Excerpts from Nick Grinde, “Pictures for Peanuts,” The Saturday Evening Post, 12/29/45

Over on Stage 6 a million-dollar picture is starting this morning. The call was for nine o'clock. It's ten-thirty already, and with a little well-placed optimism you could say that the epic is beginning to show promise of getting under way. A lot of departments with a whale of a lot of mighty fine technical abilities have been working for weeks toward this very day.

Propmen, grips, gaffers, electricians, boom men, recorders, mixers, cameramen, assistant cameramen, a script clerk overflowing her rose-colored slacks, a company clerk, an assistant director, his assistant and his assistant are functioning with the occupational movements that will find each one ready when the moment finally comes to record the suspensive scene where Nancy says, "I am tired of wearing other people's clothes. From now on I will wear my own or nothing!"

This confused efficiency, laced, of course, with a fine sense of sell-preservation, is going on, all unnoticed, around, above and in between the associate producer and the director, who already are trying to see who can stay calm the longer. The pattern is familiar to everyone. Too much has been written about the habitat of the colossal picture for anyone to have escaped a willing or unwilling education on the subject.

But over on Stage 3 in this same studio another picture was scheduled to start this morning at eight-thirty. It's ten-thirty over there, too, and they have exactly two hours' work under their belts. There are no press agents or fan-magazine writers hovering around. No newspaper columnists are harvesting their succulent crop. You'd think it said “Contagious" on the door instead of “Quiet, Please! Shooting!"

The difference is that this is just another little picture. A B picture, if you please. B standing for Bread and Butter, or Buttons, or Bottom Budget. And standing for nearly anything else anyone wants to throw at it. But it's a robust little mongrel and doesn't mind the slurs, because it was weaned on them. If the trade papers give a B the nod at all, they usually sum up their comments by saying it will be good for Duals and Nabes, which is why you'll find them on a double bill in the neighborhood theaters.

A B picture isn't a big picture that just didn't grow up; it's exactly what it started out to be. It's the twenty-two-dollar suit of the clothing business, it's the hamburger of the butcher shops, it's a seat in the bleachers. And there's a big market for all of them.

Only by perpetual comer cutting can these often quite presentable cheaper pictures be made to show the profit that is so very agreeable to the studios which invested their money in them.

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Basic emotions can happen in a quiet place as well as at the Stork Club. If John and Peggy are cut in modest circumstances, they can wear their own wardrobe, and a set suitable for their home can be found already standing somewhere in the studio. It's easy when you get the knack of it. Then, instead of taking her to a bustling restaurant for lunch and having some costly busybodies come by and tell them about the murder, they can be discovered coming out of the restaurant and shutting the door on all that expense. A reasonably priced newsboy can sell them a newspaper, so they can read all about the homicide. John's reaction to the bumping-off of his best friend will be of the same fine stuff here on the sidewalk as it would have been over a crepe suzette.

John, being who he is, naturally has to catch up with the rat who did it before the police do. There's a matter of a good name and a hunk of money involved. But does John's search take him to crowded bars, well-filled hotel lobbies, busy downtown streets, bus tops and other gregarious rendezvous? Not by two budgets. He interviews a rooming-house proprietor who lives in a little standing set at the edge of town, and who is home alone at the moment. Then he talks to a milkman in front of a brownstone set on the old New York street. The milk wagon really isn't· expensive when you consider that it hides a big hole in the front of the house where some gangsters dynamited their way out in the second episode of a serial last week.

When John finally gets into the chase at the end of the picture, does he search the affluent Union League club, or a museum, or the zoo? You guessed it, cousin, the scene is shot in an alley with three cops and some dandy shadows. And if it's done properly, it can be plenty thrilling, even if it is mounted in cut-rate atmosphere.

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One producer fell in love with a reel of train wheels. Somebody shot too much of a speeding train one day. Probably the wind on the handcar which was following the engine's underpinning with the camera was so strong that the cameraman couldn't hear the command to cut. Or something. Anyway, here was all that lovely footage of train wheels going somewhere.

The producer never really rested right until he found a story where the characters pursued one another from city to city. Every time Joe thought he was being shadowed he got that don't-fence-me-in look on his face and they dissolved to a hunk of money-saving train wheels. Then, of course, the detective, who either had to get a clue or end the story right there, got his portion of the wheels, and we knew that he was right after Joe again. So they chased from city to city, using up more and more train wheels, until the picture ended up in a draw between moving drama and galloping wheels.

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One of the most comforting things about plot lifting is that there are no new plots, and the fellows you raid have no doubt had their own little forays into the published works of even earlier shanghaiers. Plagiarism is a nasty word, but only for amateurs. Several years ago, a major studio made an all star picture with a costly scenario where in a character who was a whaler by trade and went on long trips to sea, as whalers do, was doublecrossed during his absences by a landlubber. Things went on like this for a while, until one day the whaler had his leg bitten off by a shark who got into the picture somehow. Well, the wife wasn't so much of a heel that she could let him down in his hour of need. So she nursed him, but during his convalescence he could see which way the prevailing wind was blowing. All of which made for quite a neat triangle.

Several years later, a producer at the same studio needed a story, but had very little money allowed him with which to get it.. He remembered the whale picture, and also realized that it was all paid for. So he told one of his writers how to retread the plot. At the preview of this reclaimed yarn, a lion tamer was being double-crossed by a tightrope walker every time he went in the cage for his act. He suspected it a little, which made him careless. And the lion bit his leg off. Well, the wife wasn't so much of a heel that she could let him down in his hour of need. So she nursed -- See how it's done?

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Assistant No.1 tells Assistant No. 2 that everything will be on schedule somehow. It always is. The only slight drawback is the fact that the colored actor who is to play the part of the Pullman porter is conspicuously not there yet. Seems he has been contacted, though, and is even now arranging with a friend of his to pick him up where his car broke down and hurry him to the waiting train fragment. While the assistants are still talking, the director, long since indoctrinated to abhor a time vacuum, is having the leading man's right hand blackened. Then, with the porter's white coat on, it will be his hand that is photographed knocking on the drawing-room door. In the hand will be the telegram, and the shot will tell us visually that a porter has a telegram for the occupants of Room B. The shot will be even more effective than seeing the porter approach the door in a long shot as it was written, and, of course, it keeps the company working, which is what those precious fleeting moments were made for in the first place.

When this shot is finished the leading man will resume his original identity, and if the overdue Thespian is still not there, he will be photographed in his individual close-up receiving the telegram from the supposedly offscreen porter and will answer his unspoken questions. By that time the missing actor will surely have arrived and the necessary three-shot of the group will be made, and it will all come out just as though it had been planned to be shot backward in the first place, whereas the only thing that had been planned for sure was to shoot, period.