call to make a scene at a beet- sugar factory in Chino, Calif., recently.

The director led him up to the fourth floor. “See that open well behind the fence?” he said. “You fight on this side; you take a punch in the jaw and drop backward through the fence. Cameras will catch you falling past each floor, and the net will break your fall below—I hope.”

It happened the property man had forgotten to bring along the breakaway fencing, made of fragile balsa wood or desert yucca, so Carveth ordered a carpenter to cut the regular fence in four places. The fight began. Carveth and a professional boxer pounded each other, the pair moving gradually toward the well. When Carveth reached the fence, the boxer struck Carveth on the chin, carrying the punch through to give him added momentum.

The fence gave way like paper and the stunt man rolled himself up for the fall, his knees and hips bent slightly. Instead of landing on his back, as he had planned, the momentum caused him to strike the net feet-first, the force of the blow driving his left knee against his forehead. Within a few minutes a bump the size of an egg rose on his head, but the make-up man “erased” the bump with appropriate shades of grease paint, and Carveth repeated the fall twice before the factory whistle blew at noon.

It was Bob Rose, a wiry little man of 125 pounds, who faced the man-eating shark. He arrived at the studio not long ago, to see property men holding the shark in a portable tank while a muzzle was tied ‘ over his mouth. The shark then was dropped into a larger tank, into which the camera peered through a plate-glass window. Five minutes later, the strange battle commenced.

“Never have I experienced a more weird sensation,” Rose told me. “I felt sure I could rely on my hands and the clear water for protection, but the creature gave me everything he had in the first round. He tried to ram me with his nose, while I could see his jaws moving in a frantic effort to open. His tail swished every time I dodged, and threatened to knock me through the side. After a half min- ute, I came to the surface, gulped fresh air, and returned to the battle. Bubbles began to fill the water. While this gave a fine camera effect, it clouded the water so I could hardly see. When I ducked after my fourth trip up, I saw that his muzzle had slipped. No more time for pictures then! I grabbed the ladder and pulled myself over the edge of that tank quicker than a cat climbs a tree.”

Although a slip would have ended Rose’s career at that instant, he considers the plunge into a river in a locomotive actually more dangerous. An ancient coal burner had been rebuilt to duplicate a modern Goliath of the rails. A bridge had been weakened to make sure the engine and two box cars would plunge to their destruction. Dressed in a woman’s clothing, Rose took his place in the cab, opened the throttle, and roared down the rails. When he reached the bridge, the engine started to crash down through the wooden structure and Rose dived through the cab window into the running water fifty feet below. Timed to a split second, his stunt earned for him $750, and required no more than thirty seconds to complete.

Duke Green has braved the cold waters of many streams in perilous swims, but his nine plunges into the north fork of the Nooksack in four days provided one of the toughest experiences ever tackled by any stunt man. Although he was protected from neck to knees by an inflated rubber suit, intended to give him buoyancy, he lost fifteen pounds during the ordeal of remaining for a total of forty-five minutes in the stream; his clothing froze on his back, three fingers on each hand were frozen as stiff as boards, and he could not breathe normally for two hours after each plunge into the river.

“Cold water takes more out of a man than any other motion-picture stunt,” he told me. “Three doctors and two rubbers worked on me every time I came out. I lost my hearing and couldn’t understand a shout. For hours, I felt as though I was standing under a freezing shower. When blood began to return to my fingers, which had turned blue from the intense cold, I did not know whether to holler, stand up and cheer, or grit my teeth and bear it.”

Despite the skill required and the pain often endured, stunt men as a rule are poorly paid. Many risk their lives for as little as $50.

Prices vary because bump men compete for jobs, while the more experienced experts look on themselves as professional men who should receive adequate compensation for the grave risks they take.

Several men offered to crash a series of cars for a recent picture, but the studio finally called husky Matt Gilman to wreck nine new sedans in a series of nerve-tingling crashes. No chance to rehearse or shoot retakes—unless the studio wanted to pay for a new automobile each time. During six days of shooting, Gilman drove one car directly in front of a five-ton truck; shoved another through a garage door while the roof caved in on him; telescoped the third against an embankment at the blind end of a street; crashed the fourth into a stack of cases filled with canned goods, and ran another through a drug-store window. The next four he just “tore up,” in a series of collisions with other cars. His only protection from flying glass and splinters lay in a wire-mesh windshield, invisible to the cameras, and a strap beside the seat, which he held to avoid being tossed out of the car.

ONLY one car, the one sacrificed to the truck, was specially prepared. With an acetylene torch, the entire rear end, excepting the driving mechanism, was cut through immediately behind the rear seat. Yet, when Gilman was struck by the truck, the back end failed to come off. Instead, the front door flew open and the stunt man found himself on the fender, wedged in between the two vehicles. Only a heavy foot on the truck’s brake pedal saved him from being crushed to death.

