The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm

The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm by Laura Lee Hope (1914) The subtitle of this book is: Or Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays. I love how old books used to have subtitles—I wonder if that's something I should make a point in doing—that is, if I ever write fiction again. Laura Lee Hope, of course, is not a person, but a name the publisher used as an author for any number of series books. Sometimes you can find out who the real author is if you dig deep enough. Whoever wrote this one might have authored any number of series books at the time. This book is really well-written, just surprisingly so. For a book that's over 100 years old, it has a fairly contemporary sensibility—I think anyone could read this now and enjoy it as a somewhat comic mystery of about a troupe of filmmakers who go to the country and stay on a farm in order to shoot silent film that is then processed back in New York and put out as entertainment. A lot of the ideas, sensibility, frustrations, and problems with filmmaking was, apparently, then pretty much exactly the same as it is now! There are a lot ongoing threads and gags about the characters' envy of each other, and stage actors feeling film is beneath them, and the kind of focused craziness of the filmmakers to capture images. Several times there are fiascos and mistakes that turn out to be interesting on film and reroute the direction of the stories being made. There are a lot of characters—more than I could easily follow, so I just let it flow and didn't worry about it. There's a fairly predictable mystery running through the story, of course, that has a satisfying outcome. Did I mention that there is a bee swarm? I don't want to give anything away, but the chapter with the bee swarm is particularly exciting, well-written, and even educational! I was pretty excited to find this book, as it was the first I'd heard of the Moving Picture Girls, and the book itself, judging by endpaper ads, is likely from the early Twenties, so it's kind of exciting just handling something that old—and exactly in the fashion for which it was intended—lying in bed reading, engaging my imagination. I liked this one enough to read another of the series, if I ever find one—the title of the next adventure, Snowbound, is particularly appealing to me.