LIFE magazine reported last week (about two months after Leonard Lyons had) that sequences were made for “The Lost Weekend” in which the hero, Ray Milland, went about New York’s Third Avenue among people who didn’t know they were taking part in a movie. They didn’t know because, as well as not being able to recognize Mr. Milland realistically made up, they couldn’t see the camera crew and equipment, which were hidden in such places as the top of a theatre marquee and inside trucking vans. This hidden-camera maneuver for combining real and fictional lives is as well known as movies, but Hollywood could use it much more than it does—no matter how well the scenes turn out for “The Lost Weekend.”
It would be one way of avoiding the unreal, mismated or lifeless details that now occur so often in people, scenery, action and atmosphere of scenes shot in the studio, and it’s also a way to find out what the world is like, which Hollywood could use, since it has forgotten most of what it ever knew about the world. Also, it would be seeing the world through the eyes of a camera instead of through those of a novelist or playwright, upon whom it is increasingly dependent for its conception of the world. The movies nowadays turn up fewer and fewer aspects of the world that can be best shown by the camera, and instead get more and more of what novelists like to think about. Besides, they rely too much on their past work for symbols of the real world, though the symbols long ago became stale knowledge to audiences. Making fiction films in a close union with real life and out in the real world isn’t the only way to make movies, and it is only a means. Whether a movie is made inside a studio or in the middle of a city street, it is obviously going to be only as good as the skill, intelligence, purpose and honesty of its producer.
Hidden cameras can be used to make actuality serve as the whole material of a fiction film scene or just as environment and secondary material around planned and rehearsed central action. If your plot called for some action inside of a department store the normal activity of the store could be got by sending trained actors into it to carry on a planned business with an actor-clerk. Nobody else in the store need become conscious or self-conscious of this business, since the camera man has been slyly concealed inside an ingeniously made store dummy and is recording everything from there. In this case the fictional business would be provided with the kind of life that ought to go on around it. The sides and backgrounds of modern movie scenes are at rare moments as good as they are in Sturges movies but are generally so dead and vapid and without accident that the action seems to have been played in a bottle.
There are all kinds of tones in an actual event, whereas it is very difficult to get anything but primary effects in studio productions. Also, beyond secondary effects, the marvelous illustrative capacity of the camera could be used at times in fiction films with an effect that would lift you out of your seat. If you wanted a picture of race prejudice you could send a Negro actor into a Southern bus with only one action to perform—he would sit down in a section where only white people are allowed to sit. What followed would be entirely spontaneous and approximately predictable. The value of the material would depend on how, why and where it was used in the movie, and on how well the director understood the situation and what he was about in using it, and even more, perhaps, on how much he knew about the artistic possibilities of the movie medium. Creativity in using the camera is not confined to recording an already created, rehearsed and planned action; film creativity is in the selection of the camera possibilities right for the purpose.
The difficulties involved in photographing with concealed cameras include the problem of hiding oneself and a camera sometimes even bigger. If you are hidden, you can’t get around much or fast, so that your view and range are restricted. There would be all kinds of trouble with lighting (but you could hardly do worse with that than Hollywood does right now); there is the problem of sound and getting people’s permission to use their stores, trains, homes and selves for movies. However, the solution of these difficulties (and others) requires only ingenuity, and with a normal amount of that, using real-life scenes shouldn’t be so hard, expensive or frantic as using some of the dodges thought up in studios for simulating real life.
January 1, 1945