Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) by Michael Sragow

that equipment for the Photographic Section would be easier to acquire in New York. In January 1918, Fleming was making gunnery films at the School of Fire at the rate of one or two every couple of days. He and twelve others from the 251st Aero Squadron got their orders to transfer from Fort Sill to the new photography school at Columbia University. Standing out in the group was the wiry, six-foot-five twenty-five-year-old Ernest B. Schoedsack, the co-creator of the epic documentaries
Grass
(1925) and
Chang
(1927) and then the epochal fantasy
King Kong
(1933). Within a month, Fleming had finished the last of his fifteen training films and was Manhattan-bound.
    In his February 9 letter of recommendation for Fleming, Captain Ellis suggested that Fleming and two others receive commissions “should their work at Columbia prove satisfactory.” The letter testifies to Fleming’s ability to impress people in a matter of weeks; it also points up the stature of his civilian connections. “Private Fleming was Douglas Fairbanks’s cameraman. In fact, we have found him to be more than a cameraman. He understands the motion picture game from the ground up, and he has ingenuity, conception and imagination, which made him a most valuable man in our work.”
    The U.S. School of Military Cinematography established at Columbia taught six-week courses in motion picture and still photography. Although more than seven hundred men would attend its classes and enjoy the many off-base diversions of Manhattan, the Army treated the school as a military secret. It hid in plain sight at 116th Street and Broadway, and went public only after the war ended.
    Fleming arrived on February 9. He wasn’t the sole Fairbanks cameraman on campus. Three days earlier, Harris Thorpe had arrived; he’d worked on
Wild and Woolly
under Fleming’s supervision. An East Coast cameraman named Harold “Hal” Sintzenich had helped develop the Columbia curriculum. Sintzenich was a seasoned veteran of New York and New Jersey studios, but in his diary he responded to Fleming’s arrival with youthful alacrity: “Vic Fleming, cameraman for Douglas Fairbanks, has been put in charge of the movie men, temporarily. An awfully good fellow.” Sintzenich and Fleming spent the next day “examining for men who are to go to France.” Ray June, who would later shoot Fleming’s
Treasure Island
and
Test Pilot,
also taught there at some time, but the “chief” or “senior” instructor of motion picture photography was Second Lieutenant Carl L. Gregory. Like Dwan and the other film pioneers, Gregory had earned a college degree in another field—chemistry, from Ohio State University. Then he worked briefly as a cinematographer for the Edison Company in 1909 and became a jack-of-all-trades (including writing and directing) for the Thanhouser Film Corporation of New Rochelle, New York. Tending the egos of movie-industry vets became a sizable task for Gregory, their supervisor. Schoedsack, for example, who would scale Gotham’s heights with
King Kong,
brushed off his Columbia experience with the words “I taught them how to put a camera on a tripod.” But Gregory’s faculty offered students a high-level practical education in lenses, composition, and lab work as well as “news value, historical record and war caption writing.” It culminated in “lectures on work under actual field conditions in the trenches and at schools of fire located in nearby training camps.”
    Wesley Ruggles was one student who took advantage of everything he could. A former Keystone Kop, Ruggles went on to direct the first Academy Award–winning Western, 1931’s
Cimarron.
And there was an activated reservist named Louis (formerly Lev) Milstein, a cutting-room assistant, posted after Columbia to the propaganda division of the Army War College in Washington, D.C. He hoisted equipment for a cameraman documenting Medical Corps operations, made health films about the benefits of good posture and