The Ability to Kill (24 page)

The policeman walked on grimly. He had never had a homicidal lunatic to deal with before, but this was how he had always imagined it would be.

‘Of course,’ the lunatic was saying, ‘I’d like to show my wife, really, but she’s not here now. And the joke is, Cousin Alfred didn’t even know what I was doing.’ He chuckled horribly. ‘And now there he is, on the sheet, just as if he were alive. Here we are! It’s upstairs!’

They had reached a dark doorway and the short man was standing aside for the policeman to enter. The policeman paused.

‘Just a minute. Are you the owner of these premises?’

‘Oh, no. I’m one of the tenants, the one who makes the smells. Friese-Greene’s my name.’

‘I see. All right. You lead the way, Mr Greene.’

‘Yes, indeed. I’ll go up and get everything ready for you.’

The man who called himself Friese-Greene clattered away up the dark stairs.

The policeman followed soberly. He was conquering his fears now. As long as he kept behind the man nothing much could happen. The phrases of the judge who would congratulate him on his courage and steadiness began to form in his mind. By the time he had reached the third floor, he had himself well in hand.

He crossed the landing to the doorway of the room with the light in it and looked in.

He had expected an office. What he saw was a cross between a workshop and a chemical laboratory. At a bench in the centre of the room, the madman was bending over a mechanism with a light in it which he was fitting into a box. There was a disagreeable smell in the room. The policeman looked round.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘where is it?’

The man looked up. ‘Where’s what?’

‘What you’ve done.’

‘Sit down there a minute and I’ll show you.’

The policeman looked round again, then sat down gingerly and watched his man.

He had finished with the mechanism now. He glanced at the policeman.

‘Do you mind putting out your lantern, Constable?’

Reluctantly, the policeman twisted the slide of his lantern. The man reached up and extinguished the gas-light overhead. The only light in the room now came from the box.

‘Now then, Constable! Look at that wall there.’

As he spoke a clicking noise came from the box and a rectangle of light appeared on a sheet stretched across the wall. Then, it darkened and in its place, grey and flickering, appeared the image of an avenue of trees and the figures of a man and a
boy approaching. The man seemed to be only a foot or two away when he stopped, smiled in a puzzled way and pointed. Suddenly, he disappeared and in his place there was a picture of horse-drawn carriages going by against a background of trees. Then, that, too, disappeared and the sheet was blank again. The whole thing had lasted less than a minute.

The madman turned up the light again.

The policeman rose slowly to his feet and stared for a moment at the sheet. Then, with a bound he was at the wall, prodding it with his truncheon. The wall was quite solid. He turned.

‘That was Hyde Park,’ he said accusingly. ‘I recognised it. Where did it come from? And where’s it gone to?’

The madman tapped the box triumphantly. ‘It’s in here,’ he said. ‘Like a magic lantern.’

‘But it moved.’

A seraphic smile lit the madman’s face. ‘Yes, it moved. It’s taken me fifteen years to get to that. But I’ve done it at last. The picture moves.’

Thus it came about that the first public audience to see a celluloid motion picture film consisted of one London policeman.

The real name of the man who called himself William Friese-Greene was William Edward Green, and he was born in Bristol on September 7, 1855. He was the youngest of seven children, and at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed by his father, a metalworker, to the new and rapidly expanding trade of photography.

Willie Green became an excellent portrait photographer. In those days clamps were used to hold the sitters rigidly still during the long time-exposures necessary. A photographer who could persuade a woman to look her best with an iron
clamp sticking in the back of her neck was a novelty in Bristol. Young Mr Green had a way with him. His way, no doubt, would seem a trifle indigestible nowadays (part of it consisted of likening the sitter’s hands to the petals of a flower), but in the seventies it was delicious. When he was twenty, Willie Green borrowed enough money to open a studio of his own. In that year, too, he married.

Helena Friese was the daughter of an impoverished Swiss baron, and she had come to England to earn her living as a lady’s companion. Ill-health had forced her to give up this work and convalesce with a relative in Bristol. She was dressed in white organdie and reclining decoratively on a black horsehair sofa when Willie was introduced to her. The most important books on photography were then written in German. She undertook to help him read them.