The public suspects that many of these scenes are mere tricks—that dummies, not flesh-and-blood humans, perform the nerve tinglers. Yet in one recent picture, Rose not only planned the stunts and directed six other experienced stunt men, but performed as well. Protected only by knee pads and flesh-colored gloves, he jumped through a glass skylight, swung across a room on a chandelier which he caught to break the fall, and- landed on the floor thirty feet below; rolled down a twenty-foot stairway; drove an automobile into a cast-iron lamp post, through a plate-glass window, and against a building; fought with Green atop a jail, only to knock him off into the rear seat of an automoble thirty feet below, and jumped from the apex of a high roof into a tiny net fifty feet below as flames burned the supports away.

From a spectator’s viewpoint, the fire jump is quite thrilling. In fact, it is one of the most dangerous undertakings of the movie daredevils. Speed usually saves a stunt man when plunging through a glass window, the only danger coming from the possibility of glass splinters reaching the floor ahead of him and sticking on end, with sharp points projecting upward ready to impale the jumper as he lands.

BUT fire! No stunt man likes flames. The other day, Rose stood on the top of a tall, flaming set while Green swung across a gap on a rope in a pretended effort to snatch him from the burning building. Green was supposed to miss, while Rose disappeared into the heart of the fire. Old film helped build up intense heat. Rose watched the flames closely. Timbers started to sag. Below, nearly hidden under the beams, he could see sparks floating down onto the life net. Soon he must jump. The roof moved slightly. The stunt man gave the signal for action, and Green came across, dangling by one hand from the rope. Rose missed his outstretched fingers, jumped backward—and thanked his lucky stars he had taken the precaution to soak the life net with water.

Which stunt is the most dangerous? No stunt man can answer the question, for each has his own pet nightmare. Practically all their exploits are spectacular when viewed on the screen. Some are comparatively easy and relatively safe. Some bring more pain than the stunt men like to admit.

Many stunt men “burn out”—some literally. An African tree hut had been built atop a forty-foot pole on a cliff near Balboa, Calif., eighty-five feet above the pounding breakers, for several equatorial scenes. “Natives” chased Rose through the underbrush of the movie forest, and he climbed the pole to seek refuge from their spears.

As he neared the top, his pursuers touched torches to the grass and bamboo shacks. The pole had been planted too far back from the ocean’s edge to permit a jump into the sea, so it had to be pulled over. For this purpose, a piano wire, invisible to the cameras, had been run out to a boat, located outside the camera angle.

Meantime, instead of spreading gradually, the flames suddenly burst through the bamboo and licked halfway up the pole. The actor was being suffocated. The pilot of the boat, seeing his plight, started his little craft so suddenly that the wire parted.

The stunt man couldn’t climb down through the fire. He tried rocking the pole, hoping it would break at the base. Cameramen remained calm at their posts, grinding on the death scene. They knew there’d be no second chance at this.

Burying his face in his arms, Rose peered downward through the flames. Below, he saw a narrow channel which the sea had cut through the rocks. As a wave rushed in, water covered the hard bottom of the ribbon-like gorge. After ten minutes the pole toppled, falling toward the rocks. Rose leaped sideways as a breaker rolled in, and a ten-foot wall of water cushioned the stunt man’s body against the impact that seemed inevitable. The next wave tossed him like a splinter against the rocks. He was rescued a few minutes later, nearly dead.

IN A recent drama of the West, a cowboy star climbed an oil derrick, pretending to look for bandits in the surrounding country. An explosion was supposed to topple the tall structure into a house near-by. It fell to Gil-man’s lot to ride the derrick down. When it had fallen half way to earth, Gilman pulled himself over the small superstructure rising above the platform and leaped feet-first through a six-foot hole previously cut through the shingles of the roof and onto a net, while the derrick crashed loudly through the porch. Later, the star himself was shown hanging by his fingers from a beam inside the room, while carpenters showered splintered wood on him from above.

The stunt men usually work by twos. One skilled pair found themselves on the roof of a movie jail the other afternoon, each doubling for an actor of his own stature and weight. Costumed as a police officer, the lighter man fought with the “heavy” from one end of the sloping metal roof to the other, finally forcing him to loosen his grip on a weakening gutter by beating on his knuckles with an automatic pistol—made of rubber. The victim fell into a net forty feet below, landing easily on his back.

Some scenes do not permit the use of nets to break falls. On such occasions, the stunt men must rely upon their own agility or on the eager hands of other trained stunt men to catch them. Yackima Canutt fell thirty feet from a burning building and landed on the heads of a crowd, and hardly mussed his hair. On another occasion, a performer came within an ace of meeting death when he fell less than four feet into a crowd.

Instructed to fall over the infield fence from his mount during a movie horse race, he ordered the crowd to stand ten feet back. After placing five layers of green matting, resembling grass, on the ground, he started the race, galloped around the curve, and raised himself in the saddle for the plunge—only to see that the onlookers had moved up to the railing. Too far off his speeding horse to regain his seat, he catapulted headfirst into the mass of men and women. Fifteen extras were crowded into ambulances as a result of that plunge, but the stunt man escaped with bruised ribs.

