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Page 25
Carey Drexel looked at Kennedy helplessly.
With all these troubles, how could he pilot us about? Later we
learned that this was nothing new, once one gets on the inside of
picture making. Props., or properties, particularly the living
ones, cause almost as much disturbance as the temperamental
notions of the actors and actresses. Sometimes it is a question
which may become the most ridiculous.
Kennedy seemed to be satisfied with his preliminary visit to this
studio floor.
"We can get back to Manton's office alone," he told Drexel. "We
will just keep on circling the quadrangle."
Relieved, the assistant director pointed to the door of the
manufacturing building, as the four-story structure in the rear
was called. Then he bustled off with the other youth, quite
unruffled himself.
When we passed through the heavy steel fire door we found
ourselves in another long hallway of fire-brick and reinforced-
concrete construction. Unquestionably there was no danger of a
serious conflagration in any part of Manton's plant, despite the
high inflammability of the film itself, of the flimsy stage sets,
of practically everything used in picture manufacture.
Immediately we entered this building I detected a peculiar odor,
at which I sniffed eagerly. I was reminded of the burnt-almond
odor of the cyanides. Was this another clue?
I turned to Kennedy but he smiled, anticipating me.
"Banana oil, Walter," he explained, with rather a superior
manner. "I imagine it's used a great deal in this industry.
Anyway"--a chuckle--"don't expect chance to deliver clues to you
in wholesale quantities. You have done very well for today."
A sudden whirring noise, from an open door down the hall,
attracted us, and we paused. This, I guessed, was a cutting room.
There were a number of steel tables, with high steel chairs. At
the walls were cabinets of the same material. Each table had two
winding arrangements, a handle at the operator's right hand and
one at his left, so that he could wind or unwind film from one
reel to another, passing it forward or backward in front of his
eyes.
There were girls at the tables except nearest the hall. Here a
man stopped now and then to glance at the ribbon of film, or to
cut out a section, dropping the discarded piece into a fireproof
can and splicing the two ends of the main strip together again
with liquid film cement from a small bottle. He looked up as he
sensed our presence.
"Isn't it hell?" he remarked, in friendly fashion. "I've got to
cut all of Stella Lamar out of 'The Black Terror,' so they can
duplicate her scenes with another star, and meanwhile we had half
the negative matched and marked for colors and spliced in rolls,
all ready for the printer."
Without waiting for an answer from us, or expecting one, he gave
one of his reels a vicious spin, producing the whirring noise;
then grasping both reels between his fingers and bringing them to
an abrupt stop, so that I wondered he did not burn himself from
the friction, he located the next piece to be eliminated.
We followed the hall into the smaller studio and there found a
comedy company at work. Without stopping to watch the players,
ghastly under the light from the Cooper-Hewitts and Kliegel arcs,
we found a precarious way back of the set around and under stage
braces, to the covered bridge leading once more to the corridor
outside Manton's office.
Now the girl was absent from her place in the little waiting
room. Manton's door stood open. Without ceremony Kennedy led the
way in and dropped down at the side of the promoter's huge
mahogany desk.
"I'm tired, Walter," he said. "Furthermore, I think this picture
world of yours is a bedlam. We face a hard task."
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