Cinema: New Camera

As inconspicuous as an extra’s check, the new 20th Century Silenced Camera purred away on a Hollywood sound stage last week in its first big-time assignment. Gesticulating in front of its highly sensitive lenses were such precious cinema properties as Alice Faye, Betty Grable and Jack Oakie, but 20th Century-Fox accountants in back offices well knew the unpublicized camera might prove to be the most valuable asset on the lot.

Three Fox technicians—the late bulky, impetuous Charles Melvin Miller, quiet, balding Robert Stevens and congenial, greying Grover Laube—first commenced work on the 20th Century Camera six years ago in a cubicle of the Fox camera department hidden down an obscure alley of the sprawling studio. For two years they labored long after hours, completed the first working model by 1936. Their purpose: to produce an instrument simple and speedy to operate, light enough to be toted by one man. An automatic focussing device would eliminate the time-eating practice of plunging a tape into an actor’s face to measure his distance from the camera. A built-in scene recorder would eliminate the slovenly “slating” process—photographing the number of each scene, whacking two boards together to mark the end and beginning of the sound track. It would operate as quietly as a snowy night. Gone would be the cumbersome, crate-like “blimp” which covers the camera to keep its purring from drowning out actors’ voices. The first version was tried on Shirley Temple from time to time, then hauled back for alterations and improve ments. Last Spring it did the complete photographic job on Shirley’s Young People, recording the puzzled expressions of Starlet Arleen Whelan.

Weighing only 115 Ib. (three more than Arleen) including tripod, against 425 Ib. for the old camera not counting its bulky steel undercarriage, as comparatively simple as a Brownie, the new camera had its official unveiling for Fox executives last month at a dinner in the studio commissary. Two complete camera crews (cameraman and two assistants) operated the old and new cameras for their bosses while a stop watch timed the performances. At “go” each crew swung its camera into line, slated the film, checked focus, exposed 45 feet of film, stopped, slated the next “take,” made another 45-foot shot of the same scene. The new camera took just half the time of the old.

Elated with this exhibition, Hollywood statisticians figured a saving of two hours and 30 minutes a day per picture, two to four days on an average 30-day shooting schedule, $10,000 to $20,000 a picture. This would mean at least $500,000 a year to Fox alone, a possible $5,000,000 saving to the industry each year. Quickly an order went to a Syracuse manufacturer for ten cameras of the same model to cost around $13,000 apiece, the first of which is now quietly earning its way memorializing the features of Alice Faye.