Show Business: How to Make Movies

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A movie camera can be candid when it is hidden behind one-way glass and supported by hidden microphones. It can also be candid if it is simply turned on and left running until the people who are being photographed get bored and go about their business as if the camera were not there. This technique has been used by Manhattan's Sextant Inc. to make one of the most expensive and unusual documentary TV shows ever done. It is called Inside the Movie Kingdom—1964 and is scheduled to be broadcast this week on NBC (Friday, March 20, 9:30-11 E.S.T.).

Sextant's six crews spent six months attaching themselves to one motion picture production unit after another and hanging on like lampreys, shooting miles of film in close study of directors and stars practicing their trade. The cameras were soon recording an insider's view. Watching Swiss Director Bernhard Wicki at work in Rome on The Visit is like watching a big, half-mad sheep dog forever nipping at the flock, loping in circles, barking "Go home!" at people in his way. Ingrid Bergman is every inch an actress as she sits in a makeup chair and tells the man with the eye shadow how some magazine is obviously out to sink a knife into actresses one and all. Duke Wayne, in Spain with the Circus World, fluffs a line as if he were breaking a thick stick over his knee. Delicious Claudia Cardinale, practicing her own lines near by, struggles hard not to say belly when she means bully.

Carroll Baker lies on a bed on a Hollywood Carpetbaggers set, dressed only in a bedspread, and says good morning to the film crew as if she were a switchboard operator in an office. The TV crew hung around the Carpetbaggers set for two weeks, and the wait paid off even more: they were there and shooting when a chandelrer on which Carroll Baker was swinging pulled out of the ceiling and crashed to the floor. A battling horde of Romans and Persians, practicing in Spain's Guadarra-mas for Samuel Bronston's The Fall of the Roman Empire, parts momentarily as someone drives through the battle in his Fiat sedan. Bronston hops about, small and spiffy, like the little man who was once the mascot of Esquire magazine. His spectaculars turn out to be most spectacular of all when, in one panoramic shot, the viewer can see not only 1,000 charging horses and riders but also the armies of technicians who surround them.

So it goes, in shot after shot—in 90 minutes worth watching.