LM: What kind of stoppage would you use for the different exposures?
MOHR: You’d expose for each exposure; because you didn’t expose the entire layer of film, you’d expose certain areas of it. All that placement was done in the camera itself, by means of black mattes in front of the camera. You had to know what you were doing.
LM: IN OLD SAN FRANCISCO harked back to your youth. . .
MOHR: Yes indeed. That was with Alan Crosland directing. We had miniature, of course, in that—but I did a trick on that thing that I think was pretty damn good, on the earthquake scene, and the earthquake scenes were more effective, I think, than they were in the later MGM film SAN FRANCISCO, where they destroyed whole sets. I did a gag on that; I think it was the first time it was done, maybe the only time. But it worked so damned effectively. On the front of the camera I had a control box made. I took a square reducing-glass—it was quite a heavy reduction element. I set that on very soft sponge rubber, and placed it on iris arms in front on the camera, and I’d photograph the scene through that . . . you’d have to refocus, you couldn’t use the regular focal scale. We’d be doing the scene, and when the earthquake was to happen, I’d just gently tap this reduction element—and of course, there were certain mechanical elements happening on the set, like a thing would fall or a dump box would dump from the top of this set. But by tapping on this frame that held the reduction element, it would make the reduction element jump and quiver, and the result was that you got a distorted picture—it looked as if the buildings were rolling. We used that through all the earthquake scenes; it was very effective, but done in a very easy way.
LM: Now we come to THE JAZZ SINGER.
MOHR: THE JAZZ SINGER was of course the first major talking picture; of course it was not a complete talking picture, a lot of scenes were silent. But there were some amusing things that happened on that that will bear repeating. We started the picture shooting silent, because the Vitaphone thing had not yet been perfected; we didn’t know what kind of lights we were going to have to use, because we were going to have dialogue, and the panchromatic film was so bad in those days that we didn’t want to use it generally throughout the picture. We’d use the orthochromatic film on everything that we could, and then wait and use the panchromatic film under circumstances where we had to use it. And the reason we had to use it was that we couldn’t use any arc lights, which we used on the orthochromatic film; we had to use incandescent lights for the red end of the spectrum, to which the pan film was supposed to be sensitive. And there was an unbearable heat condition with those damn things, you had to use so much of them to get an exposure. So one of the things that happened was that we had May McAvoy as the leading lady, and May had red hair. We did the silent scenes first, and shot them all with arc lights on orthochromatic film, and orthochromatic film was not sensitive to red. So the result was that May was a brunette in all these scenes. And you know, it wasn’t until after I’d seen the picture two or three times that I noticed this, but she walked from an exterior into the interior of the home, and she had some dialogue with Al Jolson, then when she walked from the outer room into the bedroom she suddenly became a blonde! And throughout the picture, in all the dialogue scenes, her hair was about eight shades lighter than it was in the silent scenes. But nobody noticed it while we were making the picture.
LM: How confining was it working with the new sound equipment?
MOHR: Oh, it was terrible. When they went to talking pictures, what happened is what so often happens when there’s an innovation: the man with the new idea becomes the lord and master of the set. The technicians from AT&T, the soundmen, said, “Look, you’re going to make talking pictures, you’re going to do it the way I say it can be done, regardless of what you’ve been doing.” So the restrictions they placed on us in the placement of microphones, that sort of thing, and the fact that we couldn’t edit—it had to be shot as a continuous scene, with multiple cameras—was really something. The sound was being put on wax disks, and they had no way of editing those disks; in other words, we could construct a scene so the entire scene would be photographed at once. Sometimes it would fill a disk, two or three minutes, and sometimes it would only use a little bit of the disk. But you had to cover all of your close-ups, and everything, all with one setup. We used the techniques then that they started using in live television later. The only difference then was that we had cameras that sounded like McCormick harvesters, and we didn’t have any blimps for them—we had iceboxes. The icebox was about six feet square, with a piece of optical glass in front; the operator and assistant could be in there, and the poor guys would die for lack of oxygen, and the heat. Well, with four or five of them around, where would you put your lights, with all these iceboxes fencing you in? That was bad enough, but then the soundman would say, “I’ve got to have the microphone right here”—they didn’t swing the mikes back and forth—and it was never above the head, always they wanted to get it so you would talk directly into it. Well, that soon proved itself impossible, because you had to see the actor, and if you were working over a table, and there was a vase of flowers on the table, or a water pitcher, that would be the receptacle for holding the microphone, but in the longer scenes where we had to have head room above the person, and the microphone had to be above the head, it was a case of either putting the frame of the picture on top of their heads, which you couldn’t do, and have all floor down below—or in many cases we introduced a piece of glass in front of the camera, on stationary shots, had the man put the microphone where he wanted to, and then have the assistant with a piece of chalk put a dot on the glass where the microphone was. Then I’d have a scenic artist come in and paint a little picture on that glass, which would in effect be hanging on the wall behind the actor. And that painting on the glass was camouflaging the microphone, which would have gotten in the scene otherwise. We had to resort to that several times. But it wasn’t too long before we reached the point with the directors, the producers, and cameramen, and we just said, “Now look, this is the best we can do for you; you get your microphone wherever you can get it.”
