A close-up of a talkie.pdf

Media

Part of The American Chamber of Commerce Journal

extracted text: October, 1929 THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL 7 before the close of the 16th century; for a long time, when their asylum was at Guadalupe, they taught the art of printing there, and only re moved the shop to Malabon when the new or phanage was built at that place. The oldest Filipino printer remembered was Tomás Pinpin, taught by the Dominicans; the Jesuits, too, had very early printshops. A text by Pinpin print ed in 1605 is extant. The printers, good ones, available among the craftsmen of Manila when Americans and Fili pinos began establishing newspapers, must have been taught by the friars; the revolutionists who printed La Independencia (which may have been preceded by La Libertad, a paper suppressed by Aguinaldo and succeeded by El Heraldo, as Taylor quotes Epifanio de los Santos as believ ing), made much of the fact that they were using the orphanage press, upon which many an argument against their cause had been printed. The first American paper published in the Philippines was The Bounding Billow, Taylor says, published by two sailors on the Olympia and, with an illustrated account of the Battle of Manila Bay, selling to several editions for a quarter a copy—50 centavos. It was followed September 10, 1898, by the first American newspaper, The American Soldier, by a group of the 13th Minnesota Volunteers. It found a place, broadened in scope, and became The Soldier’s Letter. W. W. “Mayor” Brown, destined to be a familiar figure in Manila for 30 years there after, financed this paper. Others were started, but The Manila Times, now out with its 31st anniversary number, is the only one which has survived. It began publication October 11, 1898, and has had a grist of editors and publishers averaging second to none in the islands. Martin Egan, “Bill” Lewis, L. H. Thibault, and R. McCullough Dick loom brilliantly among Times editors. Walter Wilgus, when George H. Fairchild was the publisher, had full play for his gift as a natural wit—with little fondness for politicians. When Fairchild laid down the dictum Govern or Go, as a norm of policy for the United States in the Philippines, that, for a man who kept the vitriol handy on his desk, as Wilgus did, was sanction enough for some of the most biting comment Philippine readers have ever enjoyed; it was spontaneous and it kept up daily, until the Times changed hands. It compared in dare-deviltry with the newspapers of the empire days, chiefly bought by soldiers and saying whatever they pleased. If there are files extant (since the lamentable Cosmopolitan-building fire, which left the Times with its name alone, though its files had been rich in antiquities of the early days), that period of American editorship in Manila deserves the attention of a genius. Editors and staff were hardboiled, recruited from the ranks of the volunteers whose enlist ments had expired, and the acrimonies of the barracks flowered in their unpent diction: what they thought, they said—in a way to be under stood. And they mostly thought contrary to the government. Among all their palladiums upon the preservation of which the fate of this modern Troy was to depend—but somehow didn’t—space is available for but one, The Manila Freedom. Taylor remarks it as one among 24 newspapers started in 1899, and pos sibly some others which are not recorded. Taylor thinks it was the successor of The' * Soldier’s Letter. C. W. Musser fathered it. F. C. Fisher and C. A. McDermot soon bought it, Eddie O’Brien became the editor and George Fuller the business manager; then Fisher and McDer mot sold it to Fred L. Dorr, an early-days Amer ican who had lived in Manila prior to the oc cupation and had been a friend of Rizal’s, and Dorr and O’Brien were associated in the paper together until a criminal libel action landed them in Bilibid and made some constitutional history. *The Chicago Daily News, July 31, 1929. Their offense was against Benito Legarda, appointed to the Philippine Commission, and in this day would excite no resentment from the government; but at that time the government, daily set upon by the little lions of the press, as Taft styled them, was more sensitive of its honor. Anyway, Taft had his opening and took it. O’Brien and Dorr demanded jury trial! Frederick Garfield Waite, one of the town’s best lawyers, was their counsel; he carried the case to the Federal supreme court and was one of the last to learn that the Constitution does not follow the Flag except as the Federal court may hold that it does; in other words, to learn that in the cases of Porto Rico and the Philip pines, judge-made law will be decreed at the high court’s discretion. Fuller bought the Freedom, which died about 1906; O’Brien has long been editing The Times of Cuba in Havana, Dorr lived out many another adventure and died in Manila about 1914. Some of the antecedents of the new spapers now being published in Manila will be reviewed next month. “By the end of 1899 the orgy of journalistic freedom,’’saysTaylor, “as indicated by the large number of new papers started in 1898 and 1899 appears to have subsided. The majority of those who ventured into the field either lost their capital, if they had any, or were unable to gather sufficient revenue to pay the printers. It may be noted here that in those days it was comparatively easy to start a newspaper, espe cially of a political nature. There were plenty of writers who were willing