Some pictures calling for special properties and extra people fully justify the additional expenditure; others do not.  He is a wise writer who knows his own script well enough to be able to judge.

3.  How Some “Too Expensive” Scenes Were Taken

In a great many cases, pictures containing aeroplanes, burning oil wells, railroad wrecks, houses that are completely gutted by fire, and other exceptionally spectacular features, are the result of the merest chance.  For example, a few years ago the Thanhouser studio at New Rochelle, N.Y., caught fire and burned to the ground.  The fire was a spectacular one, as the chemical contents of the building burned like powder, and there were several explosions.  The fire occurred at 1.30 o’clock in the afternoon, and many of the players were at lunch at their hotels when the alarm was turned in.  But the players, the cameraman, and the director quickly got together, and even before the fire was well out they had produced a thrilling fire picture, “When the Studio Burned,” in which was shown the rescue of the “Thanhouser Kid” by Miss Marguerite Snow, then leading woman of the company.  Thus advantage was taken of an unfortunate happening to add to the fame of the Thanhouser company.

Again, it may happen that several scenes of a big fire are taken while it is in progress, and the film laid aside until a suitable photoplay is either written by a staff-writer or sent in by an outside author.  Then the picture is completed, the fire scenes previously taken being inserted between other scenes showing the action of the plot.

One of the most thrilling and realistic fire pictures ever produced was “The Incendiary Foreman,” released by Pathe Freres early in 1908.  It had a well-developed plot that kept the dramatic interest keyed up every moment, but the features of the film were the many thrillingly realistic fire scenes, in which the Parisian fire department battled with the flames while several enormous buildings were being destroyed.  One of the earlier scenes depicted the yard of the Pathe factory, and showed a quarrel between the foreman and one of the workmen.  The ensuing action led one to believe that this was the factory that was consumed by the flames, but one or two of the later scenes made it plain to those who could read French and who watched the picture closely that the actual fire scenes had been taken during the destruction of an immense oil refinery.  Yet the combination of the rehearsed scenes and the views of the real and disastrous conflagration made a picture that drew record-breaking houses to every theatre where it was exhibited.