Paramount Press Books (1919)

THIS seeing oneself on the screen is no joke, take it from me. I’ve done it often, and with all sorts of conflicting emotions. The first time I saw myself on the screen I was in the water. I had been engaged to do a swimming scene in a picture at five dollars a day. It was a very dramatic scene, I doing the trudging at full speed through about ten feet of film. But when the picture came out, I went to see it expecting, of course, that I’d recognize myself. But all I saw was a writhing mass of arms and legs shoot past the camera. This happened in Chicago, and that first job was with the Selig Company. After seeing myself in that water scene, I went around to the director who had engaged me for it, and asked him if he wouldn’t give me a chance at some little part where I could do some acting. He looked me over and said “All right.” Then he gave me a part about the size of a pin point. I had to stand in the background in a melodramatic scene, pull a cap down over my eyes and look wicked. That part was just my dish, and I worked hard on it. But later, when I visited a theatre, I found that the scene had been cut out. So my first two attempts to see myself on the screen weren’t overwhelmingly successful. WALLACE REID Famous Paramount Star Discusses the Topic “Seeing One’s Self On the Screen” Celebrated Screen Player Says To See One ’s Self in the Pictures is No Joke, Take it from Him — Got His Chance By Hard Work and Persistency of Purpose. But by this time, the desire to become a moving picture actor had taken deep root in me, and I went from one director to another with set jaw. And the more I was turned down the more determined I became to break through the wall of indifference, and some day see myself on the screen in a real acting part. By and by I had my chance. If you work hard enough for anything it will finally come your way. That’s been my experience. When I first saw myself on the screen in a real part, I wasn’t satisfied. “Your work in that doesn’t represent you,” I told myself. “Surely you can do better.” So I went on and on, trying with each part to put more into my acting. I wanted to play character parts, sad, gray-haired old men who renounce everything in the last reel, and play the kindly father to erring heroines. But the directors wouldn’t let me. They insisted on casting me for the young man who takes the heroine in his arms in the final clutch. Old men and villians — they have always been my favorite parts, and I’ve never been able to play them. I wanted to play bearded villians especially, and in one part I did wear a mustache, but when other people saw it on the screen they said, “No, no !” “You leave those old-men parts for Theodore Roberts,” said one director to me recently. “He can raise a beard that looks like one. You’re just like an actor — always trying to do things you’re not suited for. Stick to the heroes — they’re just your meat. “I certainly get variety enough,” he resumed, “but that is also to my liking. One tires of doing the same sort of parts year in and year out. But lately I’ve been a clubman, a woodsman, a Central American adventurer, an amateur detective, a prospector, and now I’ve just finished “Alias Mike Miran,” a splendid picture wherein I am a slacker who proves a hero in the end. No lack of the “spice of life” there, is there ? Wallace Reid has to be versatile to meet the changes they ring upon him. But he is always ready and they never catch him napping. He did not mention the fine work he did in “Joan the Woman,” for example, or “The Woman God Forgot” — in fact there’s mighty little that Wally hasn’t done in the way of screen interpretations, and still he is unaffected and thoroughly likeable. 3