THESE unsung performers do not look on a fall from a horse as offering any considerable threat to the soundness of their health, unless it is taken over water. More than one has suffered the agony of falling under a struggling horse after a long drop from a cliff into a pond or lake. The only way to escape the thrashing hooves is by swimming under water.

Cliff Lyons sat astride a farm horse, which the company had purchased the day before for $25, trying to urge him into a sixty-foot leap into a lime quarry at Sonora, Calif., not long ago. For some reason, the animal became skittish and refused to budge. Finally, Lyons walked the horse to the edge of the board chute prepared to fend him off the rocks, when suddenly the animal began to slide, turned a somersault, and threw Lyons from his back. Lyons suddenly found himself diving headfirst toward the water, his feet touching the horse as the animal plummeted down, feet in the air, behind him. The stunt man struck the water and the horse struck him. Result: a sprained back for Lyons, and surprise but no injury for the horse.

Outboard Motors Propel Floating Theatre in Holland
ALMOST every canal bank in Holland, the land of canals and dykes, is a prospective theatre auditorium for the operators of a floating motion picture theatre. An enterprising theatre man conceived the idea of building a boat which would carry the projection apparatus and a ground glass screen, the entire equipment being propelled by outboard motors. The projector and operator are housed in a large steel structure at one end of the barge or boat and the screen is located at the opposite end. Two seahorse motors propel the theatre at a rate of four or five miles an hour.

Canine College Has Some Star Pupils in Hollywood

A SCHOOL—the only one of its kind in the world—where dogs are instructed in the best methods of living amicably with their owners, with other human beings and with their fellow-dogs, has been established in Hollywood, California, and rewarded, in the few months of its existence, with an attendance of more than 200 four-footed pupils. No “tricks” are taught, and the animals are not prepared for motion picture work. They are started on how to stand, how to walk, how to sit, how to lie down, how to go up and down stairs, how to open and close doors, how to go through open windows and over fences and walls.

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Star Wars Special Production and Mechanical Effects

By John Stears
Special Production and Mechanical Effects Supervisor “Star Wars”

Although the robots that appeared in “Star Wars” were not true robots, they did stir a great deal of interest. Consequently, we asked the genius behind them, John Stears, to give us an idea of what went into their design.

We would like to thank the Star Wars Corporation, and Twentieth Century-Fox Corporation, for giving us permission to use this story. —Editor

DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN OF ALL ARTOO-DETOO ROBOTS

(In conjunction with the production designer, who was responsible for their general appearance.) The problems were many, inasmuch that the director wanted to use a human as much as he could so as not to loose the character to a pure mechanical machine. This posed the question of how small a human, sufficiently coordinated and physically able, could be found. I obviously had to design my robot around the person selected, bearing in mind the limitations of what the operator inside could possibly do without undue strain, as he was to be inside for long periods in the discomfort of the desert sun and the studio lighting.

After selecting our midget (Kenny Baker), the first problem was to make him as comfortable as possible, yet make his shell as small as we could. This was accomplished by a harness over his shoulders attached to a seat. This took the weight off him until we were ready to turn the camera, the robot being supported externally until the last second. One of the big problems, as you can see, was weight, and how to keep it as low as possible.

The next major problem was how to get him to walk. The various types of surfaces he had to walk on were to range from soft sand, salt often saturated, uneven stones and shiny slippery studio sets. One added disadvantage was that often it was not to be a level surface.

This was achieved by various types of surface on his boots, which ranged from a series of non-return rollers to give a forward movement, to others which had a number of spring loaded balls on each side of the boot, which enabled him to sway from side to side. A very important factor was vision for the man inside to enable him to walk to his marks and most important to keep his balance. This was done by a one-way lens in the detachable head, which was on roller bearings to allow it to be turned 360 degrees by the operator (Kenny), although he could turn his head from side to side. The actual majority of weight which was displaced when he walked, i.e., the side to side action, was assisted by spring loaded pistons placed externally on the legs.

The external arms which had to function were counterbalanced in order to let the operator lift and perform the various tasks required. The amount of room he had to move his fingers, which were of short stumpy type associated with dwarf genetics, was possibly no more than 1″.

In order to give Artoo-Detoo a visible change in mood, I used fibre optics, which in turn illuminated a panel in the head. Using colors to give the effect of a change in mood was accomplished by using a single light source with a motorized color wheel.

Other light sources were installed for the hologram projector, all of which were powered by high-output, jelly-type non-spill batteries.

There was nothing used in the manufacture of both Artoo’s which was not machined, with the exception of the viewing lens. I was totally responsible for their creation, apart of course, from their conception, which was George Lucas’s; and their cosmetics which, as I said, Was done in conjunction with the art director.

A mechanical version was necessary because in order to move quickly a third leg had to be dropped in the center in action, which allowed it to be steerable. Infinite speed up to 7 mph was achieved through twin high torque motors mounted in the feet of the outside legs. The steering was by a two wheel mechanism in the front leg, the name of which does not exist and made no sense to anyone until it was installed and worked.

Mechanical Artoo was controlled by using a conventional radio transmitter and receiver as is used for flying models and boats. The servos in turn were hooked up to various relays and speed controllers for the operations required. The main power was supplied by a series of 6 volt jelly batteries.

