Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Jul 1929)

28 Photo by Spun: Virginia Valli has sold her beach cottage, because most likely she will marry Charlie Farrell soon. T HOPE you've noticed how much I louder every one is becoming now that voices are important in getting jobs," Fanny observed, breezily, as she pushed a chair against the wall so that she could get an' unobstructed view of the rest of Montmartre. "If you'd waited for any one as long as I have for you," I told her, "you'd have time to notice anything." But Fanny didn't give me a chance to tell her what I had noticed. Well, it is her own loss that she didn't hear about the tragic spectacle of Evelyn Brent trying to ^mam walk after three days of rehearsing with the hoofers in "Broadway." Evelyn's walk was as erratic as a whirling dervish doing the Black Bottom. "I've started a new society," Fanny confided to me. I can't say that I was surprised. It must be all of a week since Fanny tried to organize followers for the International Order of I-Will-Arise-andWalk-Out-of -All -Talking-Pictures. And now the only time that you don't meet her on her way to see "In Old Arizona" again, is when you meet her just coming from there. fjhe ^Bystander "The chief trouble with my new club," she went on, "is that the members do not know anything about it. It is, composed of those unknown heroes whose voices double for screen favorites. Frank Withers is the honorary president. He is the one who sang 'Weary River' while Richard Barthelmess moved his lips realistically. And a chap named Sherry Flail should have a special office of some kind. His is the voice of a thousand stars." "There aren't that many," I muttered, always a stickler for accuracy. . . "Maybe not real stars," she admitted grudgingly, "but near ones. It isn't like the good, old days when filmdom had a real aristocracy. Then you had to be a Griffith discovery, or you were looked on as an upstart. Now almost any hoofer who has been shut out of a night club by a raid, is likely to show up in Hollywood with a contract. "Just look at the run of 'Broadway' pictures that the studios are making. You can hardly blame them when you look at the tremendous success of "The Broadway Melody.' There's 'Broadway Babies,' which is being made by First National. Alice White and Sally Eilers are playing the leads, and there's a third role that is important. I don't suppose that the three-girl angle in 'Our Dancing Daughters' had anything to do with First National launching a production like that, do you? Then there's 'Broadway Bound' that Marion Nixon is making, and 'Broadway or Bust' made by Warners, with Betty Compson. Won't it be funny when this wave of 'Broadway' pictures hits foreign countries? Fiji Islanders, who used to think that all Americans wore ten-gallon hats and rode horses into saloons, will assume that we have degenerated into a nation of song-anddance artists." Fanny still cherishes a belief that somewhere in the world there are people who take movies seriously. Now that I think _ , .„ it over, I realize that Corinne Griffith will remake "Lilies of the Field" as a dialogue film. there are some who do. For instance, the dusky youngster that King Vidor brought to Hollywood to play Hallelujah." She came out to California by way of Memphis, but has to go back East by way of Chicago. And she has. seen so many Chicago gang war pictures, that she is perfectly sure it isn't safe for a to appear on the stranger streets. The thought of having to change trains there terrifies her, and she expects to be greeted by a salvo of machine guns when she steps off the train. "I hope you've noticed what an influence I have become in