Mohr lines up a low-angle shot for THE LAST PERFORMANCE (1929) while director Paul Fejos (with megaphone) adjusts a prop for star Mary Philbin.
LM: I’ve just seen THE WEDDING MARCH recently, and there again is a beautiful film.
MOHR: I took that over, you know; they had been about six weeks on that thing. I don’t know what the credits read on it, but I took it over as they were about to wrap it up. Stroheim was a difficult man, but he was an exacting man. I don’t know what the trouble was, but I went out and took that over from Harry Thorpe and Bill McGann, and I think we retook everything they had made, I think that was the way Stroheim worked. I was eight or ten weeks on the thing, and had a very exciting experience. I worked like a dog; we worked day and night, and there were days I never left the studio. . . . I’d sleep there on the set, send one of my assistants out to get me a sandwich and a cup of coffee. That includes Sundays and everything else. . . . oh Jesus, that was a difficult picture to do. But it was a great opportunity to make a beautiful display of photography, I thought. So much I shot I knew they couldn’t use in the picture. For example, there was one sequence, when Fay Wray goes to the confessional, I did a thing leading up to that—now whether any of this is in the picture or not, I don’t know—but I did a nine-minute lead-in to that confessional scene, of just things inside the cathedral: the dripping wax, the candle flame, the window, the statues, just a series of artistic orgasms, that’s what it was. They were all dissolves, but we only had four-hundred-foot rolls of film, so I had to time it and figure the thing, so that when I had to reload the camera, and put a new magazine in the camera, it would be on a static moment, so we could cut to that static moment and then go on. So the result was we had a nine- or ten-minute continuous film that was just dissolve after dissolve—some superimpositions. I think it’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever done, from an aesthetic point of view—completely useless ins
ofar as telling the story is concerned. He said to make it, make an atmosphere for this girl to come to the cathedral.
LM: That was originally a two-part picture, wasn’t it?
MOHR: Yes, there was THE WEDDING MARCH and then THE HONEYMOON. I finished THE WEDDING MARCH, and I got about halfway through THE HONEYMOON when the bomb burst, insofar as Von and I were concerned. I just picked up my camera, walked off the set and went home, and that was the end of it. I don’t know who he got to finish it.
LM: Did you do the color sequence?
MOHR: I’m pretty sure I must have, if it was part of THE WEDDING MARCH. It was two-color; I’m sure I supervised that. They had a Technicolor cameraman to do that, but I’m sure I supervised that.
LM: They’ve restored that sequence, and the hues are surprisingly rich and vivid.
MOHR: In the two-color process the blues were not true and the yellows were not true; blues were green, and the yellows were orange, but other than that, two-color Technicolor wasn’t bad.
LM: The flesh tones are very good.
MOHR: In my more recent pictures in color, where I could, I would not put makeup on the people; I’d photograph them without makeup, just to get away from the ridiculous color they come through with. I’d tell a woman to just put on a nice street makeup, “Put on the makeup you’d wear if you were going to a party, but don’t put on motion picture makeup.” Of course, makeup men hated me for that.
LM: Let’s go back again, to NOAH’S ARK.
