Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Faltering steps
- 2 Dog's body
- 3 Night Mail
- 4 Bernard Shaw exposed
- 5 Harry Watt challenged by the Savings Bank
- 6 ‘In loco parentis’
- 7 Rungs of the ladder
- 8 The G.P.O. becomes the Crown Film Unit
- 9 A passenger of the Ancient and Tattered Airmen
- 10 No escape from a dreary chore
- 11 Not a remake of Drifters but all at sea
- 12 Blank despair
- 13 We walk the course
- 14 ‘Tally Ho.’ The hunt is on
- 15 ‘Testing … Testing’
- 16 Faltering steps, again
- 17 A non-starter for a start
- 18 ‘Dead slow ahead’
- 19 S.O.S. to the C. in C.
- 20 The Temeraire to the rescue
- 21 The white swan from Norway
- 22 How to round up the remnants
- 23 So, this is Hollywood!!
- 24 An assignment, at last
- 25 John Sullivan and Pinewood to the rescue
7 - Rungs of the ladder
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Faltering steps
- 2 Dog's body
- 3 Night Mail
- 4 Bernard Shaw exposed
- 5 Harry Watt challenged by the Savings Bank
- 6 ‘In loco parentis’
- 7 Rungs of the ladder
- 8 The G.P.O. becomes the Crown Film Unit
- 9 A passenger of the Ancient and Tattered Airmen
- 10 No escape from a dreary chore
- 11 Not a remake of Drifters but all at sea
- 12 Blank despair
- 13 We walk the course
- 14 ‘Tally Ho.’ The hunt is on
- 15 ‘Testing … Testing’
- 16 Faltering steps, again
- 17 A non-starter for a start
- 18 ‘Dead slow ahead’
- 19 S.O.S. to the C. in C.
- 20 The Temeraire to the rescue
- 21 The white swan from Norway
- 22 How to round up the remnants
- 23 So, this is Hollywood!!
- 24 An assignment, at last
- 25 John Sullivan and Pinewood to the rescue
Summary
I returned to the unit in the spring of 1937. Harry Watt was on location in northern Scotland with Chick Fowle, who was photographing Harry's finest film, North Sea, dramatising the reliance of the trawler fleet on the Post Office radio weather station at Wick in the most northerly point of Caithness. Bill Blewett, from Mousehole, was with him, a member of the trawler's crew, and being a non-professional actor would encourage the rest to be confident in being just themselves: no acting would be required, and in this regard Bill was to be a tower of strength to Harry and North Sea was to be a great step forward in story documentary. The rough conditions in which the trawler put to sea were extremely severe, vividly portraying the dangers trawlermen face. ‘We take them all for granted. Yet we are all in each other's debt.’
Meanwhile, our small studio was a bedlam of hammering and sawing. The Jacob brothers, our master carpenters, were building what looked like a huge mushroom sock darner. This inverted mushroom was to be a rocker for the trawler's cabin which would be built on the flat top of the sock darner, mushroom at the base, of course. Wooden levers would protrude from it so that we could rock the set in front of the camera set up independently beside the rocking cabin. Had the camera not been independently set up there would have been no illusion of the trawler being tossed about in heavy seas.
Whilst Harry was hard at it with North Sea, I was allowed, on my return from Grenoble, to make my first faltering steps as a director. I was to complete a film that Harry had started but had had to lay aside for the more important subject of North Sea. However, as money had been spent on a film attempting to show how the Accountant General's Department worked, it had to be finished. It proceeded under the inspiring working title of A.G.D. It was completed and went out under the title of Big Money. Harry is credited with having made it. Not important, for I had the satisfaction of having written my first dialogue scenes and directed them for this rather dreary subject.
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- A Retake PleaseFilming Western Approaches, pp. 49 - 65Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1999