Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Jul 1929)

22 Stranger Than Fiction One doesn't have to use a magnifying glass to discover curiosities in Hollywood, because many of them are catalogued right here. By Carroll Graham "il/iiff/' Illustrated by Lui Trugo A GREAT deal has been written, and a great deal more has been said on the general opinion that Hollywood is a funny place. I recall having written something of the sort once or twice myself. Most of these astonished reactions, however, usually verge on the discovery by the newcomer, who observes — ■ in print if he is able, or otherwise vocally — that nowhere else on earth does one see a man going to work at seven o'clock in the morning in a dress suit, or virile gents parading the streets in complete facial make-up, without catcalling crowds in their wake. This is all quite true, but obvious, and by this time so oft-repeated that it is probable even the Fiji Islanders know, now, that scenes requiring evening dress are often made in the morning. But a vast field remains untouched in cataloguing all the more subtle reasons why Hollywood is just Hollywood, and in a class by itself. It has seemed to me for a long time that some reliable and exhaustive compendium should be gathered touching on the less apparent, but really more fantastic peculiarities and fancies and facts one may come upon in this quaint village, if one does sufficient poking and peering. Now, in the first place, when one speaks of Hollywood one is referring to a place of no more concrete existence than Graustark, or the mythical kingdom of Boo. For there isn't any town called Hollywood, and there never has been, so we are off to a good start already. However, the name Hollywood has come to mean an area of western Los Angeles. It rubs shoulders with the prosaic village of Sherman on the west, and with the downtown business district on the east, and is as far from either, judging by a mental and rational standpoint, as it is from Kamchatka. Its fantastic proportions take on more impressive aspects, when one considers that the precise things for which it is noted are just the things which it does not contain, namely, the homes of movie stars, and the studios. With the exception of Fox, United Artists, and Paramount, all the large studios are out of town. And without exception, the more celebrated stars reside not in Hollywood, but retire in solitary splendor to their early Grand Rapids castles in Beverly Hills and the surrounding holy land of moviedom. So, taking this into consideration, we are really on our way toward proving my contention — and others' — that Hollywood is the most charmingly odd little place you ever saw. One must consider that Hollywood itself, outside of a boulevard full of stores, a speakeasy or two, and, of course, Sid Grauman's theaters, is made up almost exclusively of apartment houses and bungalows, and these are filled with a mixture of entirely rational folk who don't work in the movies, semirational folk who do, and completely balmy folk who want to. Every monomaniac with an invention for keeping actors' hair from falling out, every one who has the remotest claim to a phony European title, every cut-up whose home-town friends told him he'd be a scream in comedies, every trick actor or buttonhole maker from Europe, every prodigy who can wriggle his ears, or undulate his left kneecap while keeping his right shoulder blade stationary, every one who has engraved the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, or built a complete ship inside a beer bottle, every one who can put forth the slightest proof of authorship, blows into Hollywood at one time or another to engage his or her talents in the movies and clean up a fortune. Then there are the uncharted hundreds of persons possessed of petty rackets, who seem to be able to live indefinitely without working. There are sharpshooters who are continually selling something of no value to some one else. There are representatives of newspapers and magazines never heard of before. In short, there is every sort of person you'd normally find either in or out of Mattea wan Asylum. In addition, of course, there are the actors themselves, the profession never being particularly celebrated for its rationality ; and there are the directors, most of whom used to be actors, and have managed to retain whatever mental abnormality they acquired in the profession. All these folk, huddled together in a comparatively limited area and very rarely associating with any one outside the charmed circle, cannot but create a remarkable atmosphere. They seem to work on each other. Hollywood who makes a The man who is living by shooting apples off firmly convinced people's heads. that he will revolu