HOLLYWOOD IN PERSON.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 134, 8 June 1929, Page 5 (Supplement)

HOLLYWOOD IN PERSON.

GOSSIP OF THE STUDIOS.

(By MOLLIE MERRICK.)

HOLLYWOOD (Calif.), May 7. If you met a charming Latin gentleman Who, it was whispered, was own cousin to the King of Spain. And who was affable and simple and sincere and entertaining. And who smiled away all attempts at giving him. or referring to his title or his status, by showing his startling teeth and saying, "Ah no, I am plain Senor So-and-so —a citizen of my country, as is the meanest peasant." You'd entertain him if you were a motion picture star or a producer. He would mean, aside from his pleasant personality, a vast political power in his country. Well—Hollywood did. They say Joseph Schenck entertained this charming person royally, and that Douglas Fairbanks gave a dinner for him. He turned out to be just the simple Spanish gentleman he said he was. In fact, he had insisted that they forget the royalty story. They just wouldn't. They haven't any comeback. He didn't carry through on false pretences. But he knows just how celluloid royalty receives the regal kind.

It's the joke of the month—join the club.

More of tiie great are? coming West to write dialogue for the lesser mentalities —with perhaps the somewhat questionable success the really great have in the motion picture iield..

: (ieorge Middletbn is cue of Winfield Sheehan"s best. President of the Dramatists' Guild and Authors' League of America, Mr. Middleton will put dignity and distinction into his labours.

John Hunter Booth is still another of the literati on the way to Hollywood. Zoe Akins will be here shortly. All these have contributed to the drama of the day. Mr. Middleton Avrote "Polly With a Past," Mr. Booth "The Masquerader." We all remember Ethel Barrymore in Zoe- Akin's play "Declasse," Gilbert Eiyery, who did "Tarnish," and George Brooks, who helped put pundh into "Spreadeagle," Eliot

Lester, who did ''The Mud Turtle," and Clare Kummer, with "Good Gracious Amiabelle" to her name.

Back these up with such stage directors as Lester Lornegan, Campbell Gullan and Frank Merlin, and if "talkies" do not become the regulation product of footlight quality as seen in New York, you can blame the fault on the "inike" and the "canned" result.' . Lines and direction will be there. So far it sounds largely like that comedian who insisted that he couldn't understand why his vocal attempts went awry. "I sing them so sweet, but they come out so rotten."

Pauline Lord turned down £700 a week ' to play the role of Lummox. She is one of the girls who hasn't fallen for tins "land of sunshine, fruit and flowers." Directors who are besieged by good and bad actors alike cannot understand such an attitude. ' That anyone should turn down an opportunity to appear in films! Well, Pauline Lord let this chance of a lifetime go by with a smile.

Cecil de Mille has taken fire dressing rooms at his new studio and thrown them into one room. Why not? Mr. de Mille makes only spectacles—nothing is done on the small scale. The tiniest detail is super-production. ,

llovie stars aren't losing their lives over the first local presentation of Eugene O'Neill's "Strange Interlude." Some of them have seen the original company in New York. More of them have a working knowledge of what it's all about. It won't make a "talkie" — __ and cinemaites are not interested *in anything that doesn't register for current use. Another thing — the play, which proved a novelty in New York, was not being shown in a largely professional community. " So the — sunset-hour opening was negotiable. But at the time the lengthy drama opens some lovely star is glaring at the director, anticipating his order for a retake. She's thinking of the long drive home, and a shower, and perhaps a beauty-nap before dinner.

If you think the fine, level-eyed hero with the broad-brimmed hat, two guns and "chaps," has completely vanished from the scene you're wrong. Just to show the world that he considers the oxygen-consuming, honest-to-goodness boy still of interest to the world, Laemmle has signed up Ken Ifaynard to make five pictures a year for four years. The stories will be built about the growth and development of the States.

Meanwhile, the rest of Hollywood will take care of the night club themes. So a good time will be had by all.

You can be a great actor or actress to the rest of the world, you can be a shining star in the movie firmament so far as the public is concerned; but to the family you are just mama and papa or whatever it may be.

. The best story of the week goes to Pat O'Malley, who sent his family to see him in the premiere of a movie in which he had an excellent part. The children were restless. Mrs. O'Malley had all she could do to keep them quiet. Finally she asked:

"What is the matter with you? Aren't you enjoying the movie? Isn't papa wonderful ?"

"Oh, pap's all right, I guess," said a small, read-headed O'Malley in a very bored tone. "But when are they going to take him off and let Krazy-Kat come on? That's what I want to know."

On the Harold Lloyd lot, watching the chap who has made clean comedy pay! It's perpetual old home week at Hal's studio. The men who are making the present picture were shooting movies with Lloyd a dozen years ago. They'll be carrying on for a score more if they do what's right, and live to see that many years. Harry Brooks, little comedian who contributed laughs to some of the old short comedies Lloyd made, is at work to-day. He is almost blind, despite the efffforts of some of the finest specialists in this country. Brooks was injured in a fall some years ago, and since then the light has been growing dimmer and dimmer. Not that he feels it that way.' The sympathy he receives is the rough, gruff, magnificent camaraderie wheh men give to men. Brooks knows, everyone on the set by the way they kick him. It wrings their hearts to see him passing through the doors of darknes, but they say no word. He carries on as though nothing had happened and is cast in every picture.. And the gang go on kicking him as they did in the old days. He never misses in guessing who it is. In a village where tales are turned out in celluloid as evenly ground as the output of a spaghetti factory, where profit often displaces pity, and lust for power puts loyalty into the back row, here is something to watch and to admire.

Talking pictures have revealed one thing to us: All the movie stars* not only act and are beautiful, but can sing also. Gloria Swanson is to have some singing sequences in her latest picture. Ladies one never

heard of as singing, warble into the "mike" these days. Sound reveals the strange phenomenon of a great group of professionals with talent which they have been hiding modestly through the years.

Now and then one of the artistes fails to click with

the' sound record-

ing. There is a slight variance. Embarrassing, but not necessarily fatal. We are an openminded and believing public. For years we have been watching rabbits taken out of silk hats, yards of silk flags produced from a magician's sleeves, great bowls of goldfish being conjured out of the air bv a wave of a wand.

Why not a great voice from a great movie artist, with the, crank .of" the camera?