The Art of the Cinematographer

by Leonard Maltin

  Happily married since 1934 to Evelyn Venable, the leading lady he photographed in DAVID HARUM, Mohr provided us with one of our most detailed interviews, covering his long and illustrious career.

  LM: How did you get started in the motion picture business?

  MOHR: In my youth, in San Francisco—at the time of the San Francisco earthquake and fire, I think I was eleven years old. I had never seen a motion picture; they were very rare articles at that time. As a kid I used to play around with lantern slides, the so-called Magic Lantern, and my fingers explored anything that was new or worth looking at. Shortly after the earthquake and fire, little vaudeville and variety houses sprang up all over the city, in former stores or basements, or burned-out buildings. They introduced this motion picture novelty; at break during the show they’d run a piece of motion picture film. And the first motion picture I ever saw was in one of these little houses; they’d set up a camera alongside a railroad track, and a train came from the distance and passed by the camera—that’s all there was to the thing. And I was intrigued with this darn thing, that from that moment on, that was the only thing I wanted to do—I wanted to find out what made that train go through the audience, and not run over anybody. We were an upper-middle-class family in San Francisco, and I had things pretty much the way I wanted them, as a kid. I finished my grammar school, and then in high school I went to Poly, and in my second year at Polytechnic I got a side job—I cut school for about the last year, and never finished high school. I got a job in the film exchange, splicing film and inspecting films that would come back from the movie theaters. We’d run it on reels through our fingers to catch the breaks, and then splice them. And in the junk of this place I found a little old, almost a toy, projection machine. It was called an optigraph, the forerunner of the motiograph, which became the projector of its time. I asked my boss if I could have it, he said yes, and I took this thing home. I had little scraps of film that I’d run on it; there was no lamp, it was just the head of the thing—it had a two-inch projection lens on it. I began fooling around and I put it in a dark box and made a camera out of it. I’d get little scraps of film—short ends, thirty feet, forty feet, fifty feet, whatever I could manage to scrape enough nickels to buy, and experimented with this thing. I actually made motion pictures with this little machine. I had to load it in the dark—I didn’t have magazines for the film—closed it up tight, and the only lens I had was this projection lens. I went around San Francisco with the thing. I made a sort of tripod, and devised a pan head for it, if you please. I got this worm gear, and a spiral gear, and put this thing together so I could pan the camera around, because I couldn’t tilt it. But I did use it; I photographed news events around San Francisco, as a youngster; I’d go to the Algin Theater, and Sid Grauman’s father had a theater called the Empress. And they were still using motion pictures at the intermission break, or in the case of the Empress Theater, where they had more than one show a day, they’d use the motion picture as the chaser to get the people out of the theater so they’d get the new audience in for the next show. And I used to photograph local news events with this thing, very badly, and I used the camera to make prints. I had to fix up a little developing room in my basement; I’d develop the negative in these tanks that I’d had built, wrapped them on a rack, and then I’d use the camera as a printing machine. I’d get maybe ten bucks or twenty bucks from the Orpheum or the Empress. Now during this period, there existed the so-called Patents Company, and if you know anything about motion picture history you know about the Patents Company. They had the patent rights to the intermittency of the camera, and any device that pulled down film and allowed a slack loop space for the film to be carried before the next pull-down, while the exposure was being made, was an infringement on their patents. The only camera that was built that was not an infringement on their patents I knew as the Gaumont camera; I think it had another name. They used what they called a beater-type movement. The film was pulled down continuously by a sprocket and a finger on a cam would come and knock the film down, and while the slack was being taken up to pull it down again by the single sprocket, the exposure was made. And that did circumvent the Patents Company’s patent, so what few independent operators who were within the law—and there were damn few of them, believe me—used the Gaumont camera. I’d been doing quite a bit of work in and around San Francisco, I’d been seen around with this camera. I’d quit school in the meantime, and taken this as a full-time occupation.

  Erich von Stroheim, director and star of THE WEDDING MARCH (1928). with Hal Mohr and Mohr’s first wife.

  LM: How old were you then?

