Help on Celluloid

It was only planned as an eleven-minute film, but seldom has a moviemaker run into a more temperamental star. The actor was a bobcat that obviously had no intention of doing what he was told. He broke out of his cage, fled up a tree, fought so violently when lassoed that he broke his neck and died. Reported the frustrated moviemaker to his employer, Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Inc.: "I am now without a cat to work with. I very much regret having to report so much trouble, but it seems to go with this kind of work."

For 28 years E.B.F. has been wrestling with "this kind of work" to bring to the world's classrooms some of the best educational films ever made. It is the largest producer of school movies, distributes them not only in the U.S. but to 55 foreign nations. Though no moneymaker, it has as impressive a board of advisers as any corporation going--former Senator William Benton, Economist Beardsley Ruml, onetime Assistant Secretary of Defense Anna M. Rosenberg, Psychologist George Stoddard, President Robert Hutchins of the Fund for the Republic, and Social Scientist Ralph Tyler. Last week it was sporting another big name: Chairman-elect Adlai E. Stevenson.

Three Ears for One. Founded by Western Electric in 1929, the company that was to become E.B.F. was just struggling along until well after the Britannica took over. Teachers had balked at using movies in their classes, and pupils never seemed to take them seriously. Spurred by the success of the armed services with audiovisual education during World War II, the company sent out 40 experts to proselytize in schools. The experts taught pupils how to run projectors, talked thousands of teachers into experimenting with films. The E.B.F. staff went through 109 standard elementary textbooks, this year drew up detailed guides on how some of its films could be tied in with appropriate chapters. The whole idea, says E.B.F.'s President Maurice Mitchell, was to get the teacher to use "the right film at the right time. Nothing can replace the teacher, but there are some things a film can do that a teacher can't."

Through E.B.F., millions of students have been able to witness such wonders as the growth of a plant from seed to blossom in a matter of minutes. They have seen the human heart in action, been whisked through the ages of history. To make one film on hearing, the E.B.F. staff worked 18 months, used the ears of three corpses to show the ear's inner workings. Each script gets a thorough examination by experts, but it is primarily up to producer and photographer to present the facts with imagination.

Tepees & Chateaux. One photographer waited an entire week to shoot a burrowing owl going into a hole and coming out again. Another cameraman was speared by a savage while working along the Amazon. In making a film called Indian Family of Long Ago, E.B.F. experts had to teach the actors, some Sioux from South Dakota, how to put up tepees, pack a travois (a primitive sledge), and shoot bows and arrows. When Producer Milan Herzog made his series on medieval life, nothing would do but to shoot it in real French chateaux that had been especially decorated with priceless furniture and tapestries from museums.

Because of the current teacher shortage, E.B.F. thinks that its influence will grow even greater. Last week it began to distribute a 162-session physics course by the University of California's Harvey White --the first full-length, high-school physics course ever put on film. The series is to be used not merely to supplement the work of the high-school teachers. It is primarily meant for an estimated 14,000 high schools that have no trained physics teacher at all. With other such projects in the works, E.B.F. may not only become more and more influential, but for hundreds of schools it may well become downright indispensable.

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