Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1919)

74 Photoplay Magazine taincd after the performance with James K. Hackett, the star of the piece, in his dressing room. They got away with it then." Holmes beat Hackett and the rest of the old-timers to it by several years in getting himself photographed for the screen. liid you know there were mo\ies. twenty-two years ago? Holmes made pictures then, on wide strips of film, before he found that they could be joined together and run in sequence. The little scraps were exhibited in nickelodeons — '"a penny a peek." Since then Holmes has kept up with the movies and to-day he shows his stuff in two-dollar houses and on the Paramount pictures program. ■"Oh. I had the camera craze and I always wanted to sec the world," he says. He has had the wanderlust ever since he can remember. As a small boy he made up his mind to travel about. IMost small boys have big dreams; Holmes achieved his: a dream of far countries and strange seas: man-eating savages and smouldering volcanoes; white-capped mountains and the Lares and Penates on quaint Japanese hearths. So that you may sit in your picture-show in any town from Indiana to Idaho, and go where >ou have always wanted to go. Vou are persuaded that the Australian is your kin; that the welfare of some ragged kid in an Italian seaport town is a personal matter; that if the Hawaiian belles are not worth a trip to the South Seas to see, the other natural beauties are. He saw it all and he is passing it on — a sort of Baedeker of illuminated information. In his travels Holmes has caught, perhaps, more real celebrities off duty and after office hours than anyone you may mention. He is on the best of terms with kings and governors, statesmen and fighters, colonial governors and small boys from Alaska to Zululand. The King of Siam, making a journey into the interior of his kingdom, invited Burton to come along and bring his camera. He did, and obtained valuable pictures of native life; and the King sent him back out of the wilderness in a Ford. The Jack Londonesque daughter of a proud and grizzled old South Seas chieftain took a tremendous fancy to Burton's beard and the tribe was loth to let him leave before he was initiated into the tribal marriage ceremony, his protestations that he had a wife in the States notwithstanding— but that's another ston*— Holmes looked sheepish and changed the subject. There are just two places on the globe he hasn't seen: Persia and South .\frica. He wants to go to Persia; South Africa doesn't appeal to him so much. But the people who have read Cynthia Stockley and know all about the lure of the blue aloes will undoubtcdl\ enjoy his camera impressions of the lower half of the Dark Continent — if he doesn't kid them about the aloes, in his sub-titles. He writes all his captions: just another fresh help war. war de The orchestra stalls of a theatre in ancient Athens— included in one of Mr. Holmes travelogues. Perhaps if the Grecians had shown a little more enterprise and conceived the motion picture, their theatres would not have fallen into decay. personal touch that induces us to sit through two reels of Alaskan river-journey and Australian bush-league stuff. The only difference between Mr. Holmes' sense of humor and that of other travelers is that Mr. Holmes occasionally employs his to advantage. He is one of the few men who if he lost his eyesight would have an excuse for giving utterance to that historic cynicism, "Oh well — I've seen everything." The only time his rather bored blue eyes light up at all is when he speaks — not of the beauties of the tropic night — but about the obvious difficulties he encounters, developing film on tour! The company carries its own developing outfit right along. In Java, or Ceylon — the hot countries — they work at night after it has cooled off, leaving ing, said Mr. Holmes, a trail of ruined bath-tubs in their wake — for thej' used them as laboratories. After he conducted the stay-at-homes to and through the Yellowstone National Park, North Cape and Cairo, London, the South Seas, and Siam — somebody started a war, and Burton Holmes, the pictorial reporter of human events, had to cover that too. And as his epitome of the struggle he showed the close-up of one hungn.' hun-hunter at a stove somewhere near the fighting front, where a Salvat i o n Army lassie handed out doughnuts to win the late Long after the pictures which scribe in minute photographic detail the hero's progress across No-Man'sLand upon his stomach, or the blood-red glorv' of the trenches at the zero hour, have been shelved — the Holmes close-up will '"live.'' The mother and father of Jim — ^| of Baltimore, who a most jumped out o their seats when they first saw their boy on the screen, found that the memor\ of that grinning close-up helped a little when they received word that Jim was killed in action. Holmes, born in Chicago in 1870, began to travel thirteen years later. He saw America first. In 1886 he went abroad for the first time; four years later he returned for material for his first lecture — '"Through Europe with a Camera" — which he presented, as an amateur, before the Chicago Camera Club. He was then persuaded to give it for money. It didn't take much persuasion — there had beer a slump in the family fortunes and if he wanted to travel h( had to earn enough money to do it. It soon became a business At first he used colored slides; as soon as pictures became a car tainty he began to use them and has been ever since. When Holmes is at home he lives in New York. He doe not wear that pith helmet on the streets. All the four comer of the earth, particularly Japan, which was little-boy-Burton' land of dreams — and he is still as enthusiastic over the Nip ponese as any ingenue over her Pekingese — unite withou clashing in the decorations of the sunny Holmes drawing-roon overlooking Manhattan's Central Park. i I