  MOHR: By this time I suppose I was fifteen. There was an oilman at this time named Griffin, who owned the cattle interest down in the Salinas Valley, and had a big interest in oil properties. He wanted to make a film, I don’t know what the purpose of it was, and wanted to get some motion pictures of the oil wells around Bakersfield. He got in contact with me, and that turned out to be a fairly good job; I began to get into the serious factors of making motion pictures. So when this thing became known, the Patents Company sent their detectives to track me down, and find out what the hell I was doing. The reason I’m going into such detail is that I think this is the most interesting part of my whole career. They trailed me around for days, and I had a big, husky kid who’d been a truck driver, who used to go with me as an assistant of mine. His specific job while I was photographing stuff was to keep people away from the camera, while I was operating, so they couldn’t get a look at the thing and see what I was doing. But these two detectives approached me on another job, and I like a damn fool, to prove to them that I could do what I claimed to do, showed them my camera; that’s all they needed—they had an injunction served on me. My father was a property holder, and in business in San Francisco; we didn’t want to get involved in a lot of nonsense, so he said, “Well, you’d better give them the camera and forget about it.” The family was against my doing motion picture work anyhow. So I went down to this attorney in San Francisco, and brought the camera in to him. He said he had to have it, and I said, “Well, you may get it, but you’re not going to get it as a camera,” and I threw the thing down on the floor—it flew out in all directions. I said, “There’s the camera if you want it.” But that didn’t stop me; I went to work for other people who had heard of me, the Miles Brothers in San Francisco, and Sol Lesser, when he put together a little film outfit called the Progressive Film Company, in which we did all sorts of documentary films, made films for different commercial outfits. One of the things I did for Sol, was in 1913, when San Francisco had bid to get the Panama Pacific International Exposition to be given there in 1915. Well, San Francisco, as you undoubtedly know, was almost as notorious as the cities are becoming today. There was one area of San Francisco known as the Barbary Coast; it was about eight square blocks, with over 20,000 prostitutes living there. There used to be people going there who’d never come out alive. But the City Fathers decided that before the exposition could be given they’d have to clean up the morals of the city, so they announced that on a certain night the Barbary Coast would be closed, it would be the end of the Barbary Coast, and they meant it quite seriously. All these little back alleys through the Chinatown area, Washington Avenue, Bartlett Avenue, Jackson Street, all these little streets in that area were where these whorehouses were, and they were all to be thrown out of town. Of course, there was a more fashionable area downtown, the Tenderloin, down around Mason Street; they weren’t going to bother that, because that was conducted on a more ladylike and gentlemanly-like basis. But this Barbary Coast was a bawdy, wild, murderous neighborhood, so Efe Asher and Sid Grauman were young fellows, boys around town and pretty wild kids. They were working with Sol, and someone got the idea to make a film of the last night of the Barbary Coast. They used to have street lights, and I’d have to photograph this thing at night; they used to have a series of alternating-current arc lights, eight or ten of them running down a street, and the
y’d flicker all over the place. To improvise some light, so I could photograph at night—I don’t know how the hell I got all this knowledge —I went down to the Public Works company and got some of these old broken-down arc lights, fixed them up on wooden stands, and I had two of these things. I’d just run my hook off of the meters, or wherever I could get a.c. current, hook it onto these things, and use them to photograph. At any rate, we made a two-reel subject called THE LAST NIGHT OF THE BARBARY COAST. I was the one-man band: photographer, director, laboratory man, editor, salesman, chauffeur, propman, everything. Very much like the young filmmakers of today; I was really a filmmaker in those days. I made these prints myself; we sold it on a state’s rights basis, where we distributed it to territories for exclusive sale, and I made over three hundred prints of that thing. I must have made a hell of a lot of money on it, because I was getting $35 a week at that time to be the factor factotum of the whole thing. Other film companies began developing in San Francisco, and I worked for most of them. A man came up named Jim Keene, built the Kennograph Studio up in Fairfax, and made a picture called MONEY, which he sold to the World Film people. I did the finishing photography and editing on that. Then there was an outfit up in San