The wives of inventors have always been long-suffering women. Mental and physical toughness of a very high order seem to have been minimum qualifications for the role. There never could have been a less promising candidate for it than Helena Friese. Not merely had she been ‘gently’ brought up; she was also a chronic asthmatic and the possessor of what Victorian medicine described as ‘a delicate constitution.’ In addition, she was ‘nervous.’ Once, when Willie unexpectedly presented her with a live crab which he had found on the seashore, the shock sent her to bed for a week. Happily, if paradoxically, she also had two other qualities; the ability to love and great courage.

She was to need them both.

It is difficult to say precisely when Willie Green became actively concerned with the problem of making pictures move. We know that even at the time of his marriage he was already working on improvements in the chemical aspects of photographic technique. We also know that he was interested in the
phenomenon of persistence of vision, upon which the operation of motion pictures depends. This had been noted by Lucretius in his
De Rerum Natura
, written in the first century
B.C.
During the first half of the nineteenth century toys had been designed which utilised the phenomenon in an elementary way. These toys—the thaumatrope and the zoetrope were among the earliest—had a common pattern. A disc or cylinder was decorated with series drawings of a simple piece of action, such as a dog jumping over a gate, and made to revolve. An illusion of movement was thus created. The dog jumped over the gate and then the action was repeated. The extent of the action was limited by the size of the cylinder or disc.

Willie Green opened his first studio in Bath. He was soon in financial difficulties, and when his daughter Ethel was born he was compelled to pawn his stock of plates to pay the doctor. This was the beginning of an acquaintance with pawnbrokers which was to last throughout his life. However, he had his moments of prosperity. He was a good photographer and the quality of his work gradually became known. Within two or three years there were Friese-Greene Studios (he had added his wife’s name to his own and tacked an ‘e’ on the end) in Bristol and Plymouth as well as in Bath. There he met J. A. R. Rudge.

Rudge was an instrument maker and an inventor of some repute. He was also a friend of Fox Talbot, the man who had invented the photographic process which had superseded Daguerre’s. Both men were to have a profound effect upon Willie’s future.

Rudge had designed a machine called the bio-phantascope which projected series photographs of movement on a screen. Willie suggested an improvement, a revolving shutter to prevent blurring of the image, and in 1885 the two gave public demonstrations of the machine.

Yet Willie was dissatisfied. The phantascope carried only twelve pictures. Even Muybridge had done better than that! Muybridge was an Englishman who, in 1872, had been able to settle a bet for Leland Stanford in California. Stanford had contended that during a gallop there were moments when a horse had all four feet off the ground. By photographing a horse in motion with twenty-four consecutively operated cameras Muybridge had been able to prove Stanford right. But Willie’s idea was that it ought to be possible to take hundreds of such pictures. The problem was how to take them with only one camera. Obviously, the root of the matter was in the nature of the photographic base. Glass was unmanageable. Something else had to be found. Willie at last decided to take Fox Talbot’s advice. ‘You ought to go to London,’ the old man had said. ‘London is the place to go if you want to share in the important developments in this remarkable age.’

So the Friese-Greenes abandoned the successful studios in Bath, Bristol and Plymouth, and went to London to open a studio there. After a while, Willie found it necessary to take a partner with money. The name of this unfortunate man was Collings.

To begin with, the firm of Collings and Friese-Greene was highly successful. They opened studios in Bond Street and Piccadilly, and then in Sloane Street. They were ‘court photographers.’ The titles of two of Willie’s entries in the Royal Photographic Society’s Exhibition of 1886 are evocative. One was ‘Portrait of a Lady in Court Dress’; the other, ‘Oh … ah!—Portrait of a Child.’ But behind the dainty studio in which these confections were produced was a laboratory; and every penny made by Friese-Greene, the court photographer, was promptly appropriated and spent by Willie Green, the inventor.

