Mack Sennett all dressed up and grouching on a leather settee in the
hotel lobby, waiting for his prey! He would not be handed dry, old
sandwiches all his days. He was out for steak, red and juicy. He got
there and has stayed put.
Henry Lehrman patting his inflated chest! He got there, but stayed put
the littlest while.
Charlie Chaplin, who topped them all, working while others slept, out
on excursions with the milkman!
Tommy Meighan of the genial smile and Irish red-bloodedness. He got a
chance, and the ladies liked him. Nice personality, and good actor,
even so.
Not alone in the movies is it easier to get there than to stay there.
Chance sometimes enters into the first, but to stay there means ears
attuned, feet on the ground, and heaps and heaps of hard work.
CHAPTER XXVIII
“THE BIRTH OF A NATION”
Late in the summer of 1912 the Kinemacolor Company of America, a
subsidiary of the English company, started the production of movies in
color at a studio in Whitestone, Long Island. The year of Kinemacolor’s
endeavor also marks Mr Griffith’s last year with Biograph, for he went
to the Mutual with Harry Aitken while I became leading woman with the
Kinemacolor.
Messrs. Urban and Smith had rather startled the world with their color
pictures of the Coronation of George the Fifth of England, and the
Durbar Imperial at Delhi; and even though their pictures were a bit
fringy, they were becoming ambitious for honors in color movies along
dramatic lines.
Great things were achieved in America in the movies, and great things
might have been achieved in America in Kinemacolor, but it was destined
otherwise. Kinemacolor was fated to be but a brief though fruitful
interlude in color-photography in the movies, which, for some seemingly
mysterious reason, is so long in arriving.
Sunshine being imperative for Kinemacolor, southern California’s staple
brand could not be denied, and soon the company left its studio in
Whitestone and repaired to the modest little town of Hollywood where it
took over the Revier Laboratories at 4500 Sunset Boulevard.
That the place had been used as a studio was not discernible from the
front. It was a pretty corner on which, some distance apart, stood two
simple cottages, Middle Western in character. They represented office
and laboratory. Dressing-rooms and stages of a crudeness comparable to
the original Biograph studio were at the back.
No fence gave privacy from passers-by, but a high board fence,
decorated with pictures of foxes and the words “Fox Pictures,”
protected the lot in the rear. It was not the William Fox of to-day who
thus sought to advertise his trademark and his wares. Another Mr. Fox
it was of whom we seem to hear nothing these days.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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