Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Jul 1929)

Tke Stroller 55 gross over $28,000, undoubtedly feeling he was putting one over on Murray. The feature that week was "Our Dancing Daughters." The gross leaped to $38,000. Figure it out for yourself. I never saw that much money. In a modest little bungalow, in an unexclusive section of Hollywood, lives a man who has spent more money making pictures than any other director. Perhaps you have heard of him. His name is Erich von Stroheim. He may toss other people's millions away in a panoply of so-called production value, but his own home is modest in the extreme. His fame rests primarily on a reputation for extravagance and leisure in the making of his photo-plays. Scarcely a magazine goes to press without some subtle or blunt dig at him. Until recently he was making a picture called "Queen Kelly," with Gloria Swanson. But before he started, studio officials impressed upon him the need for speed, and the brutal fact that they wanted one picture and not a dozen, as he delivered in "The Wedding March." From time to time icicles formed on the shoes of the officials, and they almost decided not to make the picture; then they let Von Stroheim begin. They worried him about speed, checked up on the scenes shot every day, and Hollywood can only imagine what happened behind closed doors on that certain fateful morning. Von rebelled against the years of harassment. He hired a barber by the day. The barber was instructed to cut the director's hair on the set during the day, whenever he got a chance. Von Stroheim paid no attention to the sheep shearer that day, but every step he made was duplicated by the tonsorial artist who, with his scissors as a lance, and his comb as a shield, jousted with the Von Stroheim bristles. The cast hoped he wouldn't take to shaving on the set, in fear that that would be one step nearer taking a bath while directing a hot love scene, and some one would be sure to tell Jim Tully about it. Say, if you've got a play so terrible that the highschool Thespians passed it by for something better, don't give up hope. A university prof e s s o r picks up pocket money by measuring sound waves and echoes for the studios. A barber trailed Von Stroheim on a set all day trying to clip his bristles. In this sweet, innocent world of ours there are people who believe a thing is true because they see it in print. I can just see our movie producers in Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, with lace collars and all, in that naive state of mind where they think anything they see on the stage would make a good all-dialogue movie. A certain stage producer in Los Angeles, who wouldn't give me any more passes if I mentioned his name, stages plays for the sole purpose of selling the movie rights for a young fortune. He's willing to sink $10,000 in a few weeks' run of almost any claptrap ham-and-egg drama, that would flop all the way from New York to Grundy Center and return, because he knows he'll probably get from $25,000 to $100,000 for the talking-picture rights. Vive la talking picture ! Doctor Paul Fejos, an M. D., who is directing "Broadway," has a new trick camera crane which works something like one of these desk fountain-pen sockets, only it's forty feet long. It'll point in any direction, with the camera at the end, and it'll whirl with the speed of a roller coaster in directions ordinarily taken by a merry-go-round and a Ferris wheel. The first day Fejos used the machine he had more than a hundred extras on the set, but was entirely oblivious to them in his joy in the new plaything. He was swooping all over the set. Finally the morning passed and no shots had been taken. The production manager protested and Fejos replied, "I'm rehearsing, so I can stop wherever I want to." "Well," said the production manager plaintively, "we're paying these people five dollars a day each. If you'll take them up on your rehearsals at a dime a ride, maybe we can get some of it back." Continued on page 107