But when winter came, though we lost the spectators we acquired other
discomforts. Our make-up would be frozen, and the dreary, cold, damp
rooms in the country hotels made us shivery and miserable. We’d
hurriedly climb into our costumes, drag on our coats, and then light
our little alcohol stove or candle to get the make-up sufficiently
smeary. When made up, out into the cold, crisp day. One of the men
would have a camp-fire going where we’d huddle between scenes and keep
limber enough to act. Then when ready for the scene Billy Bitzer would
have to light the little lamp that he attached to the camera on cold
days to warm the film so it wouldn’t be streaked with “lightning.”
While that was going on we stood at attention, ready to do our bit when
the film was.
We weren’t so keen on playing leads on such days as those, for when you
are half frozen it isn’t so easy to look as if you were calmly dying
of joy, for which emotional state the script might be asking. What we
liked best in the winter was to follow Mack Sennett in the chases which
he always led, and which he made so much of, later, when he became the
big man in Keystone films. The chase warmed us up, for Mack Sennett
led us on some merry jaunts, over stone walls, down gulleys, a-top of
fences--whatever looked good and hard to do.
Somehow we found it difficult to be always working with the weather.
Though we watched carefully it seemed there always were “summer”
stories to be finished, almost up to snow time; and “winter” stories in
the works when June roses were in bud. Pink swiss on a bleak November
day ’neath the leafless maple didn’t feel so good; nor did velvet and
fur and heavy wool in the studio in humid August.
But such were the things that happened. We accepted them with a good
grace.
CHAPTER XIII
AT THE STUDIO
This story must now take itself indoors. We are terribly excited over
Tolstoy’s “Resurrection.” So even though it be May, we must to the
studio where the carpenters and scene painters are fixing us a Siberia.
As the days went by we produced many works of literary
masters--Dickens, Scott, Shakespeare, Bret Harte, O. Henry, and Frank
Norris. We never bothered about “rights” for the little one-reel
versions of five-act plays and eight hundred page novels. Authors and
publishers were quite unaware of our existence.
Arthur Johnson, Owen Moore, and Florence Lawrence played the leading
parts in our “free adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Powerful Novel.” And
it so happened that just as Prince Demetri was ready to don his fur
robes, and the poor exiles their woolen slips, for the trudge over the
snow-clad steppes, a nice hot spell came our way, and we must have been
the hottest Russians that ever endured Siberia.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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