Footlight Parade (1933) - Complete 'By a Waterfall' swim spectacular Clip (pre-code) HD

This is the complete water spectacular -- the stunning work of Director Busby Berkeley. starring James Cagney, Dick Powell, and Ruby Keeler. The set was a major production. The 40 x 80 foot swimming pool had glass walls and floors and side lighting for shooting underwater sequences. The artificial water fall set, apparently different from the swimming pool set, pumped 20,000 gallons per minute. This clip was filmed in six days start to finish.

The costumes and filming were considered very risque. I'm guessing this clip may have played a role in the establishment of film code. The show never could have been done after film code was implemented.

Synchronized swimming was obviously well established then. This was filmed about 15 years before Esther Williams began doing synchronized swimming, and about 18 years before German engineer Otto Przystawik created Dancing Waters, (owned by Harold and Carol Steinman), started touring and subsequently entered the movie business. It had shows in a few places, most notably the Tommy Bartlett Show in the Wisconsin Dells.

At one time we were considering buying Dancing Waters and spent time with its Vice President. But Carol Steinman wanted a fortune for aging equipment that was very dangerous because it had unprotected 3-phase pump motor controllers on the face the manual control console. So I decided to design my own fountains going forward.

I was very interested in fountain shows, and built them for 18 years installed in the old Bullwinkle's Family Food and Fun restaurants, and many shows in Japan, Korea, Singapore, and one big one in China. In the 1990's I designed special fountains for the Splash Show in the Reno Hilton's Zeigfield Room, the largest indoor stage in the world at the time.. I believe it was the largest indoor fountain show ever done. It featured coherent flow nozzles dancers could go under without damaging costumes, bubble panels, and dancing waters-like effects. There was a big swim tank (made by others) for Esther Williams-style mermaids doing water ballet. The tank had an exploding waterfall that leapt over the front of the tank and freaked out the audience. It also had a 30-foot wide heated coherent waterfall that dropped about 110 gallons of water on dancers from 40 feet in the air at the very front of the stage. Those in the front row sometimes stood up and got ready to run!

I also did a replacement for the old manual Splash Show at the Riviera that wore out. The new fountain was automated and had special features including a water screen for projecting film and lasers on. It had coherent nozzles that created a steam of evenly-spaced 1" balls of water, with variable-speed strobes that made the balls freeze in the air or move forwards or backwards.

I had a contract in hand to do special fountains for David Letterman before he changed networks. There was a remote controlled jumping jet to go over his desk, and a hidden kamikaze nozzle Dave could control via a joystick under his desk to shoot people in the audience. My favorite was a heated coherent water dump over the set entry. Dave wanted to be able to randomly soak himself as he walked on to do the show. Unfortunately that was precisely the time when he had to change networks because his show was too expensive for the network. There was little funding for Dave's new show, so the fountains went out the window.

You can see some of my work at https://aquamationinc.com. I left the fountain biz in 1998 and went to work doing IT for AT&T.