I couldn’t remember Fig Leaves until I saw it a couple of years ago in France. I thought it was amazingly modern. It’s got two reels of color in it. I didn’t know how to use color, so I got this big set, had it done in black and silver, had all the color taken out of it. And if I remember right, I don’t think the color showed up. I think they printed that part in black-and-white. The story starts in the Garden of Eden and becomes modern. The only strange thing about it was how we got from old-time to modern. It was the days when they didn’t have a laboratory to make dissolves, so a very fine cameraman [Joseph August] and I got together, and we tried to get something a little different. We wanted it to get all fuzzy and then dissolve to the new thing. And the way we did it was to get a beer bottle that had a flaw in it and put it in front of the lens. We turned it from the clear place to the place where the flaw began to show up. But we had an awful time, because somebody lost the beer bottle, so we never could get back from the new stuff to the old in the end of the picture.

Howard Hawks, in Joseph McBride, Hawks on Hawks, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992