The Screen Guilds' Magazine (December 1934)

28 The Screen Guilds' Magazine tyilmdom’s HEADQUARTERS for Smarts Linens > Whether you purchase a smart, inexpensive gift or a complete trousseaux—you will find our merchandise PRACTICAL—BEAUTIFUL and NOT EXPENSIVE. Grande Maison de Blanc 3047 WILSHIRE BOULEVARD Established 1861 Fltzroy 3168 Los Angeles Welsh and Scottish TERRIERS Puppies for sale from CHAMPIONSHIP STOCK Dogs Boarded and Conditioned • OFFCLYDE KENNELS A. BYRON Jr. 5919 Cantaloupe Avenue VAN NUYS, CAL F. Phone Von Nuys 398 FOR SALE ANNA Q. NILSSON'S MALIBU HOUSE 4 Bed Rooms—3 Baths including servants' quarters Fully furnished ORIGINAL COST $6000.00 Sacrifice Complete with furnishings for $1500.00—all Cash PHONE TR. 3361 First Editions ft Penguin Book Shop 9675 Wilshire Blvd. OX. 6950 TO GUILD MEMBERS Do your Christmas shopping early Patronize those who advertise in your magazine Mention THE SCREEN GUILD MAGAZINE when making purchases Those Who Die More Deaths Than One ••• By Repput Sketches by Kenneth Barlow "He who lives more lives than one. More deaths than one must die." These men and women have died a thousand times—for your entertain¬ ment. An airplane crashes to earth. The pilot is killed. No doubt about it. A girl is hurled from a plane to certain death. A man leaps from the top of a burning oil derrick into a pool of liquid fire. An aerial acrobat misses the hands of his partner and crashes to the saw¬ dust far below. There was a time when the studios fostered the deception that the stars themselves took these desperate chances. The films still give the illusion, but the public has learned that in each hazard¬ ous venture the actor has an unnamed double. There are more than a score of these doubles, who receive no credit on the screen, yet bring pictures to a^fiimax and thrill audiences throughout the world. These are the stunt men and women of Hollywood. They’re human insur¬ ance policies for the studios. That is, before undertaking a stunt, they sign away their lives, hold the studio harm¬ less, while they, themselves, cannot get insurance except through Lloyds—and that is so high as to be prohibitive. Pro¬ duction managers bargain for their services, haggle sometimes over five or ten dollars, agree reluctantly to thirty- five dollars a day. At other times the double receives as high as a thousand dollars for a single stunt. Doubles, in the hands of “suicide directors,” are sometimes sacrificed, but skilled stunt men and women, left to their own devices, seldom meet with catastrophe. “No one gets hurt in the difficult stunts. You either come through or get killed,” is the philosophical way Harvey Parry put it. “Easy stunts are danger¬ ous, because the directors insist on a number of takes.” But this is not always the case, as Duke Green pointed out. Here is a bad one that landed Parry in the hospital: Green and Parry were to have a fight on a ladder that reached up and up for ninety feet and rested against a cliff overhanging the ocean. During the fight the ladder was pulled backward by wires. As they swung downward and outward on this ninety-foot arc, with perfect timing-which is essential to every stunt—both men let go and were flung far out into the ocean. Green es¬ caped unhurt. Parry survived, with several broken bones. This was the highest tumbling dive ever made. Perhaps the most daring woman in the movies is Mary Wiggins, young good looking, chic. There is hardly a stunt she will not do and has not done. Fire dives she detests, not because of the hazard, but because she must wear long woolens under her coveralls. Gasoline is sprayed on the coveralls and poured on the tank or lake below. A match is set to the lake, then to the diver. There can be no hesitancy about making the plunge. THE FIRE DIVE At exhibitions throughout the country this girl is the whole show. The most famous woman parachute jumper in America, she has tested every type of parachute now in use, and many which have been discarded as unsafe. From heights above the clouds she can calcu¬ late so nicely as to land on a napkin. In a picture recently made, a director asked her to land in a tree. Mary picked the tree and landed in it. Aside from doing stunts, she is the parachute expert for the Womens Air Reserve of which Flor¬ ence Lowe (“Pancho”) Barnes is the commanding general. “Pancho” Barnes, who has held the world’s speed record for women as well as other speed records, is the only woman member of the Associated Mo¬ tion Picture Pilots, who furnish most of the thrills for flying pictures. Of these pilots, Dick Grace has furn¬ ished the most thrills. Also, it is said, he has had more bones broken than any man now living. While still in his teens, he was a member of the Lafayette Es- cadrille. After the war he served as a naval aviator, and upon coming to Hollywood became a general stunt man. Grace formed “The Legion of Death.”