Word: celluloid
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Mussolini, the latest example of a notably successful TV specialty, is in great part a monument to a new kind of sleuth: the film searcher. Before Twentieth Century could fit together the show's dramatic jigsaw pattern in celluloid, searchers had to hunt out the bits and pieces of aging film in 25 different hoards in four countries; to give editors a choice, they brought in ten times as much footage as editors could...
Truffle Hound. The hunting ground of the celluloid sleuths is vast-Government agencies in the U.S. and abroad, old newsreel vaults and a network of private collectors, mostly eccentrics whom one NBC searcher describes as "a basketful of live eels who frequently don't own the film legally." Archives are widely scattered, often poorly indexed, studded with tantalizing gaps left by oversight, fire and disintegration. Nitrate-base film, widely used until 1948, has a lifetime of only 25 years. "It is not unusual," says an expert, "to open a can of film and find nothing but dust." Almost...
...Japanese seaside village of Kawana, hell-for-celluloid Director John Huston was about to shoot a panoramic movie scene encompassing some 350 fisherfolk extras, all decked out in elaborate 19th century samurai costumes, tunics, kimonos and big wigs. Suddenly a voice bellowed in Japanese over the village's loudspeaker: "Dolphins!" Departing radically from the script, the male extras quickly put to sea in Huston's rented sampans while the women took off their film kimonos and excitedly awaited the return of their men. Net catch for the inscrutable villagers: 270 dolphins worth $3,500 in the seafood market...
...action. Both its external quality and the unfortunate compression required by a maximum viewing time limit the film. A novel, for example, can take forty hours to be read, and can indulge in the luxury of leisurely expression, whereas the film is at the mercy of the speeding celluloid that cannot turn back, dwell or diverge. The novel can give pages to the description of minutes and skip over years in a sentence; but while a film can dismiss time, it cannot expand it or hold it back to examine it in many facets. "A novel has three tenses...
...even Harry Cohn can conjure up-or do without-the special, ineffable magic of looks and personality that only a star strikes from celluloid. Young (24) and at the top of her form (37-23-37), Kim Novak is an ample (5 ft. 7 in., 125 Ibs.), creamy-skinned girl with classically solid Slavic good looks under a gloss of glamour. Her hazel eyes are long-lashed and deep-socketed; her full mouth pouts ever so slightly; an alabaster pallor sculpts her cheeks; her hair is shaped to the head in a fluffy corona of lavender-rinsed silver platinum. With...