Although everything checked out beautifully on the one and only test it had in the studio, we had a bad time for a few hours in the desert. A sand storm, which created very bad static, affected our transmitter range. This resulted in Artoo-Detoo and Threepio appearing to copulate in front of the unit in the middle of the desert. Up until now it appears to have been futile, but one can’t be too sure of the gestation period of robots.

Apart from this incident, and a bit of damage to the dropping leg caused in transit, all the robots functioned well.

TREAD ROBOTS

There were four of these, which are incidental to the two principal robots, Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio.

The Baby Box is the odd one out here because it functioned in the Death Star only. It is the little black box which careens around doing its thing, which includes a little cameo of mine in the reaction it gives when it sees the Wookie. It screeches to a halt and does an immediate about-turn and shoots off at an alarming rate in the opposite direction. There were several of these Baby Box Robots, some of which pulled many trucks behind them.

The Dome Robot as seen with the others by The Sand Crawler is really, in my view, the power source for the others to re-charge themselves by. Inside the smoked perspex dome is a rotating solar panel by means of which it collects solar energy and stores it for the other robots to plug in and recharge their own batteries.

The Stick Robot, which assists Luke at the vaporizing units, had a pneumatically operated arm. Unfortunately it is not featured in the final cut.

The Umbrella Robot has electrically powered features and a pneumatic scoop for collecting soil samples.

All of these robots were radio controlled. The main problem was the terrain they were to be operated in: hard compressed sand, loose sand, dry salt, wet salt and small rocky areas. They had to be very powerful and weighed in at around 250 pounds each. They had to be capable of handling steep grades and turn in their own length. The biggest problem I had was to make a self-cleaning tank track; one which would not push itself or the wheels through a build up of sand, etc., but would stay put no matter what. On close inspection you will see how I did this. Radio controlled model aircraft is one of my hobbies, which enabled me to operate the robots with any sort of precision. I had a few problems when my crew members had to operate them, because of more than one robot in a shot. They did very well, though.

SEE-THREEPIO

See-Threepio, being a humanoid, I was not involved with, apart from helping out with articulation problems and his illuminated eyes. These I accomplished with one way lenses, incorporating the light source.

I was responsible entirely for his oil bath.

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Glamour Comes To The Slot Machine

Hollywood’s “juke box” movies open a brand new field for the amateur movie cameraman 1 THE lowly “juke box” is a thing to be despised no longer. In the best American tradition, it has gone from rags to riches all in one leap.

The transformation is due to a new device that synchronizes sound with motion pictures in a small space, and so creates a portable theater that can be installed wherever people gather and want a few minutes of entertainment.

Heretofore, movies have always required considerable distance between screen and projector, but now they are only a few inches apart. The projector throws the image on a small mirror, whence it is relayed to a larger mirror, gaining size as the distance increases, then to a still larger mirror, and finally to the screen. The image falls on the inside of the translucent screen, and is viewed by the audience from the outside, hence the film is wound with reverse side out, so the objects will not appear reversed.

More relays could be utilized to build up the image to any size desired, but to maintain compactness and portability in the mechanism, the screen is held to 22″x26″. Since most of the audience will view the showing at close range, this makes a very satisfactory size.

Like the “blind” phonograph this machine seems destined to replace, it is operated simply by inserting coins—nickels, dimes, or quarters. Ten cents brings three minutes of time—nine minutes for a quarter— or about the same time that it takes to play through a phonograph record. The cost is twice as much, but the added attraction of visual entertainment is expected to make it more than worth the cost.

So new is the instrument that manufacturers are not as yet certain what they will feature for their attractions. So far, they are going in for a variety of subjects, all brief and snappy-singers, bands, sport features, and miniature reviews. The animated cartoon is almost certain to be included later.

And so at long last, it looks as if the old troupers may dust the cobwebs off their make-up kits. Vaudeville seems to be coming back, a newer, snappier, peppier vaudeville that will be made profitable by mass production and mass showing methods.

Tremendous opportunities for the public in general to cash in and begin profitable careers will be afforded. Amateur 16 mm. movie cameramen will have a chance to sell their wares at excellent prices—if they can deliver the high quality work that will be required. They will be competing with some of the finest cameramen in Hollywood, but if they can meet this challenge, they will find themselves making a good living or a substantial subsidiary income. The demand for film is going to be enormous—like nothing Hollywood has ever seen.

Amateurs who have sound recording equipment will have some advantage over their ”mute” fellows, for all of these shorts contain a sound track, which furnishes music or sound effects. But those without such expensive equipment need not feel themselves at too great a disadvantage. If the material is acceptable, sound engineers can easily “dub in” effects on the track.

Likewise, the cross-roads Hedy Lamarr, who thinks she lacks only a break to become famous need no longer trek to Hollywood or Broadway and endure months of heartbreak away from home while she awaits the Big Chance. A good amateur 16 mm. movie photographer can make a few feet of her doing some snappy act, send it along, and if film editors think she has appeal, they will send it forth for public judgment. Again sound is advantageous, but not, in every case,] essential. When her voice is important, she I can have a record made for a dollar or so at any sound recording studio, and when release is made, it will have been dubbed into the track.

