Getting Difficult Shots in Movies

Bid where McCormick takes you behind the scenes in Hollywood. What is always a source of interest to me is the amount of trouble and effort directors go to in order to photograph this scene that is on the screen, often for only a fraction of a minute.

Home crews of artisans will work over a background or some incidental object in the scene so that it may appear lifelike and realistic to the minutest detail. For instance, here are some notes gathered when Douglas Cirque was directing Summer Storm some time ago.

Nathan, will you tell about him? Well, there's a lot of artistic camera angles and odd photographic effects in the picture, but none caused director Cirque so much trouble as the shooting passed the nose of a horse at George Sanders and Linda Darnell.

It's one of those shots that when viewing the completed film, it's just taken for granted. That's all right as long as everything goes smoothly, but just let anything go wrong and watch out. Well, the first time the close-up was made, Cirque didn't like it because the horse's head looked artificial.

Many realized it was because the horse's whiskers were white and wouldn't photograph no matter how he arranged the lights. Finally in desperation, Sir called the make-up man and had him put mascara on the horse's whiskers.

They photographed perfectly and took the bare artificial effect away from the horse's nose. And Hollywood defies space and time too in making movies. For instance, you see George and Linda walk from the interior of a woodcutter's cabin out into the woods.

But it wasn't that easy in the making. The scene was actually shot backwards. On location in lower California, a scene was shot showing the couple leaving a cabin and entering the woods. Because the cabin was real and too small to accommodate a huge camera with crew and the necessary lights, it was three weeks later, back on the United Artist Sound Stages, that