Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/598

 Expense in Motion Picture Making

By Albert Marple

��IT IS indeed difficult for one who is not on the "inside" of the motion picture business to reahze the ex- pense to which a picture company will go to secure effects necessary for the suc- cessful filming of a photoplay. Some- times the setting for a single scene costs hundreds and even thousands of dollars. When it is considered that even a one-reel play consists, gener- ally, of something like fifty scenes, it may be readily understood that the cost of producing even a single reel play is enormous. What, then, must be the outlay for five, six and even seven-reel plays? A few months ago the writer traveled with a company during the making of a one-reel play. It took the company four days to put the play on and, although not a single setting was made for this production, the work being mostly outside the

��studio, that "one-reeler" cost the com- pany about nine hundred dollars. The joke of it was that after being made and finished, that particular play was "pigeon holed" and, for some mysterious reason, was never copied for circulation among the motion picture theaters. This is but one source of the "incidental" expense of a company.

Street scenes cost the most. It is indeed seldom that a scene of this character does not run up into the thousands of dollars. Weeks and months of work will be put upon a street for a single scene. Just as soon as that particular scene has been suc- cessfully "shot," down it comes and another "street" rises in its place.

A street scene built for the play, "Terrance O'Rourke" is an exact re- production of a street in Tangiers, Northern Africa. Employees of the

���It took nine tons of powder to make this explosion, the smoke from which clouded the air for two minutes in the resulting motion picture

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