Producers, indeed, will be quite happy if someone will assume their production and talent worries. Some few problems are presented. Due to the small screen and limited time, there will be no miniature super-colossals. No mob scenes, no long lines of dancers, no sets that are breath-taking for their sheer size and splendor. Sets are being built in miniature for all kinds of backgrounds: snow, sea, desert and mountains. Often they are just simple boxes, on which the backgrounds have been cleverly painted. Powerful lantern slides, projected on a screen, often produce the desired results. So the ambitious amateur need not complain about lack of setting. The inside of his garage, a little canvas, and a few pots of paint are all he will need.

Another more technical problem is to make possible the selection of whatever short the coin-dropper wishes to see. At present, he has to take what he gets—and Benny Goodman fans are apt to be perturbed if their money brings them Leopold Stokowski, a sentiment in which Stokowski fans reciprocate with compound interest. Since the shorts are eight to a reel, it might cost as much as seventy cents to see what you want.

Technicians are working now on devices which will turn the reel to any selection desired, and before long, they should have it.

But the “bugs” are rapidly being ironed out. The device is successful, and will be a moneymaker, as it now stands. Making and showing of these shorts is going to be a great industry.

The humble “juke box” is going to take its place with motion pictures, radio, and sports as our chief mediums of entertainment.

What do you say we pop down to the drug store and see a movie?

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Strato-Cinema for Jet Passengers

By JAMES JOSEPH

AIRLINE ticket offices bid to become box offices—as Trans World Airlines inaugurates the first in-flight “strato-cinema”: first-run motion pictures screened in-flight.

Making this possible is a unique combination of long-play film reels, a glare-proof projection screen (its picture, whether black-white or color, super-sharp even in a fully lighted jet cabin), and individual sound controls that let passengers adjust “stereo” earphones for best reception.

Five-mile-high movies currently are being screened on two TWA transcontinental routes (New York to San Francisco and Los Angeles) and on overseas jet runs between New York-Paris-London-Lisbon. In all, 12 big TWA Boeing 707 and 720 jets have been installed with strato-theatres, their movie fare (for first-class passengers only) varied weekly.

Minutes after take-off, passengers get plastic-bagged earphones. (At flight’s end, phones are quick-dipped in a sterilizing solution, dried under infrared heat lamps, and packaged for reuse.) Adjust the earphones, plug one end into an under-seat receptacle, turn up the sound-track’s volume (via a control panel knob located near the plug-in jack) —and sit back to watch upwards of two hours of uninterrupted theater fare.

“Projection,” says David Flexer, president of Inflight Motion Pictures, Inc., which developed the jet-cinema system, “is fully automatic, totally safeguarded (against malfunctions), and operates unattended. A switch on the flight engineer’s control panel triggers the projector—starts film rolling.”

Although developers are close-mouthed about specifics, system essentials include: • A 2 x 4-ft. aluminized plastic screen, whose hill-valley serrated surface is etched with TV-like “resolution lines”—creating a no-glare, totally non-reflective screen.

• A horizontally-mounted ceiling projector fed 16-mm sound film from one of two stacked, long-play, 2-ft.-diameter reels. Top reel— which holds 5000-ft. of film, enough for 2-1/4 hours of movies—winds onto a bottom reel. At flight’s end, film projectionists rewind, reset, and focus the film for its next showing.

• A ceiling-installed audio system which achieves a kind of stereophonic effect by “delayed feed” to one of the two ear-pieces worn by passengers. Created is a one millisecond delay between sound-track delivery to the ear-pieces—thus a sense of stereophony.

• Individual seat volume controls that compensate for the jet’s 80- to 90-decibel ambient noise level. Foam-rubber ear-pieces screen out much of the cabin noise.

Perhaps the system’s most critical single segment is the screen—which, in design and effect, is unidirectionally sensitive to light. Tilted forward 8°, the screen’s sawtooth surface is almost totally insensitive to light falling upon it from any but the projector’s direction. Thus, it doesn’t reflect the glare of cabin lights or even sunlight.

The screen’s minute “resolution lines” (etched about 0.001 of an inch into its sur- face) act to intensify the projected image. In effect, the serrated surface contains some 1000 microscopic “lenses” per square inch, each sensitive only to the projector’s beam. Bothersome ambient light is “absorbed” in the serrated “valleys,” reflected from the “hills.”

Moreover, the screen is designed to receive, without image distortion, the projector’s beam which strikes its surface at an angle. Reason: Since the horizontally-stacked long-play film reels take up most of the space in the ceiling-installed “projection booth” (a box 3x3x1-ft.), the projector’s lens is located about a foot off the aisle’s (and screen’s) center, the beam traveling about 23 ft. angularly before reaching the screen.

The beam’s path is so high, in fact, that there’s headroom aplenty . . . thus no interference from passengers walking the aisle.

