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Observer, Volume XXXVI, Issue 38, 27 May 1916, Page 11

All is not big salaries and fast motor cars in the moving picture game. An American exchange tells of a tragery almost when the big producer, Ince, was putting on a fire scene. The actors were ready; the house that was to be burned had been besprinkled with kerosene, the director said "Go" and it did so. Too much kerosene had been used, and soon the actors were fighting in real earnest. First the child, then the heroine were saved, fbut the property man who had applied the match was inside. Then an actor dashed in again, got the man, but couldn't get out. Meanwhile the city fire brigade arrived, broke their way in and rescued the two men only just in time. Four people were in the hospital for some time. And the camera man never stopped. The director was heard to exclaim "Great! Great!" and not until his picture was held up for some weeks till his principals were healed, did Inne realise how near it was to proving a "great tragedy."

Mr Peter Dawson, the celebrated tbaritono, who is still starring with signal success in the Hugh I). Mc Intosh Theatre in Sydney, recently talked to an interviewer about New Zealand. He said, "Despite all we hear about the Dominion's advanced legislation, the country is essentially conservative, and regards every new thing with a good deal of suspicion. Very loyal to the old loves is New Zealand. Sing any song endeared by memories, and you're right. Appeal to any good oldfashioned British sentiment, and the people are with you cordially. It's a cheerful country, even when it is in appearance a trifle dour on top. Everywhere- I went I received such hospitality, euch unwavering kindness, as it warms my heart to remember. They'll sta::d anything from the stranger who seems inclined to play the game; they even stood my _ golf. Prohibition?" Well, my experience is that New Zealand in the matter of liquor in daily use

is pretty much on a level with other decent countries. Drunkenness is becoming unpopular, because the feeling of all good citizens is against it. Some queer things happen. The one place in the Dominion in which I had to devise subtle, schemes to dodge the too lavish and indiscriminate hospitality of the good men with a bottle of that Scotch stuff was Te Kuiti, which is what you call absolute Prohibition. One journalist friend said to me, 'Don't go there, Peter; you're too young to risk it.' He knew something, that fellow. If yo\i refuse to drink whisky in Te Kuiti they'll run it in on you as a hair-wash. The more you get, the more they think you want; it's almost uncanny. But the New Zealanders are great chaps. Their kindness is more than skin deep. They really like to make people happy. As a general rule, the brighter and gayer a show is, the better New Zealand will like it, Right through

a good part of my own tour 1 suffered from the competition of a party of "Wellington amateurs, who were out with 'The Private Secretary,' or one of those old farce-com-edies. In Rotorua a fellow showed me thirty poems he had written to a girl in the Tivoli Follies -not bad bad stuff, either. I. advised him to try the poems on one of the family weeklies, and he said he'd think hard about it. I hope he did, because I love to liven up the family press. Give my love to New Zealand, anyway. I mean it."

A picture theatre in the Spanish mission style—to cost about £15,----000, and to accommodate 1200 people—is to be erected on the site now occupied by the Strand Cafe and other buildings in Gladstone Road, Gisborne, for Mr F. Hall, of that town, who has arranged to let it to the Fuller Proprietary,

The advent of Harry Lauder as a singing comedian in plays of his own manufacture is one of the possibilities of the early future. In America lately the Scot staged his first-born, a three-act domestic comedy advertised as "The Night Before," and scored much siller and success.

By all accounts Adeline Genee. creature of gossamer-grace and lightness, has lost none of the wonderful charm of her art or personality. The lint-white hair and Dresden .shepherdess face, as well as the heavily-insured limbs 3 are as youthful as ever. Yet Adeline, ac mere years go, must foe considerably past the meridian. Recently in a new Spring ballet conducted by Sir Frederick Cowen, who wrote the music, she triumphed in a typical fashion over a crude and terrible setting that took the glamour from the work of the other players.