Only a few days were needed to get a line on the place. It was a conglomerate mess of people that hung about the studio. Among the flotsam and jetsam appeared occasionally a few real actors and actresses. They would work a few days and disappear. They had found a job on the stage again. The better they were, the quicker they got out. A motion picture surely was something not to be taken seriously. Those running the place were not a bit annoyed by this attitude. The thing to do was to drop in at about nine in the morning, hang around a while, see if there was anything for you, and if not, to beat it up town quick, to the agents. If you were engaged for a part in a picture and had to see a theatrical agent at eleven and told Mr. McCutcheon so, he would genially say, “That’s O. K. I’ll fix it so you can get off.” You were much more desirable if you made such requests. It meant theatrical agents were seeking you for the legitimate drama, so you must be _good_! Would it be better to affiliate with only one studio or take them all in? There was Edison, way out in the Bronx; Vitagraph in the wilds of Flatbush; Kalem, like Biograph, was conveniently in town; Lubin was in Philadelphia, and Essanay in Chicago. Melies was out West. It would be much nicer, of course, if one could get in “right” at the Biograph. Some of the actors did the rounds. Ambitious Florence Auer did and so became identified with a different line of parts at each studio. At Biograph, character comedy; at Vitagraph, Shakespeare--for “King Lear” and “Richard the Third” with Thomas H. Ince in attendance, were screened as long ago as this; at Edison, religious drama. There she rode the biblical jackass. The Kalem studio was in the loft of a building on West Twenty-third Street. You took the elevator to where it didn’t run any further and then you climbed a ladder up to a place where furniture and household goods were stored. Bob Vignola could be seen here dusting off a clear place for the camera and another place where the actors could be seated the while they waited until Sidney Olcott, the director, got on the day’s job. Sidney Olcott was an experienced man in the movies even in those early days, for had he not played a star part in the old Biograph in the spring of 1904? As the _Village Cut-up_ in the movie of the same name we read this about him in the old Biograph bulletin: Every country cross-corners has its “Cut-up,” the real devilish young man who has been to the “city” at some stage of his career, and having spent thirty cents looking at the Mutoscope, or a dollar on the Bowery at Coney, thinks he is the real thing. The most common evidence of his mental unbalance is the playing of practical jokes, which are usually very disagreeable to the victim.... In a few years Mr. Olcott had evolved from the “village cut-up” at Biograph to director at Kalem.