Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1916)

Just a little different from the others. IT N every motion-picture studio one I visits, star actresses and actors, together with their directors, are the persons that claim one's interest. There are other players, standing about or working in scenes, who have small parts and no reputation, that are never noticed by the visitors. Some of these players are deserving of no notice, for they work only for a day or. a week "just for sport," and then flit away from the studio, and forget all about it — except when telling their friends of their experience in the camera wonderland. But there is a class to be found among this group who are deserving of the attention of the visitors and of the public who attend the picture theaters — the extra girls, who are working toward the top. That is the reason for this little story. The editor decided that in their ranks there must be one who was typical of the class, and commissioned me to find her. The qualifications were not hard to remember : she had to be pretty, ambitious, intelligent, and be in a position where she worked in a studio almost every day, but was not on the regular pay roll. I started my search for her one bright and sunny morning, submitting myself to the unhappiness of traveling by surface, subway, ferry, and interurban trolley to the Universal Film Manufacturing Company's new eastern studio, at Leonia, New Jersey. There I explained my mission to the powers that be, and secured permission to wander about the studio floor. This I did for more than an hour, seizing every opportunity to talk with the extra girls and test their possibilities of being the subject of the article. Suddenly I found her. I asked her if she were ambitious, and if she were on the regular salary list of the Big U. To the former, she