Evening Star Newspaper, December 7, 1930, Page 98

vy B T RS R e -~ THE SUNDAY -STAR, ¥ w A 'WASHINGTON, D. C., DECEMBER 7, 1930, % pee aking LAUGHS for Sixty Years * ‘ An Unusually Intimate Close-Up of Weber . | i, and Fields, the Most Famous and Historie _of American Comics, Who Began Wise< cracking in the 1870 sand Still at It Over the Radio and in the Talkies. it o e, < 5 Joe Weber has kair of silver now and . @ grandfatherly look, but he can still hoof, as these_girls from the old come- dians’ new movie venture can testify. CENE: Hallway of the WOR broad- casting station. The time is mid- afternocn: The background of the corridor has the impersonality of gray .cement and plaster. Doors lead every- where into sound-prcofed rooms, and as they open they offer a quick glimpse of intricate radio apparatus. Pe:formers rush in and out, brushing each cther without so much as a . eoasual greeting—all of' them with eyes glued upon wrist wa ches. Inside one such room five musicians from a studio orchestra struggle at imitating the broken and crude brasses of a little German band. And just outside the door two elderly men lean against the wall reading from typewritten manuscript. One is tall, wiry and well pre- His skin is leather-brown from a Sum- mer of golf links and seashere. The other is . short and dapper in a trimly taflored suit of gray mixture. The tall man begins to read: - *Vell, Mike, id's unuseless—if you had less brains you'd still hef nudding.” . “Yah—vot’s der answer—Meyer?"” “I'm ftryink to drive into dot dumb head sometink aboud polidigs. No#, are you, Mike, vet or dry?” “I'm dry.” “How do you know you're dry?” . *Vell, if you don’d belieff it, feel me.” ekeit Al bt station. And when we got there t a dozen of our old-time troupers there to appear with us—there they all were, as though time had stood still. ¥ E 4 “The music show world has never outgrown the influence 6]’ the old burlesque and it isn’t likely to.” Weber and Fields in their heydey. 327§ 1 ki i i it “Vot kind of sense is dot? If I'm going %o be dry I need a towel.” : So it goes—right back to the timeless wag- gery! And just around the corner of the years —two ghetto lads living within a few blocks of each other. g Here in a dingy, sunless cellar is reared little Moscha Weber—who became Joseph Weber, One of a brood of 17, with poverty and neces- sity stalking all about. And just around the block Lew Schonfield, who turned his name into Lew Fields for stage purposes. Then two lads tossed together at the famous old Public School No. 42 in the heart of the ghetto—two lads pursued by the street gamins of the East Side and finding a shelter in the Bowery; the Lew Fields, his skin bronzed by a Sum- - mer at the seashore and on the links, is remarkably well preserved for a man who has been making "em laugh for 60 years. being schooled in survival while little more than infants. But way back in the '70's you find two ambitious little products of the ghetto trying to c¢rash through the barriers and get a ¢ “show their stuff” on the stage. And when, thanks to a stubborn refusal to be turned down, that chance finally came, it found Lew a without even the price of the black-face up required for their particular number. Finally they inducsd a sidewalk chestnut merchant to part with a few bits of burnt charcoal for their makeup. A stage manager, trying to be rid of them, advised them to call upon Tony Pastor. They were told that Pastor, then quite a theater dignitary, might be found at his place of busi- ness about 7 o'clock in the morning. Dawn found them waiting. And Pastor was finally run down somewhere around noon. When the lads burst in on him and showed him their tricks Pastor laughed in high amusement and advised them to wait 10 yeass and then come back to see him. After that they found a chance in one of the newly-opened musees. I'l.‘mqumb'mflmtm&eymto German comedy. They had been working in straight black-face, adding to thelr wardrobe much experience in different types and their different kinds of exposure exactly how much time to give to var of the picture. Wherever possible, arranges his lighting so that he graph a scene with one exposure for the whole landscape, doing away with any shading effects due to certain parts being lighted more than # ' others. Where he needs more lighting of any one 'puto(tmooenewhflemm»hm.he has a homemade spotlight made out of an old , tin can with an ordinary frosted bulb inside, Sometimes he has to flood underneath the card- board on which the sceme is built up, and be- cause of this he always keeps his scene on a box so that he can easily put a light under- neath to give the proper effect. With his cam- era but six inches away, he can get effects which make the background 20 miles distant. ’I‘!ns table-top photography, as it is known, is not new with Mr. Reberts, except in one respect. H2 knows and has seen numerous " table-top’ photcg:aphs in which inanimate ob- jects have been made the character, but these, he points out, can always be distinguished from the real things. They lack the reality of his Crities point out that his trees are really in the ground, not sticks on a piece of paper. . This reality is especially brought out by the fact that so many artists, art critics and judges are unable to tell that the landscapes such as those on this page are not real. He has'seen beauty in prosaic objects of nature ‘that others have overlooked.