Pictures kept on radiating from the stable with quite gratifying
success. In time along came Jeanie Macpherson intent on an interview
with Mr. C. B. DeMille. Jeanie now knew so much about the movies and
C. B. so little, he just naturally felt the Lord had sent her. Miss
Macpherson’s presentation of ideas always got over to Cecil. So Jeanie
signed up with the new firm on that rather long ago day and now she
gets one thousand a week, I understand, for writing Mr. DeMille’s big
pictures.
We must go back now and rescue Jeanie from Mr. Jones’s Ball, for in
“Mrs. Jones Entertains,” she has duties to perform. In that picture
she was not “principal guest” but the “maid.” Flora Finch was a guest.
Miss Finch in another Jones movie becomes a book agent soliciting Mr.
Jones in his office. In “Mr. Jones has a Card Party,” Mack Sennett
appears as one of husband’s rummies, and in yet another “Jones,”
Owen Moore, first husband of Mary Pickford, is seen as “atmosphere”
escorting a lady from a smart café. So chameleon-like were our social
relations in the “Jones Comedy Series.”
A Flora Finch tidbit here comes to light. Though fifteen years have
elapsed, they have not dimmed the memory of the one hundred and
eighty-five feet of “Those Awful Hats.” The exhibitor was told: “It
will make a splendid subject to start a show with instead of the
customary slides.”
The “set” represented the interior of a moving picture theatre. The
company was audience. Miss Finch was also “audience,” only arriving
late she had a separate entrance. Miss Finch wore an enormous hat. When
she was seated, no one at the back or side of her could see a thing.
But out of the unseen ceiling, soon there dropped an enormous pair of
iron claws (supposedly iron) that closed tightly on the hat and head
of the shrieking Miss Finch, lifting her bodily out of her seat and
holding her suspended aloft in the studio heaven.
How many times that scene was rehearsed and taken! It grew so late and
we were all so sleepy that we stopped counting. But pay for overtime
evolved from this picture.
The members of the stock company that had grown up worked on a guaranty
of so many days a week. Now with so much night work our director felt
that the actors not on “guaranties” should be recompensed and it was
ruled that after 7 P.M. they would receive three extra dollars. So
when 6 P.M. would arrive with yet another scene to be taken, the
non-guaranty actors became very cheery. More money loomed, and more
sandwiches, pie, coffee, or milk, on the company. Frequently those not
on the guaranteed list made more than those on it, which peeved the
favored ones.
Along about now Mr. Herbert Yost contributed some artistic bits. Once
he was Edgar Allan Poe and he wrote “The Raven” while his sick wife,
poor little Virginia, died. We were a bit afraid of being too classic.
The public might not understand--we must go slowly yet awhile, but not
all our days.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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