to give the anxious world the benefit of their wisdom for the pleasure it afforded themselves and without cost to the publisher. Filipino printers received from P0.20 to P0.80 per day and if the 'ghost didn’t walk’ on Saturday they lived just the same.” In newspaperdom, the ghost walks when pay day comes. Is the ghost gonna walk today? is an anxious query unless the business office has the envelopes ready early. NEW SCHOOLS OF ENGLISH To our readers who may be interested in movie theaters in the provinces—ivatch the talkies. Don’t be caught napping. The talkies in Manila are already turning out to be the schools of English one’s first observations pre dicted they would be. The initiatory difficulties at the Radio, for instance, where they were first installed in Manila, have been overcome. New equipment is going into the Lyric. The Rialto has been fortunate from the start. The Ideal goes talkie this month. While there is nothing to add to September’s comment, and nothing to modify, we urge theater-owners in the provinces the importance of installing talkies at once and getting the right kind of apparatus. There are two systems, one synchronizing the phono graph with the actors’ lips, the other photograph ing the sound on one edge of the film and scien tifically turning it back into sound from the microphones. Theaters with poor acoustics can be improved in this detail by use of heavy hang ings on the walls and across the ceiling and at the doors. The Radio has been so improved, until it is now easy to hear from any seat in it. Even a town which has been indifferent to movies will respond to talkies; and teachers will soon notice how the talkies help them in the teaching of English diction and pronunciation. Don’t over look the fact that the talkies are a new form of drama. Be first in your field with them. They annihilate movies overnight.—Ed. A Close-up of a Talkie By Jack Casey* Hollywood, Cal., July 28.—They work eight hours a day. If they get five minutes’ worth of results they are satisfied. That’s the talkies. Mechanics of the “new” (in reality very old) medium have caused what the producers love to call an art to become as mechanical as a barber’s electrically driven clippers. There’s a human guiding hand necessary to get a decent picture or a John Gilbert haircut. But turn the clippers loose or turn on the juice of talkie-re cording instruments and you’ll still get some thing—in the barber shop probably a painful nip on the scalp, but in pictures more than likely a classic, the human guiding hand having ruined more pictures than anything else. ■ * * * And the talkies—how are they made? On a set, in a hot, sound-proof stage. Broadway players—stage players—do just what they would do in a play behind the footlights. Only they do it under much brighter lights and in a sickish looking brown makeup, before from three to six cameras. The cameras have lenses of various sizes and are covered with hoods or are in port able booths. From a microphone near the players wires run into the sound or “mixing” room. There two machines record the spoken voice in a tiny zigzag thread (depending upon the voice or sound vibrations as to loudness or softness). On the film this is known as the film track and is transferred to one side of the film being “shot” in the cameras when the picture is matched up in the laboratories. Voices of the players are released in the sound room via a loud speaker—the same as by radio—• and the man in charge, by twirling a dial, just as in radio, does what is known as the “mixing”. He makes the voices either louder or softer—-to make them sound right in the theater—as his experience and judgment dictate. The record ing machines get the sound on the film track through tiny mirrors which catch and reflect the sound vibrations on the sensitized celluloid. The same medium is used to get it back from the film in theater-projecting machines and released through loud speakers to the audience. Buzzers are used as signals, and the numbers for the various “takes” (scenes shot) are talked into the microphone as well as photographed for identification on the film (silent) which photo graphs the scenes. In other words, synchroniza tion has to be perfect. Otherwise the film reels —one sound, one silent—would not match up to the sound track or talkie. * * * In the old days a director would say “cut” if somebody blundered. Now he says “N. G.”, and a buzzer halts the recording machines in the sound booth. The shooting schedule following a week of rehearsals on such a drama as “Paris Bound”— on which set, at Pathe, we spent an afternoon— is fifteen days. The work is scheduled to go on for eight hours a day. The picture will run, when released, an hour and fifteen minutes. So Ned Griffith, directing, had to get five minutes’ perfect results each day of the fifteen—which he did. In fact, he did so well that we can safely recommend “Paris Bound” to you. Ann Harding, very blond and very nice, stopped New York cold with her performance of the stage “Mary Dugan,” and does as well in this, her first film. However, we’re no press agent. Frankly, we enjoyed a private preview of this Griffith opus far more than we did seeing it made. Talkies are tiresome, arduous and mechanical. And a voice that is charming on the set gets a mechanical veneer in being recorded. Until that is eliminated the producers never will make the so-called “new medium” much of a threat to the speaking stage.
Date: 1929
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