FACTS FROM FILMDOM.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1384, 2 November 1916, Page 35

FACTS FROM FILMDOM.

Charlie Chaplin attained his twentyseventh birthday last April. sjs « * * Says Clara Kimball Young, who stars in “The Feast of Life” at Every body’s Theatre this week: “The motion picture is not a play nor drama but a narrative. Many magnificent novels would fail hopelessly as staged dramas, and yet make fine pictures.” The Margaret Anglin Picture Corporation has been organised, with offices in the Times Building, New’ York City. The famous actress whose name is borne by the company will be seen in eight subjects. The making of these will not be permitted to interfere with her stage work. ♦ ♦ « * Blanche Sweet is now busy on a feature entitled “Public Opinion,’' which, as the title suggests, is a problem play.

The Lyceum (Sydney) is inviting limericks on Charlie Chaplin. * * • Marguerite Clark’s latest triumph is “Silks and Satins.” The World Film Company, under the direction of Mr. W. A. Brady, has started comedy production, and has engaged Lew Fields and Marie Dressier to head the fun-makers’ list. Fields was associated with his partner, Joe Weber, in a couple of Keystone comedies recently. Marie Dressier is weil remembered, through her work with Charlie Chaplin in “Tillie’s PuncLtued Romance.”

Mary Pickford has begun an enthusiastic crusade for appropriate music in picture theatres. A while ago (the stoTy goes) she .looked in at a screening of her own “Madame Butterfly,” on which occasion the genius who presided over the organ accompanied the sorrows of Cho-Cho San with a spirited rendering of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

? An untimely gale, which swept suddenly over New York, completely destroyed an Italian village which had been erected at the Brighton Beach race track for the filming of “Romeo and Juliet.” Francis X. Bushman and Beverley Bayne were just about to start work on exterior scenes when the wind so rudely decided “to huff, and to puff, and to blow the house down.”

Is success in the films due mostly to appearance, or is it due to ability to act? asks an American magazine. These two questions have raised a storm of argument. Blanche Ring says that the motion picture public likes dolls as its heroines. Mary Fuller, on the other hand, contends that an actress without charm, personality and ability cannot succeed m the films.

D. W. Griffith is said to be working on a film greater than “The Birth or a Nation,” called “Mother.”

Enid Bennett, the pretty Australian girl who was here with the Fred Nib--10 Company, has started a 10 months’ engagement with the Thomas Ince Film Company in New York.

Mary Pickford has engaged her very own studio in New York, and has already started her first Mary Picklord Film Corporation picture. In the new venture Little Mary is to be her own manager, producer and star.

Al. St. John, the acrobatic comedian, is a nephew of Roscoe Arbuckle. He stai’ted public life as a clog-dancer with a company of quack doctors, but when that broke up “Fatty” got him a position as one of the Keystone Cops. He has graduated to leading comedy roles, and divided honours with “Fatty” in “The Waiters’ Ball.”

Robert Hitchens’ “ The Garden of Allah,” is being made by the Selig Company in twelve reels, which means the using of some 100,000 feet of film, and a year’s time for an army of screen players.

“ Your daughter has a wonderful voice. You ought to cultivate it.” “What for? A voice doesn’t show up in moving pictures. But I’ve got a boy with a funny walk whom I expect to see drawing a thousand a week one of these days.”

There are no half-measures about film companies. In a new photo-play to be screened in America, a dozen freight cars are going to t-e piled up in a wreck. The wreckage has already been contracted for by a match company and a wholesale junk-dealer.

“I have no false notions about myself or about my profession,” Earle Williams, the picture idol says. “I don’t expect adulation, and don’t want it. I’d like to tell a lot of girls who write love-letters to motion-picture actors that there are a lot of fellows right in their home towns who are just as good, as handsome and probably a whole lot more serviceable than the film heroes they rave over.”