Australian director Alf Goulding who made the wonderful Tip Tap Toe (1932) here has an amusing hit at Poverty Row producers whose only concern was making a movie with a minimum number of slates. Natty little Nat Carr is the perfect Poverty prototype who insists that Edgar shoot each set-up with a minimum of two takes. He doesn't mind if Edgar takes all day because the cast and crew are hired by the day, not the hour. His petty concerns are limited to the amount of raw film stock used. Hence, a maximum of two takes.
Bungling, impatient Edgar, of course, goes about his task the wrong way and starts shooting almost as soon as he sits in the chair, instead of rehearsing for hours and playing about with dummy camera runs. And the star, naturally, resents Edgar's elevationa fact that is also delightfully true-to-life. On a movie set, the assistant director has nothing at all to do with the stars who receive instructions solely from the principal director. Stars despise assistant directors and here Miss Temperament has to be coaxed into accepting Edgar by the executive producer.
After mollifying his star, the executive producer hurries off and we don't see him again until near the end of the dayagain true-to-life.
It's a pity we are not shown more of the mechanics of movie-making (we see loads of the clapper-boy but the hairdresser, the make-up man and even the photographer don't get a look-in, though we do glimpse a couple of the operators) but at 19 minutes there's not time for everything.
The comedy mostly revolves around the device of having Edgar's idiot family visit the set and continually disrupt shooting. This is most definitely not true-to-life, but, as these incidents induce more than a few laughs, I don't suppose many patrons will object.
