CHAPTER V MAKING A MOTION PICTURE Once I was turned loose in New York City with thirty-odd thousand dollars and a novel by a popular author, and told to make a movie out of them. Suppose that should happen to you. How would you begin? Of course you would want to make a better picture than so many of these other fellows seem able to turn out. But how would you start? Just by hiring some actors and a camera man and telling them to get busy? It is not so easy as that. The first thing for me, to be sure, was getting together the men who would help make the photoplay. Re-writing the story into a scene-by-scene continuity, hiring a studio and attending to all the business details, selecting a cast, picking out the “locations” for scenes, designing the “sets” and supervising the construction of them, and “directing” the scenes, is more than any one person can do. The Swiss Family Robinson itself couldn’t do it alone. So I selected and hired a director, and a camera man, and a continuity writer, and an art director to design the sets. That took quite a while. Then the trouble began. The director decided he wanted an assistant director; the camera man decided he wanted an assistant camera man; the art director decided that I didn’t know what I was doing, and the “owners” decided that everything done so far was all wrong. That brought out two very interesting things about motion pictures that apply to lots of other businesses as well. And sports, too, if you like, and almost everything else. The first is the matter of coöperation. When the rowers in a boat pull only when they feel like it, the boat goes wabbling all over the place, instead of straight ahead, and everybody gets his knuckles barked. Everybody has to pull together. Imagine a football team without any teamwork! Movies are so complicated, in the making, that dozens of people, hundreds often, have to pull together when they are being made. That very thing is one of the big reasons why moving pictures to-day aren’t any better than they are. Mostly movie people haven’t yet learned to pull well together, or how exceedingly important it is in the making of pictures. If you can’t work with other fellows without bucking and kicking,—don’t ever try motion-picture work. The other trouble was with the owners. There were too many bosses on the job, which always makes a mess. That quaint, humorous philosopher, “Josh Billings,” once said, “It ain’t ignorance that makes so much trouble; it’s so many people knowing too many things that ain’t so.” With movies, that’s an ever-present danger.