AWAITING THE VERDICT

Evening Star, Issue 19411, 20 November 1926, Page 17

AWAITING THE VERDICT

BUREAU OF THOUSAND HEARTBREAKS A woman representative, who has spent some months in Hollywood in order to investigate at first hand for the ‘ Sunday Chronicle ’ conditions of life in the world T famed film city, describes the pitiful scenes that are daily enacted in the room of a hundred heartbreaks where applicants for minor parts seek jobs. I have just visited a room in Hollywood where more hearts are broken every day than in any other room of its kind in the world. ' Officially, it is called the Central Casting Office; its object is to keep a complete register of all the extra players in Hollywood, and act as an unpaid agent between these players and the studios. Sometimes the daily number of supers, known in the profession merely as “ atmosphere,” whose services are required by any of the big producers, does not reach 100, sometimes not oven ten. As there are 10,000 people trying to earn a living by "walking on” in films, it is obvious that disappointment, even starvation, awaits most of them day after day, JUST OUT OF REACH. They may work three or four days in a month—if they are lucky I —but still they hover round the studios gossiping, boasting, telling anyone who will listen how they "supported” Harold Lloyd or Pola Negri, or how Norma Talmadgo wants them for her next picture—“a big bit, she tells me; something really good.” Something really good is always waiting for them, just out of reach. That is the big tragedy of Hollywood; its greatest heartbreak. And the whole thing is concentrated into a single room in the Central Casting Office, whence studio “atmosphere ” is secured every day. Seven large rooms comprise the offices; three of them, separated by glass partitions, are the most important. First is the bookkeeping room. GENERALS AND HAGS. The centre room is a waiting room; there interviews take place, and players sit for hours against the wall hopI ing to learn they are wanted the next ! day. They form a varied, half-sad, halfcomic collection; on the list may be found generals from the Russian Imperial Guard, many British and foreign ex-officers, Chinese, Malays, Spaniards, Italians, men and women with strange faces, frankly hideous; deformities, hunchbacks, old women, grey-haired and wrinkled, . who register for work as " hags -and look it. The third room is the most important; the telephone room. It contains a telephone switchboard with thirty lines, controlled by two operators; one large table, with seats for ten men and one girl; each seat has a telephone facing it. In their hands, those ten young men carry the names and identities of 10,000 players! At 3 o’clock the outer offices close. By 4 o’clock messages have come in from all the studios, giving the number of atmosphere players required next day; the kind of scene, and the time “shooting” starts. 700 CALLS AN HOUR. These orders are taken and divided between the ten casting directors; each cm© is made responsible for book-

ing sufficient players to cover Bis pan* ticular order, and the whole thing IS done by telephone. From 4 o’clock to 7 p.xn. players on the office register start ringing up from all over Hollywood; over 700 calls an hour came through. The men sit at their telephones, with lists and pencils read. The telephone operators say: “ Central _ Casting Office,” and immediately give the name of the caller. Probably the name is repeated by one of the casting men, in which case the operator connects the caller to that man, and a conversation ending in an engagement follows. If the name, on being givcn_ twice by the telephone operator, is not caught up by anyone at the casting table, tho operator speaks to the caller, saying: “No, nothing. Nothing yet," and clears the lino. The noise in this room is terrific, but out of it all a vast amount of business emerges, triumphantly. The general sound is like this SEVEN DOLLAB& “Buck Carey . . . Give Buckift Gordon; he wants him . . . No; -I want Buck! Over here, please. Say, Buck, to-morrow morning, Fox Studios, 7.30, ready to leave for location; evening clothes; seven dollars. 0.K.” “Hi. wait a minute! Did you say Mary Freeling? Gimme her! I wanna talk to her . . . No, give her to me; I’ve got her on my "list. Working, Mary? I want j-ou to-morrow morning, rain or shmo, Lasky Studios; beautiful evening gown and wrap; dressed aud on set 8.30; pay you ten dollars. 0.K,” So it goes on, without breathing space, for about three hours.