We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
From under my Hat
We even went to the studio on Sundays when Larry did his numbers. One number had a choral group of eighty Negroes. I'm a pushover for the melting lilt of their voices, and the day that number was done, fifty of us spent the whole day listening.
However, Greta Garbo was the most exciting personality on the lot. Her name still seems to light a torch in the minds of everybody who hears it.
Maurice Stiller brought her to Hollywood after she had done a film with him in Sweden. She was his protegee, and there was an understanding that Garbo was to have a contract with Stiller at MGM.
In 1926 Lillian Gish brought a Russian cameraman, whose name I've forgotten, to Hollywood from the East.
Nobody had seen the work of the Russian. The studio saw some trick slides with which he was said to get effects. They had to have more than that. He was asked to make tests.
Shucks, you couldn't ask the great Miss Gish to make tests! "Whom shall we get?" studio representatives asked each other. Some bright boy piped up, "That big Swede's been sitting around a long time. Why don't you let her earn some of that two hundred and fifty dollars a week?"
So for three days Greta Garbo sat on a high stool while the unknown Russian made tests of her.
A director was looking at water scenes to use in his picture The Torrent when, accidentally, the tests using Garbo were cut in. His producer was sitting beside him. Apologizing nervously, he stopped the projection. "No, go ahead," said the director, "I want to see something."
When they'd been run through once, he called for them to be run again, then jumped up and ran to the front office. "I want that girl— the one in the tests. I want her for The Torrent."
The front office had been ready to send Garbo back to Sweden, where such minor talent belonged, and the director was called all kinds of a damn fool. "I want her," he said stubbornly.
He got her. She was cast opposite Ricardo Cortez, and when the picture was released a new comet streamed across the picture sky.
196