BUDDING FILM STAR

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22744, 3 December 1935, Page 4

BUDDING FILM STAR

MR FRAftK LEIGHTON’S OPPORTUNITY HELD UP BY SHIPPING STRIKE The shipping strike in Sydney has more than the usual significance for one very impatient young man in Dunedin at the present time. The announcement in yesterday morning’s Daily Times that “ the sailing of the Wanganella from Sydney has been- postponed ” threw ■ him into a state of agitation which all but found expression in the.familiar old makeshift of “tearing his hair.” The thought of Cmesound Studios commencing work on the Australian film, “ Thoroughbred,” by Edmond Seward; the American scenario writer, and waiting for him to appear to carry through his sequences at mid-day on December 9, when he cannot possibly reach the New South Wales capital until December 13, is causing Mr Frank Leighton, of the J. C. Williamson “ Roberta Company a lot of concern. Mr Leighton'has been selected to play opposite the American film star, Miss Helen Twelvetrees, in the film dealing with the life of Phar Lap, which Ciuesound Films

will commence producing at their studios at Bondi, Sydney, in a week’s time. Hie final instructions were received in his week-end mail, and included an urgent request to be on time on December 9 at noon, as the whole film will have to be held up pending the shooting of his sequences. “And all because of a strike they’ll have to wait three or four days,” he declared to a Daily Times reporter yesterday. “ Heaven knows they have enough strikes in Australia without insisting on having one just at this moment,” he concluded, waving the script of the play in one hand and a curious conglomeration of figures and letters and connotations, which are his sequences, in another. Sequence C. shots 356, 357, 358. and so on-to 379, U.U. shots, 456 to 488, with AA’s, BB’s. and all sorts of other combinations of letters, are the cryptic signs and hieroglyphics with which the producer intimates to his players their place in the film and the times of their attendance, and looking at them and then at the script of the play, which is like no other script that the stage ever saw, one realises that making a film is not simply a matter of posing before a camera. Mr Leighton, at the moment, has to content himself with waiting for the Marama to land him in Melbourne from Bluff on December 12, and lie is still hoping that when he arrives at the Bondi studios at noon on the 13th his defection will have been regarded iu the light of an “ act of God ” over which he had no control. “ Though I don’t suppose that will compensate Ginesound for what it will cost them to hold a picture up for four days,” he concluded.