Variable lenses permit the showing of standard or cinemascope movies. “Big screen” films use the screen’s entire 4-ft. width. Standard films use only about three-fourths of it.

Pre-flight focusing (once set, the lens is locked in position) is achieved by adding to the standard reel about 3 minutes of “focus stock”—film of the same density as the featured movie. This footage is used by projectionists to pre-set the lens’ focus, adjust for the film’s aspect ratio, and check sound levels. Once pre-set on the ground, the “projection booth” is locked—and is operationally ready when the flight engineer flips his control.

Strato-cinema developers met—and solved —the weight problem. The projector weighs but 60 lbs. and a fully-loaded reel about 15. The entire system—audio, seat plug-ins and controls, screen, and earphones—likely adds no more than 300 or 350 lbs. to the jet’s weight. It operates on the plane’s standard 400 volts, automatically shuts itself off should the film break, the projector’s cooling system fail, or other malfunctions occur.

Talkies to Entertain TRAIN Passengers
TALKIES are soon to be one of the amusements provided for passengers on de luxe trains of leading railroad lines. These “Talkie cars,” designed by William D. Knox, of Birmingham, Mich., are being built for several railroads at a cost of $60,000. They will be decorated like a modern theater, and show latest pictures. Special roller bearings and sound-proof walls will eliminate noise.

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A Vest Pocket Movie Of Yourself

New drop-a-coin camera turns out portraits which wink and smile.

HAVE you ever wondered what you would look like in the movies? Well, you will soon have the opportunity of finding out—and you won’t have to go to Hollywood or spend money on a screen test, either!

A New York inventor, Stanley Pask, has recently perfected an invention which is a vest-pocket edition of a motion picture studio. Al H. Woods, famous New York play producer, has financed the invention, and before long folks all over the world will he able to step into a little booth, drop a coin in a slot, and step out six minutes later with a movie of their own features. Here’s the way it works: You step into an attractive booth, built like a miniature Japanese pagoda or Spanish villa, sit down in front of the electrically driven camera, which is hidden from view except for the lens, and start it in action by dropping a coin. All you have to do then is look pleasant, smiling, closing your eyes, winking, and registering other attitudes you wish to be recorded on the finished film.

Six minutes later a folder emerges from a slot, in the shape of a little book, in the center of which, under an oval opening, appears your face. Over the photo is a piece of celluloid with a number of fine opaque lines running vertically down it, 64 of them to an inch. Moving this with the finger, ever so slightly, causes the photo beneath it to reproduce the facial expressions you assumed in front of the camera, giving an illusion of motion to the features.

How is this done? Theoretically it is easy to explain. Twenty-five different facial attitudes are snapped by the camera, and all are imposed over each other on a single photo print, which is marked off with a number of vertical lines which conform with those on the piece of celluloid. Moving the celluloid screen thus blots out certain parts of the picture, which are in turn brought out when the screen is moved further along. Like a moving picture, which is made up of a succession of “stills,” it is the rapidity with which each picture follows on its predecessor which gives the effect of motion to the eye.

In practice, the main difference between the pocket movie and the full-size brand is that the miniature uses a celluloid screen to “mesh” with different poses of the picture, thus presenting them in succession to the eye, while the large machines project the individual poses on a screen by means of lights and lenses.

Before perfecting his camera, which is called the “Movie-of-U,” Inventor Pask spent two years perfecting the harmony of screens which is the secret of his machine. Just as he was on the point of completing his invention, Mr. Woods heard of it and became so interested in its possibilities that he was instrumental in forming the corporation which is now marketing Pask’s machine. It is calculated that the machine will gross $90 an hour in receipts when properly located.

Already several units have been installed at Coney Island, Niagara Falls, and numerous other resorts throughout America. At this writing the Argentine rights have been sold, and negotiations are under way for sale of Mexican and Cuban rights.

Several theatres have sent in orders for machines to be placed in their lobbies. All of which helps to prove that there are still millions to be made by a man with an idea!

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GOOD EVENING, I AM VAMPIRA

A scary femme fatale peddles old horror films on TV At an hour before midnight each Saturday on many Los Angeles TV screens, a gaunt, black-wigged mistress of ceremonies steps out of ominous, drifting mists, screams hysterically into a shuddering camera, intones the greeting in the headline above and then sighs morbidly, “I hope you have been lucky enough to have had a horrible week.”

With this beginning the macabre lady, who calls herself Vampira, invites her audience to watch a program of choice horror films, including such scary relics as White Zombie and Fog Island. Between movie reels Vampira provides eerie interludes of her own—a ghoulish hospital plan for would-be suicides called The Yellow Cross, a foaming cocktail “that will absolutely kill you.” Vampira was born Maila Syrjaniemi in Finland 31 years ago and her real hair is blond, but she has thrown herself wholeheartedly into her role, going abroad dead-panned and beshrouded even in daytime to enlarge her horror-loving public.

DEATH’S-HEAD SOFA is used as a perch when Vampira addresses TV audience. She boasts her fingernails are hemorrhage red.

SPIDER SEARCH with flickering candle is favorite Vampira interruption. Her fictitious pet spider, called Rollo, can never be found.

