Not the fellows with steady jobs, who have already made good in their own particular field. They have too much at stake. The amateur prospectors are recruited, first of all, from the ranks of those who have everything to gain and little to lose—the rolling stones, the lovers of pure adventure, the gamblers, the fellows with the grub-stake and a thirst for sudden wealth. [Illustration: _Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation._ WRECKING A RACING-CAR FOR SPORT. To smash an expensive automobile for motion-picture purposes is nothing unusual. In this picture, in addition to the two movie cameras, note the “still” camera at the right. “Stills” are usually taken of every important scene.] [Illustration: _Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation._ GETTING A RISKY BIT OF ACTION. The dust behind the motorcycle indicates the speed at which it was going. The actor, a “professional double” accustomed to taking chances for extra pay, risked his neck in being thrown over the standing car.] This may seem a little rough, when we apply it to the great movie industry, but it is the truth. That is, it is the truth about the movie beginnings, the first years. For instance, there were a couple of men who did reporting, off and on, for a Los Angeles newspaper. They drifted into motion-picture work when the first studios came into Hollywood—because they had no steady jobs to keep them from trying out this new gamble. But the star reporters and the influential “desk” men on the paper didn’t have any time to fool away on the new wildcat schemes. Only within the last few years have they been won over, here and there, by big offers. The first money to be invested in the movies did not come from banks or bankers, or other leading financiers or investors; for the most part it came from druggists who had just sold out, or dry-goods clerks who had laid aside enough to make a little plunge, or shoe salesmen who had been left a modest fortune by their Aunt Maria and itched to see it turn to sudden wealth. The get-rich-quick instinct was at the bottom of most of the early movie money, just as it was in the golden California of Bret Harte. Why, you may wonder, if all the early movie investment was so foolhardy, were so many fortunes won instead of lost? The answer is that for the most part they were lost, and always have been, both in the movies and in rushing to new gold fields. One picture cost three-quarters of a million dollars to produce. The money was invested by hundreds of little stockholders, to whom the chance of “getting into the movies on the ground floor” seemed too good to lose. But the company went bankrupt, and the assets, including the film, were bought in for $20,000.