The Photo-Play Journal (Jul 1919-Feb 1921)

August, 1 920 25 is really his chief hobby. He' likes to dabble in mechanics. He told me about his new projection machine which he uses in "his theatre." "His theatre" is his study, — but he really does have shows there. The machine is a remodelled toy moving picture projector that somebody had decided to discard. Vincent recovered it and has made a thoroughly modern apparatus from it. The shows are all his own, too. He has a way, it seems, of collecting lots of waste film at the studios and reassembling it so as to make a new story. Of course, I wanted to go to one of his shows. I went ! ! Before I saw the picture, however, I was sworn to secrecy about it. Vincent, you see, has nothing but the finest in "his theatre." The feature on the program I saw had a cast of six stars, who are certainly among the best known players in filmdom. The prints, of course, were scraps from several different plays of these stars, but they were so put together that even the most hardened critic couldn't call the continuity worse than fair. But I've probably said more about it now than I should have. I expect we will hear a great deal of Vincent Coleman within the next few months. One of his recent pictures, "For the Freedom of Ireland," is yet to be released, and at present he is hard at work at the Constance Talmadge studios playing opposite the screen's leading comedienne in "Good Refer ences." Now that "Martinique" is back in New York he has an opportunity to appear before the camera while he is playing on the stage, and he is making the most of it. That means hard work, day and night, with very little sleep, but he doesn't seem to mind it. "Hard work ! Surely I expect that," he told me. "I'm hoping to get some place in this business, — and, naturally, hard work is the medium." Hard work is the Coleman slogan. Vincent is one of those persons who can't be content when he is idle. But fortunately he has so many side lines that he is able to keep himself occupied every minute of the time without sticking to one thing long enough to have it become monotonous Vincent, like Rod La Rocque, who is one of his best friends in the profession, is an artist. Rod's preference is cartoons, though he has devoted much of his time to landscape water colors, but Vincent has an aptitude for portraits. So far, he has been indifferent to the commercial possibilities of his skillful pen, but he admits that it may be another means of getting back to New York — when he tires of wrestling. Though ninety-nine and sixty-sixths hundred per cent optimistic, Vincent has just one worry — and that worry is about his work. Vincent, physically, is the type of man whom you will always imagine as the dashing young hero, who kills villains, leaps off bridges to save his sweetheart, and comes back to her home in time for the final loving close-up. That's what worries him ! "Last summer a friend of mine went to see a director who was casting a picture," Vincent started. "My friend was about all anyone could want in appearance, but he had never played a part before in his life. But that didn't make any difference. The director — you'd know his name well if I mentioned it, for he is among the better known in the East — was satisfied that Arthur was the type, and he engaged him. Luckily, he made good, but the chances "Martinique" marks Vincent's return to the stage after a year in pictures. Josephine Victor is shown with him in this scene from the play were just as strong that he wouldn't. But he was the type ! "That type idea is one of the curses of picture making. Directors — I know I'm generalizing, but, of course, I don't mean all of them — cast all their pictures by type. When they read a script, they visualize each part and the man who plays the part must be like the director's first conception of him. There isn't a player in pictures who is not familiar with 'you're not the type,' the stock expression of casting directors from coast to coast. "Types, naturally, must play an important part in the producer's selection of any cast, but there is something else that should come first. If you have a stock company in your town, you'll get what I mean. Isn't there a man in the troupe whom you have seen as an old English butler, a drunken tramp, and a Methodist minister. That may not be quite the list, but it is near enough to illustrate what I mean. If that man was really an actor, he looked equally well in each of the parts, though just as like as not he's not a bit like any one of them off the stage. "Opportunities to do character work of that sort mean more to us than the chance of wearing our best clothes as we walk through a leading role. At any rate they mean more to me. There's a satisfaction I feel after having done a character role or a heavy, if I've really done it well, that I can never get from something I just happen to be the type for. "But don't misunderstand me. I want to play leads. Somehow in pictures you've got to be the leading man or you don't seem to get very far. The character man is underrated. That's why I want to play leads. But I do not want the usual straight role of the man who is just continued through five reels of a lady's life so that the audience will know who he is when it's time for the star to be married. "The leading man can bring his own individuality into the picture. That should be his goal and his contribution to the photo-play." Vincent offered two totally (Different characterizations in "The Law of Nature" {left) and "Partners of the Night"