ON TOUR of city Vampira sits regally in back of old Packard with chauffeur provided by TV station. She screams at stop lights.

HAUGHTY Vampira ignores people on the street. “I like them to stare if they know who I am” she admits, “but not if they don’t.”

HOPING FOR GLOOM, Vampira puts up umbrella on sunny day. She tells signature seekers, “I give, epitaphs not autographs.”

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Movie Shown on 2 Screens

A remarkable new movie theater in Los Angeles projects films on auxiliary screens in its lounge rooms by use of a light-proof tube and reflecting mirrors.

AN ELABORATE new talkie theater now being built in Los Angeles, home of the movies, is able to project its feature film to one or more auxiliary screens in its lounge rooms, simultaneously with the showing on the main auditorium screen.

To the person not versed in optical laws, this may appear as a simple innovation, yet it is the result of years of experimentation by the most noted scientists in the country. While the people in the auditorium are viewing the picture on the big screen, the waiting patrons in the lounge room, and other ante rooms, see the picture simultaneously on a miniature screen 36″x48″, accompanied with complete sound effects.

At the outset, this may seem as a novelty only. But it has a distinct commercial value to continuous performance theaters. While a patron is waiting admission to the auditorium, he can see the picture in miniature. After gaining entry to the auditorium, he probably will leave when the picture reaches the point where he first viewed it in miniature. So the seats are vacated sooner, and the box office profits.

To go into the intricate optical laws which make possible the indirect projection, would be about as intelligible to the average reader as the Einstein theory or the fourth dimension. But the rudiments of the system can be gleaned from the photo-diagram.

It must be assumed that the average reader understands how a picture film passes through the projection machine. The “frames” —that is, each individual picture on the strip of film—are exposed momentarily before the aperture in the gate of the projection machine. A powerful light is focused upon the aperture, and projects the image on the film through a lens to the screen. Seemingly, pictures in motion result.

Now, if a second aperture is cut in the gate, two frames can be exposed simultaneously. A special condenser lens floods both apertures with light. The light beam from the second aperture, carrying the picture image, is conveyed through a black-lined tube fitted with special mirrors and lenses, to a remote point where it is projected on the back of a ground glass plate. The visible result is similar to looking into the finder of a camera.

S. Charles Lee, nationally known architect, designed this theater with view to providing more than mere entertainment.

An ultra-modern barber shop with complete valet service is provided for the men patrons, while the children are catered to with unique playrooms. The ceiling and walls of these rooms are an excellent imitation of the interior of the menagerie tent at a circus. Around the walls are miniature cages with miniature mounted animals— lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes—all exceptionally life-like in appearance.

The lounge room is especially commodious, and can accommodate 400 persons. Adjacent to this room is a cafe serving light lunches. Also an exhibition room where “objets d’art” are on display. At one end of the lounge room, built into the wall behind heavy plate glass, is a broadcasting room from which the theater programs can be “put on the air.” Patrons can see this in operation. There are no permanent fixtures attached to the floor of the lounge room, so all furniture can quickly be removed to convert the room into a ball-room.

Mechanical and electrical features of the theater are very novel. The theater is sectionally ventilated. Sensitive thermostats are placed at numerous points in the building. If a crowd collects at one point, the bodily heat will affect the thermostat, which, in turn, operates the ventilators, and provides cooler air to that section of the building.

The floor of the main auditorium of the theater not only slopes toward the stage, but is also concave—the side seats rise above the center seats. Every seat in the house provides an unobstructed view of the stage or the screen. Behind a ground glass panel in the front of every step in the aisles, is a green neon tube. These provide a grassy-green pathway along the aisles, which make the aisles clearly visible to the patrons, but diffuse no light upon the projection screen.

Movies Fill Gaps in Stage Play

WHEN you see stage and movie actors present the same play, you notice how much the stage action is limited by its few possible changes of scenery. To remove this handicap, a New York inventor proposes a combined stage-and-movie show, in which movies intermittently “double” for living actors. Suppose a leading character, in the flesh, strides from his house. Simultaneously, the lights dim, the stage darkens, a movie screen moves horizontally across the stage, and a projector takes up the story of his travels and adventures. Meanwhile the stage setting is changed and the living actors take their positions in readiness for a new episode at the character’s destination—say, an office. The movie ends as he arrives, the screen is drawn aside, the lights flash on, and the play continues. New dramatic possibilities are claimed for the plan.

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The Theatre of the Future

By HUGO GERNSBACK

THE “legitimate” theatre, as it is constituted at present, is doomed to extinction. The motion pictures, which for fifty cents give the public an excellent two-hour entertainment, are too strong competition for the legitimate theatre where seats cost from $2.50 upwards. Yet, up to now, there has been no way to sell seats in the legitimate houses cheaper, for obvious reasons. Even the largest do not seat more than three thousand persons; so that the cost of the production, the salaries of the actors, the rent of the theatre, must all be borne by a comparatively small audience.