Rafael called the California Motion Picture Company, which was headed by George Middleton and Alexander Bifus. Middleton was married to an opera singer by the name of Beatrice Licinina; she was the star of some of the films. I photographed a lot of their films, and edited a lot. In those days you did whatever there was to be done; you might be a photographer, or director, actor, anything—which was great training. It’s too bad you don’t have some of that kind of training today. Then I built my own studio over in Berkeley, on Telegraph Avenue. I took over what had been a store on the comer, plus quite a bit of lot area, and a barn, down about a hundred feet from the store area. By this time war had broken out, the First World War in Europe, and it was 1914. Up until that time all of our really good films, the best grade technical films, actually did come out of Europe, although we did have Biograph, and Vitagraph, Lubin, and all those people, who made exciting American films. But the really well-made films all came out of Europe, and they had a certain flavor. But with the beginning of the war in Europe, that source of supply was cut off; there wasn’t much film made in Europe. I think the last film to come out of there was CABIRIA; it was made by an Italian film company, and it was a spectacular film, about the last days of Pompeii. It had the eruption of volcanoes, and palaces tumbling, and all that. And in this they had a shot in which the camera traveled through this tremendous palace—it looked like it was floating on air. I couldn’t figure out how the hell they’d done this, but I made up my mind that in my next picture I was going to do this. To get back to the thread of the story, I got the idea that since there was a big Italian colony in San Francisco, and these films had been cut off completely from Europe, there’s a market, a gap to fill. So I went to the Italian colony and there was a man named Johnny DiMaria, who owned most of the real estate in the Barbary Coast; he was like a Little Caesar type of character. And I got to Johnny, talked to him, and promoted. He said, “Well, what are you going to put into this thing?” So I talked my dad into giving me $500 as my investment in it. We sold stock among the Italians and raised $4,000 to $5,000, and Johnny said he could put up the rest of the money to complete this project. The project was this: I built a studio, rented this ground on Telegraph Avenue, converted the old store into offices, prop rooms, and dressing rooms. I built an open stage next to the barn; the barn was the shop and loft, where we built the scenery. Half of the stage I covered with a solid roof, the other half I left out in the daylight. I read a thousand books, finally found a book that I liked the theme of, and I literally plagiarized this book, a book by Amelia Reeves, and wrote a motion picture script. I couldn’t typewrite very well, so I didn’t bother spelling everything out; I abbreviated everything. The whole script was an abbreviation. One line would cover a minute and a half! It was an Italian story, a period thing; our scenery in and around San Francisco lent itself very nicely to the scenery of Italy. I bought a Model T Ford, a Pathe camera, which was the camera of the period (the Patents Company was through, by now), and we built an Old Italian street set on this lot. I’d gone to a booking agency in San Francisco and hired an actor and actress, and I had an Italian girl, who was the daughter of one of the investors, who was a fine-looking girl. I used to load the leading man, a valet who was a damn good little actor, and a dog who worked in the picture—I would load the whole company, including this same truck driver who used to be my strong-arm man (he became my cameraman), into this Model T Ford, including the camera and one or two oilcloth reflectors that I put up on sticks. We were all in this Model T Ford and off we’d go behind the hills in Berkeley or up toward Raccoon Straits near the San Pablo Bay area, and we made this picture. I took over this laboratory that had fallen all to pieces in Berkeley, and I fixed it up. I’d be shooting all day, I’d come to the lab that evening, roll up the negative and put it up on the drums, get two or three hours’ sleep, then come back and make a positive—develop it and put it on the drums, then go to the studio and we’d go out on location again, or shoot in the studio. Getting back to the CABIRIA thing, I devised this dolly and I sincerely believe—it may be not true, of course—but I honestly believe it was the first time a camera was ever moved on wheels in a motion picture in America. I made a track, and got little car wheels, put this platform on the car wheels and set the camera on the tripod atop it. We’d built the set with a broken wall, so you could travel from one room to another, and tracked the camera across this thing. That was my interpretation of what I’d seen in CABIRIA. I may be wrong, but to my knowledge it was the first time a camera had rolled on set—they’d had them in automobiles and trains before.

