SOME TYPEWRITER

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXV, Issue 12390, 30 July 1937, Page 6 (Supplement)

SOME TYPEWRITER

A typewriter thirty feet high with a twenty-eight foot carriage, writing on paper twenty-two feet eight inches wide, is just a Hollywood dance director’s idea of ‘‘somethingdifferent.”

It was constructed as the setting for a spectacular song and dance number for Warner Bros.’ new comedy, with music, “Ready, Willing and Able,” which has its final screening at the Regent 'to-night. The idea was conceived by Bobby Connolly, who staged the dances in the picture.

The huge machine, the exact reproduction of a popular streamline portable, magnified in its proportions to 32 times its regular size, is “operated” by Ruby Keeler and Lee Dixon with the assistance of fortyodd girls, one for each letter and symbol on the key board.

Miss Keeler and Dixon perform their herculean task by dancing on the keys, spelling out words of a song by Richard Whiting and Johnny Mercer—“ Too Marvellous for Words”—which is sung by Ross Alexander and Winifred Shaw. The dancing girls, as each key is pressed, react as type bars, imprinting a letter on the huge sheet of paper inserted into the machine.