Chapter 11: We Were Still Experimental
[Pare Lorentz:] We talked and we would say we were still experimental. I wasn’t on permanent employment until I started to make The River. So I moved up one notch in being put on a weekly payroll or I’m not sure it was not an annual payroll. Getting back to Roy, one amusing thing was I said, “I simply can’t work at these wages.” So I hit a figure like $9, $10,000 a year and D.J. Ward is absolutely stopped and said, “There’s some kind of a rule. But do you realize that that’s what Henry Wallace gets? And you can’t get as much money as the Secretary of Agriculture.” But we did arrange I got $9,999 dollars.
We had many ideas and concepts which didn’t work out. One of mine was, just like any movie director, that I might ask a man to go ahead and do location pictures. That it would make my life easier and cheaper and we had many discussions like that. But it actually wasn’t true as to being feasible. They only had a vague outline except it seemed all right to me. That is, where there was grass, shoot it, where there were heavy equipment, shoot it, where there were cattle, shoot it, where there were dust storms, shoot it.
