A recent week-end in Topanga served to demonstrate how truly "the ladies call the shots" these days, and sometimes in odd ways. At Melcher’s old Homestead Rifle Range on the wide plateau just east of Greenleaf Canyon. Mrs. George Melcher presided over the shooting range while Lea Marlow, head of M.K.M. Pictures, a movie producer of Hollywood, directed and shot scenes for a “western” in which an old fashioned Gatling gun was used.
Mrs. Melcher maintains strict discipline on the range in accordance with safety standards and has a record of no accidents over some years of target shooting by thousands of rifle and pistol marksmen.
Miss Marlow, a human dynamo on the motion picture set took a sequence of a forthcoming motion picture which called for use of a Gatling gun, predecessor of the modern machine gun, which appeared in the late 1880s and was used in the Spanish-American War before the turn of the century. The Gatling gun worked perfectly on the range firing at a rapid rate as the gunner turned the crank. Miss Marlow in her capacity as producer is her own director, cameraman and script writer and has turned out some remarkably fine pictures.