  LM: Was that how they’d done it in CABIRIA?

  MOHR: No, they’d had an elaborate overhead crane; they went over platforms and down stairs and everything else. They had this thing, as I later learned, on an overhead trolley; the camera hung down from this. That apparatus would have cost more money than my whole damn picture cost! Before we finished our picture—I’ll round this story out so I don’t leave it up in the air—we ran out of money, and I put the picture together as best I could. DiMaria had something up his sleeve, because he had a contract with me; if I had made a successful picture and sold it, he was going to finance all future products. I had a two-year contract for $100 a week, plus I think twenty or twenty-five percent of the company. So Johnny saw no reason why I should get all this money, I guess; I took the picture, which was incompletely cut, to New York, and showed it to William F. Brady, who was the head of the World Film Company, because they had a distribution company for independent films, called the Greater New York Film Exchange. They played Ping-Pong with it while I was staying in a little cheap hotel at Washington Square, and in the meantime there were several hundred dollars’ worth of bills back here, and Johnny put the outfit through bankruptcy while I was in New York, so I was out on my can. I went back to California, and I don’t know if the picture was ever sold, or released, or what.

  LM: What was the name of the film?

  MOHR: I called it THE DAUGHTER OF THE GODS. Shortly after that, Herbert Brenon made a picture with Annette Kellermann called THE DAUGHTER OF THE GODS, a different film. So from then on, I came down to Hollywood; this was late 1914. Arthur Rice, a lab man I’d known in San Francisco, had come down to Universal Studios as a director, and he got me a job as a film editor, at $25 a week. They had just moved out to where Universal City is now, from Sunset and Gower. There were nine of us, as I remember, in that cutting room, cutting the product of fifty-four directors. Most of them were one-reel films, but some of them were features. Lois Weber was one of the directors; I later photographed a picture for her. One of the stars was Ruth Stonehouse, and they wanted to make a director out of her, so I helped her direct, and edited her films. Then World War One came along, that is, our involvement in it, and I’d left Universal—I
quit or got fired, I forget—and I got a job with the Rolin Film Company. Hal Roach and Dwight Whiting owned a studio up on the top over what was then the Hill Street Tunnel, downtown. They had a little daylight stage, and Snub Pollard, Bebe Daniels, Harold Lloyd, Toto the Clown were all working for them. So the draft thing had come along, and I had been given an F deferment, so Whiting figured, “Well, here’s a young guy who can be a director, and there’s no danger of him being taken away into the Army.” So I got a job with them directing Harold Lloyd comedies, and by the time I had made two of them, the draft got me, and I was off to the war in 1917. The way we worked was, we had a stock company, and they had a little schoolbus; we’d load the stock company in the bus. Harold had a Chandler touring car, and his chauffeur, Gil Pratt, wanted to become a director, so he would co-direct with me. We had no scripts, but we’d get a story idea, and develop the thing, and talk it out. We only had to make nine minutes of film, so we’d get a running gag going. The first picture I made for them was called THE BIG IDEA, which opened at the Criterion Theater, the opening week that the theater opened. We’d leave all the interiors until after we’d gotten the exteriors, because the running gags depended entirely on what we did exterior; so then we’d spend a day or two on the interiors, and in one week we’d shoot a film. These were seven-day weeks, of course, not like today. And in the meantime, Harold’s other director, Alf Goulding, was preparing, getting his ideas together. So the week that we’d finish, and I’d go into the cutting room to cut the film, Alf was out shooting. So as I say, I got to make two pictures; then when I got back after the war, I started all over again in San Francisco. I went to work for the Miles Brothers again, and did some documentary films. Meanwhile, a company had started out in Portland, Oregon; a man named McMonies owned a big biscuit factory in Portland, and he financed this motion picture company. They’d taken over an old stone foundry out on the outskirts of Portland; they’d made a picture, and hadn’t completed it, and a friend of mine who’d gone up there as laboratory man got in touch with me, and I went up to Portland, and finished this picture, as photographer and editor; that was around 1920. It was one of Jean Hersholt’s first pictures, and I’ve even forgotten the name of the damn thing.