Oldtimer

While gun fights raged around him, 61-year-old William Beaudine Sr. scrambled last week over the rocky hills of Big Bear, Calif. Looking like a scarecrow in a straw sombrero, worn levis and scuffed sneakers, Director Beaudine shouted, "Cut it! Print it!" and wound up the shooting of an eight-episode package of Wild Bill Hickok TV films. Bill Beaudine was making TV movies as quickly and cheaply as any director in the business.

Beaudine learned his trade in the silent days with such oldtimers as Marie Prevost and Ben Turpin. Says he: "We'd write 'em, shoot 'em and print 'em in a week." Nowadays, most Hollywood directors are apt to shoot one scene scores of times; but a lot of TV programs have happily reversed progress and gone back to the old slapdash days. Today, Beaudine has a budget of $25,000 a film, and it costs $10,000 a day to shoot. Beaudine seldom takes more than 2 1/2 days to get a film in the can.

The pace is rough. Six days a week, from sunup to sunset, Beaudine drives his crew and cast hard. His pockets are crammed with slips of pink paper on which he has plotted the night before. The cameras have scarcely stopped on one scene before he is shouting "Over here!" and pointing out the spot for the next shot. If a script girl should point out that the badman is not carrying the same ivory-handled six-shooter as in a previous scene, Beaudine says with a shrug: "If the audience notices a thing like that, we've made a hell of a boring picture."

The end product is not as bad as it might be. Beaudine believes that "planning and being a jump ahead is what counts." He recalls an old two-reeler he was directing when an elderly actress dropped dead in mid-picture. Saddened but unsentimental, Bill stopped shooting only long enough to write her out of the script, with a subtitle reading: "Mrs. Murphy has gone to her relatives."

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