Ginger Rogers walked to the sidelines of the Swing Time set during a break and pulled off her dancing shoes. They were full of blood.
The crew at RKO had worked past midnight on "Never Gonna Dance," the number in which she and Fred Astaire whirl up twin flights of stairs. By her own account, everything had gone wrong. An arc light went out. The camera made a noise. One of them missed the step where Astaire was supposed to catch her in the final spins, and once, at the end of a perfect take, his toupee flew off. The takes piled up, and Rogers later put the count at more than forty-eight. Hermes Pan, the dance director, saw her feet and offered to stop the shoot. She refused. The good take went into the can at four in the morning, and the director, George Stevens, told them they could go home.
Audiences in 1936 saw a white gown and two dancers who moved as if the music had just occurred to them, with both bodies in full view from head to shoe. Astaire insisted on that frame. He shot his numbers in as few pieces as he could, usually with four to eight cuts, so the eye could follow every step.
A frame that hides nothing forces the hiding to happen earlier. Astaire spent weeks in a closed rehearsal hall building each routine with Pan, who danced Rogers's part until she could come in and learn it. On the films after Roberta in 1935, Pan also dubbed her taps in postproduction. The audience got the one take. The weeks, the stand-in, the dubbing, and the shoes stayed off the screen.
Four centuries earlier, an Italian diplomat had written down the rule that camera obeyed, and he had coined a word for it.
