The property man is the one who has to see that the details of a picture are correct; that if the hero has a handkerchief showing in his pocket when he walks out of one scene, he has it when he walks into the next, and so on. When you realize that a picture is usually taken location by location and set by set, instead of in the natural order of the scenes, you can realize how important it is to have some one check up on all the details. [Illustration: _Courtesy W. W. Hodkinson Corporation._ GETTING A COMEDY CLOSE-UP FOR A LAUGH. In this scene, where detail of expression is important, the big reflector is brought close to the subject and held in place by the property man, whose head is just outside the “camera angle.”] [Illustration: _Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation._ A “LOCATION” WHERE REFLECTORS ARE ESSENTIAL. Under the big trees of a forest there is never very much illumination for quick photography, and reflectors to throw additional light on the actors’ faces are doubly important.] The first interior scenes to be taken, we will say, are those in a drawing-room set, that the carpenters completed first. They are, perhaps, the scenes that in the script are numbered 22, 23, 49, 107, 108, 109, 191, 224, and 225. In Scene 22 the hero comes into the drawing-room and finds that his father has just had a severe paralytic stroke. In Scene 21, perhaps, he said good-by to a companion on the front steps and then entered the house. Scene 21 was taken “On location” three months before Scene 22 is to be taken in the studio. But in the finished picture, the hero will walk through the front door and immediately come into the drawing-room. It is the duty of the property man to see that he isn’t wearing a golf suit when he goes in the door on one side and riding-breeches when he comes out on the other side of the door. Our property man was a friend of the owners, who had no previous experience to speak of. They wanted him to learn the business (or art, if you prefer) and insisted on his appointment. That is no unusual thing in picture-making; it would amaze people to know how far, in the case of the great majority of all pictures that are made, the owners influence things. If you have a good director, and assistant director, and photographer, and actors, what difference does a property man make? It would seem, would it not, that the various assistants would look out for all the details necessary, dividing the work up among them? But they can’t. There was the cat, for instance. We were taking some of the early scenes in a city of the Middle West (one of the great charms about movie-making is that you often travel to the places you want to photograph, instead of trying to “fake” them in the country around the studio) and the script called for a cat. The hero, according to the story, would not desert his old cat when he left town, so he took her along in his automobile.