What was that? A flash of lightning! The drummer redoubles his sonorous roll, ending with a wild, spine-stiffening thump. Some storm. The heroine’s hair is blown so violently you fear it may be torn out by the very roots. She falls to the moss-grown forest floor. Livid flash and another thunderous roll. Then the deluge. The heavens open, and while the fanfare is loudest and the lightning is lividest, our fair lady is soaked to the skin with real water and falls to earth, beaten down by the very force of the torrent from on high. Great scene, that! Come with us now and see how the game is played. Ah, the movie studio! Here’s a patch of nice green grass on the studio floor, and back of it a few shrubs and some sizable trees. Up on a scaffold high enough to be out of the camera’s ken are a dozen men, each armed with a huge watering pot. The heroine stands on the side lines, waiting for the storm to begin. Storm in broad noon of a sunny day? Sure thing. Just watch. An excited-looking individual holding a bunch of manuscript stands beside the heroine--yes, you’ve guessed it, he’s the movie director. She gets behind the trees, and the man at the camera crank starts turning. She pushes her way through the tangled wildwood and stubs her toe, looking unutterable anguish the while. “Down stage!” yells the excited director. She staggers on as directed, the camera man cranking nonchalantly with one hand while he takes puffs at a cigarette with the other. The poor girl tries to rise, and wabbles feebly. “Fall in front of the camera!” bawls the director. She falls at the proper focal distance. “Stretch out your arms--look wild!” yells the boss of the works. “Let her go!” this time to the men with the watering cans. And poor heroine, struggling and staggering, is drenched to the skin with the downpour, not from the heavens above, but quite as wet. But, we ask, where is the lightning for this wild outburst of the aforesaid Nature. “Oh, that’s easy!” laughs the director. “We put that in afterward with the scratch of a pin.” “But how are you going to make it look like night?” “Easier still--we’ll tint the film blue. Got to have sunlight to take any kind of pictures, anyway.” So, when you see this thrill, remember that the lightning is a pin scratch, and the night effect is blue aniline dye and not by the gloom of night. As for Jupiter Pluvius, the men with the cans of water can wet down the place with equal skill. Have you ever witnessed an exciting scene about a big building--a home or a factory--and then, in the next reel, watched it go up in smoke and flame? Yes? Some expense? Not so very much, for you haven’t seen the real building burn down at all, but only a little model of it after the scene has been acted out in front of the real building. “The best fire effects are made in the studios, anyway,” the movie expert will tell you.