PARADOXICAL FACTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 February 1939, Page 5

PARADOXICAL FACTS

HOLLYWOOD A VERITABLE PARADISE. | A collector of paradoxical facts,' roaming in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s' Culver City studio, would find it a ver-■ ilable paradise. At almost every step' some strange new fact, apparently con-! tradictory circumstance, or amazing revelation would greet his eye and! car. Hundreds of conceptions of the; general public have been changed i through modern progress on the screen. One of the first things to strike the paradox-hunter would be the fact that, on a picture set. the cameraman never touches his camera. He watches lighting, composition, action, pictorial effect and make-up. It is his assistant who aims, starts, and stops the camera. When elaborate ea-

mera mechanisms are used, as man?/ ; j as eight men operate a camera. _ | The cameraman never touches it. but i l only signals the helpers. _ j I The man who records the voices of; j Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy > ' never hears a note of their songs. i i It comes from the microphone to the; 1 recording machine as an inaudible el- ' ectrici'l current, and he gauges it by a ' little rod light signal, the needle of a microvolt indicator, and sees the I “voices" in the form of almost microscopic grooves on the "check-up wax , record. Sound entering the microphone is changed to a vibrating current which actuates the actual recording apparatus, and the indicator-needle the engineer uses is far more accurate than his i human ear. . j ■Cobwebs seen in old houses or in I dark corners in screen drama arch i'

• spun by spiders, but bj‘ a machine . which fashions them out of rubber cement much as a candy floss machine i spins sugar into candy.