In 1888 Willie demonstrated before the Bath Photographic Society the first fruits of his work in London, some paper ‘films’ of street scenes in Brighton. The paper was made transparent by soaking it in oil; but it tore frequently, and he was already at work on a new substance he had found—celluloid. At the time it was available only in thick gluelike sheets. The transparent celluloid film produced by George Eastman in America was yet to come. Willie Green made his own strips of film in the basement of his house; and he designed a new camera for it. By the end of the year his preoccupation with this work and neglect of his ordinary photographic business was complete. Collings at last rebelled, and the partnership was dissolved. Willie Green was on his own again.

The patent for the successful camera which Willie demonstrated to the policeman was taken out in the spring of 1889. It was not the first motion picture to be patented—that of Le Prince, the Frenchman, patented in 1888, has that distinction—but it was the first practical one. It had, indeed, almost all the essential features of a modern camera except sprockets, and these Willie had discarded because, in the earlier paper-film camera, they tore the paper. Willie’s patent forestalled by months Edison’s demonstration of the kinetoscope and by several years the Lumière brothers’ machine.

Two years later Willie was bankrupt.

Before he died, in 1921, he was to go bankrupt twice again; but that first bankruptcy was the greatest disaster, for it cost Helena her life. With extraordinary determination this semi-invalid set about rebuilding her husband’s fortunes with the proceeds of the sale of her jewellery. By 1895, Willie again had a photographer’s business (owned by Helena) and a laboratory in which he was working on a colour film process. But the strain had been too much for her, and towards the end of that year she died.

He married again eventually, and went on inventing; but he never surpassed his first great achievement. He made money sometimes. More often he lost it. When he died he had over seventy-five patents to his credit; but the all-important patent of 1889 no longer existed. When the first renewal fell due in 1894, he took no action. He did not have five pounds for the renewal fee.

Willie Green was not a man who cared much about his personal dignity or standing in the world. Indeed, the only occasion on which he ever attempted to establish his claim to consideration as a film pioneer was when one of his sons, who had claimed at school that his father had invented the motion-picture camera, was humiliated by the production of an
Encyclopœdia Britannica
article on the history of the films which did not even mention his name.

The
Encyclopœdia Britannica
has never repaired the omission.

A great many novels have been written about the experiences of novelists who have ventured into that strange jungle called the film industry. Some are funny, many are dull, a few are angry; but most of them have a common pattern.

The hero, young, innocent, but remarkably talented, has written a brilliant novel. His agent has persuaded him, though against his better judgment, to sell the film rights. The producer, generally of Middle-European origin, implores the hero to write the script. How else can they hope to convey to the screen the qualities that made the book so successful? Reluctantly, the hero agrees. Work begins.

Then, disaster strikes. The hero’s script is mangled beyond recognition in order to provide a part for a nymphomaniac star. The producer turns out to be a pimping monster. The novel—‘this sensitive study of adolescence’ as one critic called it—becomes a roaring musical about campus life in the Middle West. The novelist returns sadder, wiser, and sick at heart to the battered old desk in his mother’s attic.

That, then, is the legend, and I think that any discussion of the relationship between the writer and the film industry must begin by taking it into account. And not merely for the purpose of discrediting it. A great many writers have had encounters with the industry of just that sort. Not all of them,
however, write books to celebrate the occasion. Some, less hampered by self-pity or complacency, have reflected that an art which at its best is capable of making all but the very good novels seem flatulent and commonplace, cannot be judged solely by the activities of its meanest practitioners. I referred to the film industry as a jungle and I hope presently to justify the term. It is not entirely derogatory; jungles are often interesting places. But, if I may pursue the metaphor for the moment, I do not think that a man who goes big game hunting armed only with a catapult is entitled to much sympathy when he gets mauled.

Most writers from other media go to work in the film industry in the hope of making a lot of money in a comparatively short time. That is not intended to be a harsh judgment. It is a good thing to be able to earn a lot of money in a comparatively short time, and only the envious will be ready to supply moral reasons for denying the fact. The nice difference between
making
a lot of money and
earning
it, we will leave for the moment. However, the seduction scene in which the novelist succumbs to the producer’s blandishments had better be rewritten, I think; and we ought to add another sequence in which the novelist discusses the tax implications of his surrender with his agent.