PEOPLE NEVER IDLE

Waipa Post, Volume 47, Issue 3371, 23 September 1933, Page 9

PEOPLE NEVER IDLE

How do motion picture actors on a sound stage busy themselves between scenes ?

While technicians make preparations for a new " shot," and lights and cameras are being adjusted, the players necessarily retire into the background. Do they sit with folded hands, or occupy themselves with other maters? This question is often asked and answered at the Metro-Goldwyn-MJayer studios. If you had happened on the " Peg o' My Heart" set, you would have seen Marion Davies working tirelessly before a battery of cameras. But when, the scene was over you would have seen Miss Davies retire to her portable dressing-room and. armed with pen. ink and paper, attack a huere stack of letters. There is no one'who has more friends all over the world than Marion Davies, and she insists on answering tiheir messages personally. Robert Montgomery, who played opposite Miss Dalies in that picture, could have been found behind his favourite book, as always when not in frcnt of the camera. Being a lover of horses, and a polo player, he reads everything written on the sport. Joan Crawford has a daily schedule when making a picture. During the filming of "To-day We Live," she managed to get in an hour a day, practising her French. In spare moments she would also pick up a crossstftch rug, six of which she has finished already and presented to friends. Norma Shearer has a busy time of it when she has a spare second. She has menus to make out, instructions' for servants and social obligations to meet. She handles all these matters with expert ability and is back before the camera the moment she is called.

. You don't find Clark; Gable ing around with his hands in his pockets when he happens to be out of a scene. He is too fond of the great outdoors not to be making elaborate preparations for a hunting trip immediately following the completion of a picture. He brings all his favourite guns on the stage with him. and once his scene is over he busies himself cleaning and polishing them. Marie Dressier clips recipes, and pastes them in her famous cook book during every spare moment on the set. Loner before Miss Dressier ever thoug/ht of 'Owning her own home, she started planning the things she would cook. She has so many new dishes to try outs that if she cooked for the rest of her life she could never hope to catch up with herself. # . ' 'R'amjortiNoyar.ro .cannot practise his singinjr while-on the.set, so he devotes himself to'composing, music, and. writing lvrics. Wallace Beery, who pilots his own plane,"is foi'ever studying aeronautical maps and learning about air currents and altitude conditions. Helen Ha!yes snends her. spa-re time writing a plavl Wjlliam. Haines makes designs and sketches of lamps and furnishings that will eventuallv find their wav into some home, via his antique arxl deco" of infr shop. ■