Page:Wilson - Merton of the Movies (1922).djvu/159

 nightfall. He hoped they would have trouble with the fight scene. He hoped there would be those annoying delays that so notoriously added to the cost of producing the screen drama—long waits, when no one seemed to know what was being waited for, and bored actors lounged about in apathy. He hoped the fight would be a long fight. You needed blankets even in sunny California.

He went out to pass an enlivening day, fairly free of misgiving. He found an abundance of entertainment. On one stage he overlooked for half an hour a fragment of the desert drama which he had assisted the previous day. A covered incline led duskily down to the deserted tomb in which the young man and the beautiful English girl were to take shelter for the night. They would have eluded the bad sheik for a little while, and in the tomb the young man would show himself to be a gentleman by laying not so much as a finger upon the defenceless girl.

But this soon palled upon the watching connoisseur. The actual shots were few and separated by barren intervals of waiting for that mysterious something which photoplays in production seemed to need. Being no longer identified with this drama he had lost much of his concern over the fate in store for the girl, though he knew she would emerge from the ordeal as pure as she was beautiful—a bit foolish at moments, perhaps, but good.

He found that he was especially interested in bedroom scenes. On Stage Four a sumptuous bedroom, vacant for the moment, enchained him for a long period of contemplation. The bed was of some rare wood ornately carved, with a silken canopy, spread with finest linen and quilts of down, its pillows opulent in their embroidered cases. The hide of a polar bear, its head mounted with open jaws, spread over the rich rug beside the bed. He wondered about this interestingly. Probably the stage would be locked at night. Still, at a suitable hour, he could descreetly find out.

On another stage a bedroom likewise intrigued him, though this was a squalid room in a tenement and the bed