MOHR: NOAH’S ARK is where I split with Mike Curtiz. We were doing NOAH’S ARK, and we really went all-out on the thing. We had tremendous sets—if you saw the picture, you know what was involved with it. When we got to the flood sequence, we built a number of sets, tremendous sets, going up fifty feet in the air and that sort of thing. In one sequence we had sixteen cameras going at once . . . Mike had worked it all out. It was a big venture to do, and it had been awfully hard work. So we got to the point where the flood was to topple these temples, and columns would fall on people, and that sort of thing. And we had possibly forty or fifty stunt men and women who had been engaged; I have no particular sympathy for them—I mean, if they know their job, and they know what they’re doing, they can protect themselves. But we had thousands of extra people on the sets, and they would do anything you’d tell them, just to get the day’s work, but they had no idea what the hell was going to happen. So we’d gone around to plot how we were going to handle these collapsing sets, and there was a man there at the studio at that time named Fred Jackman, who had a blue-backing process that was very effective, where you could superimpose solid things over other things. I knew damn well that we could have these people on the set, and drop a certain amount of water on them, and maybe a few pumice and balsa-wood sections on them, and they wouldn’t get hurt, and I knew that over that, Jackman could take a miniature of a tremendous amount of water, and tremendous columns collapsing, and blue-backing them over this action, make it look as if it was a one-piece film. So I assumed we were going to do this in a trick way, but when we were looking at these sets I talked to Mike, and Darryl Zanuck, who was producing it, was with us, and I said, “Well, we’ll have to make provisions for Jackman to overlay his miniature stuff . . .” and he said, “No, we’re not going to use Jackman on this.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “We’re going to actually have these columns collapse,” and they had these spillways built on top of the columns that held tons of water, and they would come whooshing down onto the set. I said, “Jesus, what are you going to do about the extra people?” He said, “Oh, they’re going to have to take their chances.” I said, “Not as far as I’m concerned, I’ll never have anything to do with a thing like that,” and I went through this very carefully with Jackman, and explained how they could have a few stunt people and he could lay in the other extras, and it would be just as realistic, just as effective, but without killing anybody. They insisted they were going to do it the way they wanted to do it, so I told them to shove the picture, and walked off the set. Then the boy who had been my assistant took over the picture to finish, he and Chick McGill. They modified their extremities to some degree, but one man lost a leg, a couple of people were injured to the point that they never did recover. The goddamned murderous bastards never should have permitted a thing like that to happen. So that was the last thing I did with Mike.
LM: Can you explain about the different film stocks at this time?
MOHR: In the orthochromatic stages, before panchromatic film became the thing to use, because of sound, there was a competitive film made by the Dupont film. It was a true orthochromatic film, and by being true orthochromatic it did have yellow sensitivity, and certain qualities that the so-called orthochromatic that Eastman made did not have. In my opinion, it was a superior film. I had had such good success using Dupont film, where I could use it, that I had a preference for it. Warner Brothers had a financial tie-up with Brulatour, who was the distributor for Eastman film at that time, so they were committed to Eastman film. The Eastman film was a damn good film, don’t misunderstand me, but I had a leaning to the Dupont, which was finer quality. Now the panchromatic film that Eastman was making at this time was deplorable. Brulatour had died, and Bill German was now the distributor for Eastman film out here, and I told Warner Brothers,
“Look, if we’re going to do NOAH’S ARK the way we have it set up, to meet these requirements, I want to do it on Dupont film. If I have to use Eastman panchromatic film, I know that I can’t handle sets of this size and get the quality that we want to get into it. I think that I can possibly get it on the Dupont, and I’ll make comparative tests to prove it.” So they reported that to Eastman, who threw his arms up—“There’s a revolution!” But Bill German was a smart little guy, and a pretty good friend of mine; we sat down and had a talk about it. I said, “Bill, it’s reached the point where if I’m going to photograph NOAH’S ARK, and maybe I won’t as a result of this, I cannot do it on your panchromatic film.” So he got on the phone to Rochester, and they went back and forth, and made an experimental emulsion panchromatic film, and came out with what is known as Type 2 panchromatic negative. I made tests with it and found that I could do with that what would be required. It wasn’t what the final black and white films are, the double and triple x, which are exquisite films, but by beating them over the head hard enough, they did come out with this Type 2 negative that had the sensitivity and not the degree of contrast the old panchromatic film had. So I’ve always felt in a sense responsible for bringing out that film, which was the beginning of the evolutionary stage of panchromatic film.
LM: They wanted you to use Eastman panchromatic, you wanted to use Dupont ortho. What about Eastman ortho at the time?
MOHR: Eastman ortho was not ortho. It was a black and white film, but it had no sensitivity at the yellow end of the spectrum. I don’t know what you’d call it. On the old orthochromatic film, if you were to put a red filter on it to try to control sky, you got nothing. But on the Dupont I could use a K-3 filter or something, and get blue sky held down, and the white clouds would come through. K-3 was a very heavy amber filter.
LM: When you got into 3-strip Technicolor, the blue strip was orthochromatic film, wasn’t it?
MOHR: Yes, that’s right.
LM: Did you have to start using arc lights again?
MOHR: No, we had to use a hell of a lot of light, but the blue record was the worst record of the three. I think the blue record was behind, the back negative, and that was just to get a record that would throw blue in—it wasn’t for resolution purposes. I think we used to get our black and white prints off the green negative, or the red. But the requirement of the ortho strip in the three-strip camera was not too great.
The Art of the Cinematographer Page 14
