Begins Making Pictures

Equity Motion Picture Company Makes First Films at Van Harbor Casino

Whenever you see a motion picture trade marked with balanced scales, you will know that you are enjoying a product of Sullivan County’s latest industry, the making of photo plays.

Billy B. Van, comedian, farmer, philosopher, business man and above all, wide awake hustler, is the president and moving spirit in a new $50,000 New York corporation called the Equity Motion Picture Company, and in the few weeks since his return from the Keith circuit has assembled the large amount of material, the large and varied number of people, and perfected the complicated arrangements necessary to begin business in the film producing line, with the result that the first two productions, two comedies called ”Some Hero” and ”The Janitor‘s Vacation” were filmed this week.

It is no small task to equip a motion picture studio. There must be assembled a limitless quantity of materials and costumes for the stage settings, the mechanical arrangements need much attention and a considerable number of skilled men are required to produce the scenes which figure in a picture, to say nothing of the people who know how to act before the camera. Mr. Van‘s first move was to erect a large stage directly back of his ”Van Harbor Casino.”

Flanking this is a line of dressing rooms, and the space under the Casino has been fitted up for developing rooms, carpenter and artists‘ shops and property rooms.

The first objects which met the writer‘s eye after passing the high board fence which encloses the field of operations were a number of human figures in all stages of construction.

President Van, who very courteously stopped in the middle of a busy forenoon to tell about the work, explained that the first picture was laid in an artist‘s studio and these alarming excelsior men and women were to be [illegible] into the artist‘s masterpieces.

An antique wrought iron, crucible turned out on inspection to be made of putty and canvas. Workmen were busy turning out other interesting objects for the "studio." A line of canvas flats and a stairway would become the grand hallway of a palatial hotel. A few signs posted up over the doors of the dressing rooms and a plank walk in front could not be told in the film from a genuine line of bar rooms and shops in a western mining town. In one of the first pictures a man is shown entering a business block (in this case the Richards block). Upon disappearing he is shown coming up the stains in the building and going to his office door. The change of film is instantaneous but in producing, the man goes into the block in Newport but really he comes up the stairs on the studio stage where light effects and scenery are arranged to suit.

This is, of course, only one example of the methods which the picture men use to get what the story demands.

Mr. Van is very enthusiastic about the work. He points out the wealth of scenery at his command for those pictures which demand water, woods, mountains, farms, rural implements, antique articles, in fact everything needed. He has noted the tendency of industries to flock together and predicts that when the success of his company becomes known, other film producers will wake up to the advantages of this section for the work, and before we natives are aware what is happening we shall have a ”boom” such as this section has not seen since the white man introduced fire arms and rum and routed the aborigines.