The property man of a famous director once told me: “I’ve got the greatest collection of junk in the whole business. Just odds and ends. No one thing in the whole outfit worth anything in itself, but the King (he was referring to the director) would be crazy if he sold it for ten thousand dollars—yes, or twenty-five thousand, either. I tell you, sometimes junk is the most important thing in a picture.” After a set has been built, it is usually “dressed” by hiring first the furniture from one of the concerns that have grown up for just this purpose—renting furniture, old or new, to motion-picture companies that want to use it for a few weeks. If, in addition to what has been rented, the producing company is able to supply bits of “junk” from its own property room and make the set look more natural, so much the better. The story is told of one enterprising concern in Los Angeles that started in collecting beer-bottles just after prohibition went into effect. Since the bottles were no longer returnable, they were able to buy them here and there for almost nothing, until they had on hand a tremendous supply. The word went around that such and such a concern was in the market for bottles, and every boy in Los Angeles gathered up what he could find and took them around while the market was still good. People thought they were crazy, and had a good laugh at the movie industry that didn’t know any more than to buy up hundreds and hundreds of old beer-bottles that nobody would ever be able to use again. Then one of the producing companies wanted a batch of bottles for some bar-room scene and found that they didn’t happen to have any on the lot. They went to the big property concern that they usually traded with, only to find that they, too, didn’t happen to have any beer-bottles. So they went to the concern that had been buying them all up at junk prices. Certainly they could have some bottles—all they wanted! They would be thirty cents a week each, and a dollar apiece for any that were broken or not returned. Take it or leave it! The corner on old beer-bottles had suddenly become profitable. The producing company tried to get bottles elsewhere and beat the monopoly—but time was pressing. When the overhead of a single company is running at hundreds of dollars a day, a property man will not be forgiven if he holds up the whole production while he scours the city to save money on beer-bottles. The price was paid. But let us get on with our tour of the studio. We have not yet come to one of the most important places of all—the laboratory where the film is developed. The laboratory work of many producing companies is not done on the lot at all, but is sent away to one of the big commercial laboratories that does work for many different companies. But several of the larger producers have their own laboratory plants.