Fire!

In a big building between the studios of Famous Players and R-K-0 in Hollywood a man was running a spool of film through a polishing machine. Something went wrong with the machine. A spark flew from a whirling gear and set the film on fire. A few seconds later every film in the room was on fire. Burning gas exploded and blew out the door, the flame rushed into other rooms. People staggered out of blazing doorways. Some were taken away in ambulances. One man died of his burns. All day the building—a laboratory of Consolidated Film Industries—burned like a pine torch while a crowd watched and fire-engines drenched the studios on each side of it with water. When the fire was over no one for a while could open the red-hot doors of the vaults in which "master" films were stored.

Few Hollywood producing companies print or develop their own films. They have such work done by the Consolidated laboratory, biggest company of its kind in the U. S. In bottle-like glass cases, side-by-side on long shelves resembling wine racks, the rolls of celluloid are kept like vintages. Some of those in the burned building were unreduplicable parts of pictures now in production—the whole negative of Jazz Heaven, two days work on Dance Hall, the complete negative of The Vagabond Lover (starring girl-crazing Rudy Vallee) and Night Parade. Every existing negative of Douglas Fairbanks' and Mary Pickford's The Taming of the Shrew was rumored to have been destroyed. Then somebody found they had been taken out just before the fire. About $2,000,000 worth of prints made from the stored negatives were burned up, but that was all. Assured that burning cinema film breeds no such dreadful gases as X-ray negatives did in the Cleveland Clinic last spring (TIME, May 27), searchers opened the hot door, entered the vaults, found the vintages of romance, adventure and claptrap, safe on their racks.