THE ACTION
It is a warm night in early June. The year is 1950. The time is after midnight. The campus is silent. No one stirs. Then, slowly, stealthily, a door in Clothier silently opens. A crime is about to be committed--to film.
In April of that year, John Weigel's play, The Crime, had won the first Book & Key one-act play contest. A contemporary allegory of the story of Adam and Eve, the play caught the fancy of Ted Conant, who had the vision of turning it into a short motion picture and a College first--the first student-produced movie to be shot in Hollywood's professional film format, 35mm.
However, the nearest available 35mm motion picture cameras were in New York City at Camera Equipment Company, a rental agency serving the film-producing community on the East Coast. The rent for the huge camera, sturdy tripod, and a few lenses seemed enormous beside the slim financial resources of the student producers, who, therefore, decided to rent the camera for just one day. The entire production would have to be done in 24 hours, including the time to drive to New York to buy the film, rent the camera, and return it the next day. Furthermore, because there was no "sound stage" on campus, the filming and recording of dialogue would have to be done after midnight, when the College was quiet.
Karl Ihrig, who had one of the very few student cars on campus, remembers "driving up to a Kodak film warehouse in New Jersey and having to empty our pockets and use canvas boots because of the extreme fire hazard." Thirty-five-millimeter film was not safety film at that time.
As soon as the camera and film reached the campus, we made test exposures and developed them in the Camera Club darkroom on the top floor of Trotter to bolster our confidence that we really knew what we were doing.
In the meantime, others were readying the stage in Clothier. They placed the set, originally created for the play, against the back side of the closed theater curtain and turned the lights to face toward the front of the stage. The sound crew struggled to locate the microphone in a spot that would give good reproduction of dialogue in a place not at all intended for sound recording. The recording was on magnetic tape, commonplace today, but a relatively new medium in those days. Thacher Robinson '50, whose home was adjacent to the campus, owned the two Magnecord tape recorders, which were also used at WSRN. The tape was 1/4 inch wide and ran on 12-inch reels through the recording machines at 15 inches per second. A modern professional cassette recorder can do as well on a track about 1/16 inch wide on tape running at 17/8 inches per second.
Clare Whittlesey Weigel reminisces: "Ted came back from New York with a camera he had rented for 24 hours, a very short time to shoot a one-act play even if you don't include the round-trip to New York. The time problem was compounded by the small amount of that expensive commodity, raw film stock, available to us. For the cameramen and the actors, there was a challenge to get the shot right on the first take, and usually they did."
Preparations to do something most of us had never done before naturally took longer than any of us had imagined, but, well into the night, the filming did finally begin. The actors were surprised to find that making a film is not the same as presenting a play. As Jean Matter Mandler describes it: "The filming was done at three different distances--close up, middle distance, and far--and all the actions at each distance were filmed at one time.... The outcome must have been a good deal of choppiness in event sequences. For example, an actor's reply to a statement might be filmed hours after the statement was made. Because the filming took so long, our clothes got rumpled, and our voices changed timbre. My recollection is that there were some scenes in which my voice went from a squeak to a growl and my clothes from neat to disheveled within a few seconds of film time." Tom Kinney affirms Jean's reaction, but his principal memory is of extreme fatigue. After the filming, he says he went to bed and didn't wake up until the middle of the afternoon hungry but with no money to buy anything to eat.
Clare recalls: "Although I had directed a number of stage and radio dramas in high school and at Swarthmore Network [now WSRN], I knew zip about movie directing. This is where Barbara Pearson Lange came in. She somehow appeared at my side. She showed me how to make a story board and initiated me into the concept of camera movements and angles, helping me to plot the lengthy panoramic shot with which the film begins."
The filming stretched on into the dawning hours, and the campus began to awake. As we neared the end, we had to station guards on the road by Clothier to stop any traffic during each filming episode to keep the extraneous noise off the sound track. But finish we did, and the rush was on to get the camera back to New York to beat the 24-hour deadline.
Bill Young made the return trip in his 1928 Model A Ford panel truck, pedal to the floor all the way--remember, no Interstate highways in those days. Bill pulled up to Camera Equipment Company on the west side of Manhattan, where his companions unloaded the gear onto a freight elevator that opened right onto the street. Bill drove on to find some place to park. When he asked a policeman on the corner where he could put his venerable truck, the cop eyed the vehicle and then said: "I suggest you take it straight to the Sanitation Department." (Young still has the truck--and, in fact, it was pictured on page 15 of the March 1998 Bulletin.)
Months later, the picture editing, sound editing, titling, music composing, recording, narrating, and printing came to an end. Ted Conant arranged to have the film shown in the movie theater in Swarthmore. We all trooped down for the "World Premiere." The Crime was distributed nationally for several years by Brandon Films, a distributor of mainly nontheatrical films, in a 16mm print version. A 35mm film print is in the archives of the Swarthmore College library. I have a 16mm print from which Ken Kurtz has recently made a video copy.
This brief event in our college life influenced, or perhaps abetted, career choices for several of us. Ted Conant continued in the motion picture and related fields, working with a U.N. film unit in Korea, the National Film Board of Canada, WGBH in Boston, and in other areas of the communications industry. Mike Eisler '51 worked in the audiovisual field. Ken Kurtz made his career in the television industry. I worked for Kodak for a third of a century, about half in technical areas related to motion pictures, and, for the last 15 years, I have been producing and showing motion pictures professionally.
John Weigel writes: "As for the results, the film itself was remarkably different from the stage performance. With Clare's direction and Lewis Core's* stage set, it had the lighthearted, near-foolish effect I believe I had in mind. With the strong black-white contrasts, seemingly slower pace, and the close-ups, the film gave [the play] a suddenly ominous effect, with constant insinuations of meaning.... I don't remember having this intent and certainly felt I'd loaded on the hokey, but it all fit together in turning the play around to a darker side, which I could now see always had underlain the lighthearted foolery."
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