An Unusual Library

Taranaki Daily News, 24 September 1940, Page 10

An Unusual Library

Backgrounds Filed Away A hard-v/orked pair are Messrs. Roy Granville and Harmon Weight, film librarians for RKO Studios. They are the real rabbit-in-the-hat men of Hollywood. Every major studio maintains a complete sound-track library, and engages an expert to watch over it. Men such as Granville and Weight may come up from their dusty vaults at any time with peculiar patches of celluloid material that can enhance a movie by 50 per cent., or maybe cut production costs by a large margin. Weight's chief stock-in-trade is the "establishing shots." He controls a million feet of catalogued negative gathered from world-wide sources — from news reel services, motion picture cutting rooms, and professional producers of stock film material, from whom the studios are constantly buying footage that some day may save them a costly location trip or two. When i'. becomcs necessary for the studios to establish photographically authentic long shots of foreign locations, such as London's Leicester Square, Berlin's Unter Den Linden, Shanghai's famous Bund and so forth, Weight invariably has what they want right on his shelves. If it's something more off the heaten background track he has outside sources which may ring the bell for him on short notice. World -roving cameramen find it profitable to dicker with the studios for their negative. For the average backgrounds, they are paid a flat rate of 2.50 dollars a foot, which is pretty high, but far cheapc- than sending out a camera crew to take it first-hand.