When "The Pictures" Were Very Young

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 247, 18 October 1941, Page 15

When "The Pictures" Were Very Young

in Hollywood keeps you perpetually young." Robert Z. Leonard, known affectionately as "Pop" to everybody in the pictures, should know. This is his thirty-fourth year in pictures, which makes him the oldest director in length of service, not years. There isn* t a grey hair in his red head and he bounces his 2251b around like a juvenile. Under a battery of lights on the set of "When Ladies Meet," with Joan Crawford, Robert Taylor, Greer Garson and Herbert Marshall, Leonard told of the early Hollywood he knew. He first saw Hollywood, then a crossroads village surrounded by orange groves, in the summer of 1907. To reach the sleepy village from Los Angeles it was necessary to change street cars three times. Played Both Roles "There were five people, rarely more, in a company," he said. "The pay was 7.50 dollars a day." The schedule was a picture a day, a one-

reeler costing 250 dollars. In the first scene I ever played I was told to ride to the top of a hill and look surprised. 'What am I supposed to be looking at?' I asked. The director wasn't sure. He was still writing the script on his cuff. It developed that I was looking at an Indian chief. That afternoon I took off my cowboy outfit and played the Indian." By 1910 Leonard was a stripling leading man for Selig Polyscope, but was still doubling up on roles. In "The Roman" he played Hobart Bosworth's bearded father in the morning, his clean-shaven son in the afternoon and a Roman general between times. This was the period when Hollywood was having a bootlegging gang war of its own. Renegade cameramen, hidden in bushes and behind trees, would sneak what shots they could and steel the picture before the legitimate companies could get their films into theatres. Chaplin In 1913 "The beginning of screen slang was 'Keep your eye on the ball,'" Leonard said. "Our one tiny outdoor stage was operated on rollers to follow the sun, which was called 'the ball.' No sun, no work. When I was directing 'Ziegfield Girl,' I remembered the first dancer to figure in a film drama. We got her from the

Orpheum, in Los Angeles, to dance in a Western saloon. That was a sensational innovation." Leonard thinks the biggest con-! troversy that ever raged in Holly- ! wood history was over the daring suggestion to increase the standard one-reeler to two reels. Many thought it would ruin the 3'oung industry, and a favourite argument against it was "Why, no audience will ever sit through two reels." In 1913 Leonard met an obscure 100-dollar a week comedian named Charlie Chaplin. Three vears later Chaplin's earnings were 670,000 dollars, topped only by "The little Biograph girl with the curls," Mary Pickford, who had made 1,000,000 dollars. That was the beginning of Hollywood's era of splurge and splendour that ended with the crash in 1929.