Hollywood

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 750, 24 August 1929, Page 18

Hollywood

AN AMAZING PLACE, WHERE ONE GETS USED TO ANYTHING.

HARLAN THOMPSON’S STORY Paramount’s Hollywood, like Caesar’s Gaul, is divided into three parts—the lowans, the picture people and the original inhabitants. The lowans look up to the picture people; the picture people look down on the lowans; and the original inhabitants shut their eyes tightly when either of the others are around. A pathetic lot, these aborigines. They can remember the time when their land was a quiet land; when a petrol station was a petrol station, and not an Egyptian temple illuminated in six colours; when a restaurant was a restaurant, and not a brown derby 50ft high; when a lot of other things were a lot of other things, and not a lot of movie sets gone into trade. The original inhabitant takes it pretty hard, and well he might, for he is one of a doomed race. For one thing, many of them are getting along in years, and no old people have much driving chance Hollywood’s “My first impression of Hollywood gained shortly after I came West to write for Paramount,” says Harlan Thompson, “has not yet left me. Looking out of my hotel window the morning of my arrival, I saw a young man on the side-walk below. Not that this was so remarkable in itself, but he happened to be engaged in pulling up run-length silk stockings while waitmg for a taxi. In the process the striped dressing gown he wore was biown back enough to reveal that the rest of his costume consisted of a lace-trimmed pink georgette combination. “I expected someone to speak to the poor chap and tell him that such things Just weren’t done, especially in the morning—but nobody did. In face £* Hr hundreds of people who passed taxi ar »*ived, not one paid the slightest attention to him. I knew then that Hollywood was going to be different. 6 6 “In a few short weeks on the Paramount lot I have grown used to anvtnlng. If a group of creatures with six eyes and green tails landed in a v-ard et ra r ° m lars . ri Sht in my front yard, Id maybe give them a sidelong 1 went out to the mailbol ,' vh ‘ ch company was maknum? at *>ind of . an aviation picture. The original inhabitant is different. He resents little things like that. And he 11 go on resenting until that dav comes when a front bumper takes him even Hollywood. l .’’’ When he