Suppose that one of the elaborate New York productions, such as the “Follies,” could be viewed at the same time by three million people. Obviously, the cost per seat to the audience, instead of running up to $0.60 (for good orchestra seats) and more, as it does today, would come down to 50c per seat, and yield a handsome profit. And this is exactly what the theatre of the future will do.

I have shown here my conception of the future theatre, which by this time must become obvious; with the event of television, the legitimate theatre can be not only saved, but made to reach undreamt-of heights which cannot even be foreseen today.

During the month of October, the Broadway Theatre in New York City exhibited, for the first time on any stage, a giant television screen 10-ft. square. Before the production, I was requested by the management to suggest various ideas as to what should be televisioned. One of my suggestions which was adopted, was to televise the performance in another theatre and show the results on the television screen in the Broadway house. This suggestion was accepted; and part of the regular show of the Theatre Guild was shown on the screen of the Broadway Theatre. It was the first time in history that two theatres had thus been linked together, the production of one stage being shown on another.

This is the principle of the theatre of the future. I now go a step further and show what will happen ten years hence. In New York City, or Chicago, we will have a central key theatre, located in a building erected specially for that purpose, which will have a large number of stages. There will, however, be no audience in this theatre; no one will view the performance directly excepting the stage director and stage attendants.

The curtain rises and the production starts. A battery of television transmitters picks up the light impulses, while a battery of microphones picks up the sounds. The results of both pickups are transmitted over a wire net to distant cities; just as, today, the headquarters of the New York broadcast studios are connected by wire with distant parts of the country.

There will be, however, this important difference. At the present time every one listens-in to radio programs at his home; whereas in the future, you will have minate behind each orchestra seat in such a way that the action ejects a stream of invisible gas particles, containing the odor which now envelopes each member of the audience.

Of course, the scent organist of the future will not rest after simply depressing a single key, which would give the audience an excessive scent of, let us say, heliotrope, jasmine, narcissus, rose, etc. If he is a skillful scent organist he will be able to depress several keys at one time, and combine a number of delightful new scent combinations; just as the skillful musical organist of today, by depressing a number of keys, can produce novel effects upon our auditory nerves.

In our illustration is shown in detail how the small feed-pipes terminate close together in a small round boxlike affair, where various odors may be mixed, and the result of the mixture conveyed into the audience.

Lest you think that the idea is far fetched, I wish to point out that some years ago, at the Music Box Theatre in New York, during a certain performance depicting a California orange grove, the audience were surprised and delighted to find the entire auditorium permeated with orange scent, which was released in the basement and blown through the ventilators so that, at the appropriate time, the entire auditorium was bathed in a delightful orange scent.

Multiple Screens for Super-Movies

THE present method of representing simultaneous scenes on a motion-picture screen, in succession, may be supplanted by one in which details will appear on one screen, and the main body of the action on another, at the same time, according to a recent patent which contemplates the making and projecting of several films at once. This will require more than one projector; and they must be operated in exact synchronism, for both film and sound. The patent contemplates either the use of two machines to fill a screen twice the ordinary size, for a spectacle, or one for a full-size scene and one for a smaller screen, as illustrated. Another feature of advantage is the more exact location of the apparent sources of different voices and other sounds. For auxiliary pictures, on a different plane from that of the main screen, a mirror is used to alter the angle.

Mechanics of the Future

• SCENES on this page, taken from the recent G-B (Gaumont-British) feature film, “Transatlantic Tunnel,” represent a high degree of ingenuity in forecasting the inventions of the next quarter century, as will be seen.

This is scientific and mechanical fiction, not science and mechanics; the film tells a story, without endeavoring to demonstrate its possibility mathematically. The Transatlantic Tunnel, from England to the Azores, to Bermuda, to New York, is proposed to link the Old World and the New. As foreshadowed in one of our past issues, the future high-speed tunnel is to have cars operating in vacuum.

Scene showing the approach of the Transatlantic Tunnel at the British end: observe the autogyros, as well as cars.

Above, the tunnel, with its boring head—the “Radium Drill”— which is to advance two feet a minute. This melts the rock, a part of which is used to reenforce the sides. Left, one of the numerous television scenes of the film, which represents a time long after television has turned the corner and become a routine of daily life.

One of the air locks is shown above. In the story, romance and adventure are paramount, the mechanical details but the setting against which they are seen. The engineer in charge closes the doors against entombed men, including his own son, when the tunnel encounters an unforeseen disaster from a submarine volcano. An interesting advance showing of the picture was presented, with a tunnel in New York as its theatre.

In the distance may be seen the setting of the tunnel-mouth buildings, pictured above. Foreground, technicians at work on the film.

A motion picture must be worked out in someone’s mind before it can be acted before the camera. This is particularly true when it deals with events in the past or in the future; so that scenery and scenes must be created that have no existence at the present time. One of the designer’s sketches of the interior of the tunnel, to be compared with the actual photograph at the upper right, showing the set built from it. Another sketch, (center) was not used; the conception of the tunnel having been evidently altered in working out the course of the action.

Construction headquarters as it is presented, with the instrument boards communicating with all parts of the work.