Working in Hollywood by Regev Ronny;

Author:Regev, Ronny;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press

CHAPTER FIVE

Shooting

Cameraman Virgil E. Miller chose to open his 1964 memoir, Splinters from Hollywood Tripods, with an observation made by former secretary of labor Maurice J. Tobin:

Some of the brightest stars in Hollywood are the fellows who never get their names in lights—no glamour magazines carry their pictures—they never appear in previews—BUT, no picture could be made without them.… We are so busy applauding the leading lady or the leading man, we fail to notice the beautiful jobs done by the cameramen, electricians, grips, property men, make-up men and women, set-dressers, hairdressers, sound men, costumers and others. I like to think of these people as Hollywood’s 400—the men and women from the 40-odd unions, without whom there would be no pictures and no stars.

As a member of the behind-the-camera workforce, Miller wished to dedicate his book to these “forgotten people who have been so sadly neglected by the press and the public—those without whom the other half could not function.”1

These “forgotten” figures certainly numbered in the hundreds or even thousands. With the resources available to the big studios due to the industry’s vertical integration, the production lots in and around Hollywood were tremendous apparatuses, swarming with people and activity. By the mid-1940s, 30,000 men and women were employed in the Los Angeles film industry.2 These various craftsmen worked in close proximity to one another on the studio lots and were capable of producing almost anything one could imagine. Director George Cukor, for example, remembered that when he was making the movie Camille for MGM in the mid-1930s, “it was decided” that the casino set had to include a statue of the goddess of chance. “This was at five o’clock in the afternoon and we were shooting the next morning,” he recalled. “I came in the next morning, there it was, larger than life,” in marble white, about ten feet tall, and equipped with both rudder and cornucopia. Such ingenuity and efficiency were not out of the ordinary. “They had tremendous resources,” Cukor said, especially “the technical part of it.”3

Each studio was an ecosystem, one in which the stars were more of a looming presence than the beating heart. The it-takes-a-village nature of the era becomes apparent if we consider the spatial organization of a production center such as the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank. Purchased in 1926, the property was essentially sixty-eight acres of farmland, but by the 1940s the company had expanded it, turning it into more than a hundred acres of offices, sound stages, and back-lot settings, inside which worked about 3,500 employees.4 The main entrance was on Olive Avenue, “flanked by well-kept lawn, carpeting a grove of tall pine trees.” Upon entering the main gate, the first thing one encountered was “the two story Administration Building, where in the foyer, Grant Donnelly … functioned as a receptionist and guardian,” serving, essentially, as the indispensable gatekeeper, separating insiders from what actress Anna Q. Nilsson once termed the “Heartbreak Lane in Hollywood, leading by a circuitous path to the gates of the many studios.

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