Hans Dreier — Astronomy Aids Art Department (1936) 🇺🇸

It is written in letters of adamant across the showman’s manual that the moon of the Caribees be always full.

But not so in the technical lexicon of Hans Dreier, generalissimo of Paramount’s art department.

Dreier is an astronomer as well as an artist–showman, and he’d rather turn thumbs down on a full moon when it’s not in season than take it easy in the simpler task of cutting an oval for the Lunar decoration on a piece of scenery.

When Dreier gets a moon job he yanks out his astronomy charts and the almanac, which have nothing on them like the honeymoon of romantic invention.

At the University of Munich, where he became a master of arts, Dreier learned all about the moon and its phases — new moons, first quarter moons, last quarter moons, full moons to the two quarters, Ramazans — those hunger-stricken moons of the Lenten period — and harvest moons.

He knows them like a limerick and talks glibly of this or that one enroute to its preordained wax and wane.

But that’s just one of the problems Dreier runs across in his daily toil; nor is it the end of the moon problem, which always has to jibe with the season represented in the cinema. Dreier doesn’t want any error-sharp from the hinterland writing in about these apparent trivialities. And don’t think they don’t write. Reams of letters, and they know their stuff.

Moon jobs, Dreier points out, are the most ticklish of astronomical subjects in a movie.

“To get them right,” he says, “they require calipers and the astrolabe. Since all locales are different, you have to draw a bead on the moon from that spot through orientation at the point of latitude and longitude.

“In Rumba, for instance, the original script called for a crescent moon and Carole Lombard talked to George Raft about it, romantically. But it was the wrong day of the month and we had to switch to a full moon and the dialogue had to be re-written accordingly.”

Lighting the moon in a piece of scenery is also a major problem. They used to illuminate with a sharp spotlight from the foreground, but that threw a shadow on the sky. Then someone conceived the idea of lighting it from behind, and that made the center brighter than the rim.

It was Dreier who hatched the trick which is universally in use today. He made his moon in the shape of a drum and filled it with tiny electric light globes, the size of flash-light bulbs, which huddled one against the other. Assuming that the scenic moon is two feet in diameter, there are about 1000 bulbs in it, shedding a uniform radiance behind the entire field of thin white hide which comprises the moon’s face.

Although Dreier usually goes to work on a picture about three months before the first camera turns on a scene or about five months before it is ready for audience inspection, superhuman speed is sometimes a requirement in his position.

It still brings beads of perspiration to his brow whenever he thinks of the hurry-up order he got for an eight-room house of Long Island Sound proportions that had to go up instantly for a recent production.

Dreier and his men had only a week to do it in. That meant everything from the architect’s drawings to the final paint job. But he and his crew turned it out on time. Dreier says it was a spectacle that would make the practical building contractor either go daft or split something in his laughter.

The construction process went on after the fashion of automobile assembling in a big plant. Hardly was a wall set in or a door swung by one man when another came along with paint buckets and so on. In a week every room was complete and habitable. In that house you could have cooked with gas and electricity, bathed and built a fire in a fireplace. Dreier couldn’t guarantee the roof in a cloudburst and he wouldn’t have know what to do with the water in case of a bath, as the house had no drainage. But it looked like the real McCoy from any angle.

What always strikes Dreier as the most ticklish undertaking is the construction of a set Josef von Sternberg used, which even after it was up and ready to be photographed, resembled a jig-saw puzzle in disarray.

Centuries of people had lived in this little community, and centuries of repairs had gone into it. Lean-to’s and cubicles and exposed stairways had been built from time to time, according to the script, and the Basques who lived there had no idea of form.

Hence, Dreier had to sketch some of these additions as fifty years old, others 100 years old, and they all had to be projected out of a house front that was perhaps 200 years old. Moreover, all this had to be built out of new lumber. There’s nothing so difficult, he claims, as trying to make new timber appear bent and warped with age.

The entire scheme, viewed by the naked eye, looked very idiotic before the troupe stepped on the set. But later when the lights burned on it, the camera lens dissolved each bit as a separate unit and each eyeful represented what is known as local color.

Architect Dreier had his first film set training in Germany in those days when Ufa turned out such pictures as Passion, Peter the Greek, Danton and Dr. Caligary’s Cabinet. He worked on all of them. He has been at Paramount twelve years and considers The Patriot, an Emil Jannings picture of seven years ago, and Caprice Espagnol his masterpieces.

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Hans Dreier — Paramount Art Director

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• W. B. Ihnen
• Bernard Herzbrun
• Robert Usher
• Roland Anderson
• Hans Dreier

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Collection: Motion Picture Studio Insider, May 1936