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"The Digest of the Motion Picture Industry"
Page Seven
Taking Chances on Being Movie Actors
Bj) RAT H. LEEK
Steeplejacks who gambol on the pinnacles of skyscrapers lead soft, pampered existences, as compared to those laid out for the male players in productions now under way here.
For hair raising thrillers the sort that used to be performed by the luckless "double" have been the order of the week. And in every case the players whose names appear in electric lights were those who braved the perils laid out by imaginative script writers.
Within a few days Milton Sills submitted to a spectacular beating that would have chilled the ardor of any ring champion. Walter Hiers clung, head downward, from a parachute several hundred feet above the ground, while Kenneth Harlan provided the climax to the thrills by crashing from the clouds in an aeroplane, through the roof of a house and landing right side up with care, almost in the arms of a Spanish senorita.
Sills took his trouncing in the interest of the second production of "The Spoilers," in
which the Goldwyn organization is attempting to outdo the famous fight originally staged by William Farnum and Tom Santschi. Noah Beery's idea of making the fistic encounter realistic was to hurl Sills over his head three times in the course of the fight — a bit of unexpected violence that kept Sills in his bed for two days after the struggle.
Hiers' thriller is a feature of "Fair Week," being filmed by the fat comedian as his newest Paramount picture. The story calls for a rescue scene in which the hero all but loses his life. If the good natured Walter's statement may be accepted at its face value this is just what occured. At any rate, it is hardly likely anybody will be able to persuade him to leave the ground for many days to come.
But it remained for Kenneth Harlan, experienced aviator that he is, to provide the real breath taking thrill. "The Broken Wing," in which he is playing a featured role, calls for the collapse of an aeroplane in mid-air, a drop through a roof and the
wrecking of everything in sight but the intrepid Harlan, who is needed for fresh hazards in later episodes.
When the production was seen on the speaking stage in New York and elsewhere the crash was pictured largely in the words of the player rather than in fact. But in the Tom Forman production it was agreed that it would be visualized down to the last broken bolt of the aeroplane.
The drop, which carried Harlan and a pet dog through the tiled roof and log-covered patio of a Mexican home, was figured out with mathematical precision in advance. Engineers who weighed and balanced the plane assured Harlan that there was no chance of his meeting death in the fall.
"A broken arm or leg at the most," was the reassuring statement of the cheerful experts.
So the fall was taken the other day amid a roar of timber and rending steel. And Harlan didn't break so much as the mere leg or arm that the experts had figured
(Continued on Page 21)
MILTOH SILLS SACRIFICED SEVERAL INCHES OF SKlrt "TO MAKE THE FIGHT Il4 ""THE SPOILERS" REALISTIC
KEMNETH HARLAN PROVIDES REAL THRILL BV A WELL CALCULATED -ij-^ AEROPLANE CRASH FOR, ~ THE BROKEN WiMG
ETHEl SHAl-MOrt SAYS kSHt KNOWS WHAT THEY MEAN-BUT KEEPS THE SECRET TO HERSELF