“It was the very worst experience I ever went through. Temperature 120
in the shade. In the sun...? One man burned his hand quite badly opening
the door of a motor. We had eight wind machines, and in the studio, to
match up with the blowing sand outside (supposed to be blowing in the
doors and windows), we used sulphur pots, the smoke giving the effect of
sand blowing in. The sand itself was bad enough, but the pots were
worse. I was burned all the time, and was in danger of having my eyes
put out. The hardships of making ‘Way Down East’ were nothing to it. My
hair was burned and nearly ruined by the sulphur smoke. I could not get
it clean for months. Such an experience is not justified by any
picture.”
Nature seems to have wearied of their evil-smelling feeble devices, and
one day gave an example of what she could do herself. Miss Moir,
graphically:
A few days before we finished the scenes up there it turned cold.
Towards the end of the afternoon work was stopped by a terrific
sandstorm. A howling wind, which soon assumed the proportions of a
hurricane, tore down from the mountains sending the sand whirling
in dense masses before it. The sky was black and everything was
obscured by a veil through which we could dimly perceive the
figures of the cowboys bent forward on their saddles, horse and
rider braced against the oncoming fury, making for camp. There was
an extraordinary beauty about the scene, as Lillian and I stood
for a moment and watched it before getting into the car, and I
could appreciate the feeling in her voice when she said “Oh, how I
wish Mr. Griffith was here. How he would have loved to photograph
that.”
All night long the storm raged while our shaky little hotel
quivered to its foundations. As we lay in bed trying vainly to
sleep, we could see the flimsy walls of the hotel bending before
the onslaught, and in the morning the room was full of sand which
had leaked in through every crevice of the ill-built structure.
This was exactly what they had come up there to produce, but apparently
they made no use of it. One remembers Griffith waiting for the blizzard
in New England, and echoes Lillian’s heartfelt utterance. The day had
come when Nature’s effects were no longer in favor—were even resented,
as an imitation; and one who has seen the picture must confess that
those eight wind machines were not easily to be outdone.
The most depressing of Lillian’s films, “Wind,” is one of the
best—beautiful in its sheer ferocity. Nemirovitch Dantchenko,
distinguished manager, playwright and producer, of the Moscow Art
Theatre, being then in Hollywood, after a preview of it, wrote as
follows:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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