Evening Star Newspaper, August 1, 1937, Page 81

Avgust 1, 1937 LUGKY olRY They beam brightly in Hollywood — they dazzle film fans wherever movies are shown. Lucky? Yes—but it's a luck backed by pluck and brains and hard work by GROVER JONES HE old and the new — nowhere is the change more noticeable than in the mo- tion picture business. New styles. New ideas. New faces. A million-dollar pro- duction of today becomes the laugh of to- morrow, simply because the ladies of the land obey the dictates of fashion. A long skirt sud- denly supplants a short one, and the audience, adjusted to a new style, howls at the cinema tragedienne when tears are really in order. The producer weeps in his beard and mentally kicks himself for not sticking to his first idea of making a costume picture. Those things run on indefinitely if they’re good. Clothes make, or break, the picture man, and so do topical subjects. The latter because the topic of today may be reversed tomorrow, and, by the time the picture is finished, is completely forgotten by the buying public. The gangster picture, once so popular, dis- appeared overnight. 1 was doing a script for Ben Schulberg — all about a hot-shot hero who wasn’t on the up-and-up. The day we finished the script, somebody tipped off the police to the where- abouts of John Dillinger — and the G-men polished him off. Automatically it did the same thing to our script; the gangster hero had lost luster with his great American public. What once had been a good idea turned out to be nothing but wasted effort. Incidentally — or maybe not incidentally — a young man was brought to light in this contemplated picture who was unknown then, but famous now. And to show you what a good judge of talent I am, I'll illustrate. One morning Schulberg called me into his office. A tall young fellow sat in a chair. He looked at the wall beyond and never even offered an exchange of glances. I was intro- duced to him and he left. THIS WEEK “What do you think of him for the boy in the story?”” asked Schulberg. “What do I think of Brooklyn winning the pennant?”’ was my retort. “‘If he’s an actor, I'm the Ten Commandments.”’ Schulberg grinned. “He will be,” he said. ‘“You wait and see.” I did, but I didn’t wait long. This fellow, whose name was Fred MacMurray, clicked in his first picture, ‘‘The Gilded Lily.” Wesley Ruggles, the director, and Claudette Colbert, the star, saw a test of him and agreed to gamble on an unknown. The studio rejoices that they did. He is now one of their biggest bets. He makes two pictures to the other fel- low’s one and belongs to that distinctive group in Hollywood which has no complaints. One morning not long ago I sat on a wooden sawhorse with him and we straightened out the problems of the picture business. Also, I learned a great deal about the fellow himself. It began when I made the assertion that I came from a smaller town than anyone else in Hollywood. “Oh, you did, huh?”’ he snorted. ‘“Well, try and find Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, on the This, of course, can be done if you have a magnifying glass and the window shade is pulled up. He went to high school in Madison and won letters in football, baseball, track and basket- ball. Then, to the disgust of his mother — his father having been a concert violinist — he took up the saxophone. ¢ MAKING ‘“THE LONESOME PINE": SYLVIA SIDNEY AND FRED MACMURRAY BEAUTIFUL AND BRAVE: .NORMA SHEARER, WITH LESLIE HOWARD LEFT: MARTHA RAYE, WHO SANG INA NIGHT cLue BELOW: TYRONE POWER. HE ONCE USED THE NAME OF DOAKES “I spent a year in Carroll College, trying to spell Waukesha, which was the town where the school was located, but finally in despair and also because we were short on this thing called money, I went to Ghicago and joined up with an orchestra. Hamburger was my favorite food when I could get it.” “Then you came to Hollywood and made good; is that the idea?”’ I asked. “I came to Hollywood, but I didn’t make good. I hung around the Central Casting Office hoping somebody would discover me; went to previews and premiéresand asked stars for their autographs. I got plenty of these, Mogazine Section 7 but not a single autograph.on a contract. “Then 1 saxophoned my way into the Hollywood Theater. Here I met a couple of monkeys like myself and we organized a band which we called The California Collegians. We were pretty good, too, and to prove it, we got an offer to appear in ‘Three’s a Crowd,” a New York musical show. “I was in New York five years. Finally worked into the big production, ‘Roberta.’ And what a break! Oscar Serlin, the movie talent scout, saw me in the stage band and invited me to his office. I went and tried to be nonchalant — lighted a cigarette, you know. But, boy, how my hand shook.” “‘No worse than it shook in Ben Schulberg’s office,” I said. “It did, huh?”’ He grinned, and walked away. Being an old-timer in the business, I find it interesting only when I come face-to-face with incidents possessing the human angle. A great deal of drivel trickles out over the world about some of our personalities. Actually, the general run of actresses and actors are hard-working people, with plenty of ups and downs. Among them, of course, are bound to be a few upon whose brains an ec- centric engraver would have difficulty inscrib- ing a simple period. And when I say engraver, I’'m referring to the fellow who inscribes the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. Of this latter group there is little to be said, except that God gave them their faces. They are a vain lot and quite forgetful — forgetting that it took a well co-ordinated studio and plenty of money to assist them along the path to glory. We have a name for them, but it can only be used in private conversation. But the good ones? Ah, they’re different! 1 asked for a few remarks from Carole Lom- bard and this is what I got: “I was taken out of three pictures because I didn’t know what to do with my hands. . . All the time I was making seventeen flops in a row, 1 was afraid someone would call my bluff before I had a chance to really learn something about this business. . . John Barrymore taught me more about acting in the six weeks we were making ‘Twentieth Century’ than I had learned in all my previous “After all, how important are actors? We Jress the stage, I grant you, but we’re awfully lucky, too. We get 90 per cent of the glory when the credit should be divided among so many.” : The stuff has a ring because it’s true. These people out in Hollywood are a goodly lot, and if you don’t think so, you’re stepping on the toes of the universe — for they come from all parts of the globe and truly represent a fair slice in the social life of every city, hamlet and * town. Back in the days when the late Olive Thomas was starring for the old Biograph, a young girl got a job in one of her pictures, called “The Flapper.” This girl’s name was Norma Shearer. She had been reared in the lap of luxury, but financial reverses had de- prived her of the lap — and there she was. She had registered as an ‘‘experienced (Continved on page 12)