FILM EXTRAS

Evening Star, Issue 20543, 23 July 1930, Page 11

FILM EXTRAS

THE GIRL WHO SOBBED “ I have made my debut _on the talkies. I am appearing with Miss Edna Best and Mr Owen Nares in ‘Loose Ends,’ which British International are producing at Elstree,” wrote a. correspondent-of the London ‘Daily Chronicle ’ from the English film centre recently. It is not exactly a leading part, but if you look very closely at the scene in the underground lift, you may be able to pick me out from the forty others. That is, provided the Cockney charwoman has not got between me and the camera. It happened this way:— With visions of my name in flashing electric lights, and of my picture in the papers as a new “discovery,” I boaraea the train for Elstree—that train which must seem to the ambitious. aspirants an escalator to film fame. There were a number of them on it. In my own compartment a young girl broke down and began to sob convulsively, and to go on sobbing fop nearly ten minutes —to my great consternation. , I tried to think what Ronald Colman or John Gilbert would do in the circumstances. Just when I , was plucking up courage to console her she turned to me with a beaming smile. “ Was that anvthing like the real thing?” she asked. “ I have been practising it for days just to show tho director what I can do.” . At' the studio the casting'director put me through a cross-examination. His remarks were not encouraging. “ Rut isn’t there a role I would suit?” I pleaded. “Well,”* he said, with a devasting frankness, “you might do for a baqk clerk or a railway porter. f- Wouldn’t I do for a journalist, say ?” I asked maliciously. ■ “Good heavens, no, man,”. he said, with startling force. “The' man we - want as a journalist must ■ be’.tall ” (I winced), “handsome” .. (I winced again), “with keen grey eyes” (I blinked), “and an alert expression” (I bowed my head). Then he remembered that-a crowd was wanted for a lift scene. , I jumped at the chance. Stars have been discovered in the crowd before now—Ramon Novarro, for instance. Hope springs eternal . . : My face was smeared with a coating of a browny greasy-painty my eyelids were darkened, and my lips rouged to a stand the glare of the arc' lamps. After much waiting it came to “ shooting ” the scene in the underground lift. “ Keep out of the way as much as you can,” said the director. “ Over in that far corner for preference. Keep your mouth shut, and don’t sneeze.” The sheer realism of - that, underground lift ruined my chances of ever allowing, my talents. I was jammed in the corner by a rush-hour crush, and I can only hope for the best. Then 1 wandered back to the casting director, and asked him if he could not arrange for me to have a screen test. I asked it all in innocence, for I have seen the producer putting several possible through their paces. But I was not long in being disillusioned, and without any waste of words. For it seems that a screen test fop a talkie costs nearly £2O a time. It is very, very rare nowadays that anyone but proved stage stars ever get a screen test, which is essential before one gets a big part. And so, with fame still very remote, with my pride humbled with the thought that I was miscast even as a journalist, I trudged back to the station to find a girl crying quietly on tho platform. It wasn’t the girl of the morning, and it wasn’t" for effect. They were real tears. Like me, she was disillusioned.