Louis H. Tolhurst — Hollywood’s Most Patient Director (1924) 🇺🇸
First prize for patience in Hollywood goes not to those newcomers who wait outside the studios week after week, hoping and praying to obtain a job in pictures; it belongs to a tall, studious, but affable man, whom no fan has probably even heard about — a man by the name of Louis H. Tolhurst.
He is the chap who makes the insects act in the films — the ant, the bee and the spider, and the performers he directs are reputedly the most temperamental in the world. Sometimes it takes hours, sometimes nearly a month, for him to secure a single scene, and during the most of that time he has to watch with an eagle eye the slightest movement made by his talent, and be ever on the alert to set his camera apparatus speedily going.
There are lots of opportunities in the movies, of course, besides the ones to act. Nothing spectacular, to be sure, endows them with a glitter to attract the casual audience eye. Who is concerned, for instance, with the machinery behind the delightfully amusing and pepful cartoons of Felix the Cat or Æsop’s Fables? It is enough that the quaint picture-book animals scamper hither and yon, getting into complications and performing deeds such as you dreamed that they might do when you were a child. Yet once in a while a query must arise as to what peculiar principles of photography and technique are behind their animation and their antics, and many people doubtless realize that it is only by the most laborious and tedious process that the phenomena of cartoons and sketches coming to life is accomplished.
In a way, Tolhurst is doing much the same thing with insects. The only difference is that the actors in his pictures are really alive. They are so much alive, in fact, that they are maddeningly difficult to handle. Every move that they make, every wiggle, almost, eludes the eye, unless one is trained in observing them, and to attempt to follow these motions with a comparatively ponderous mechanical device like a motion-picture camera, and what is more to get the various insects to perform special stunts, like that where a fly juggles a cork ball, or an ant lifts a miniature telephone pole, is indeed a feat that is not without a thrill.
Tolhurst started experimenting all of eight years ago. In his youth he was interested in microscopy, and had learned through his study a lot about the habits and peculiarities of rare bacteria, as well as the more familiar bugs. He had also done a lot of still photography of insects, and had never been satisfied with the results. It came to him eventually that if he could succeed in using the motion-picture camera, instead of the still camera, he might obtain much more satisfaction, and also add something to the store of popular knowledge of the world.
Five or six years ago he had so far perfected his apparatus that he was able to assist the D. W. Griffith organization in the filming of a picture called “The Microscope Mystery,” in which Constance Talmadge was the human star. You may remember this feature, for the plot hinged upon the discovery of some tubercular bacilli on the handle of a revolver. These were detected, of course, by the microscope and through Tolhurst’s system of photography you were also enabled to- see the evidence on the screen.
The great obstacle that stood in the way of progress in microscopic photography was the obtaining of a light which should be sufficiently powerful to illuminate every move an insect or a germ made, and yet so to dispose of the heat from this light that it would not burn the bug up. The exact manner in which Tolhurst solves this problem he keeps a secret, but the close-ups of ladybugs and flies and spiders that he obtains on the silver sheet prove that he has brought his lighting process up to a high degree of perfection. He has also constructed all sorts of mechanical devices that will set in motion like lightning his camera and other contraptions. In this way it is possible for him to catch the slightest grotesque gesture, or even the changes in facial expression of one of his subjects. He has incidentally made the bee spin a thread on a spool, he has shown the fly juggling a tiny dumb-bell made out of cork, with its feet, and he has actually photographed a spider devouring its winged prey.
Some of the pictures are positively uncanny in their vivid impressions of the tiny six-footed and winged creatures.
The curious part of it is that he does not have to carry on this work for the sake of earning a livelihood; it has been simply a hobby with him. He has an independent fortune in his own right. Just the same he is going right ahead and photographing all manner of strange and wonderful phenomena of nature.
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Photo by: Woodbury
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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, May 1924
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Collection: Moving Picture World, November 1923
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