Amateur Movie Makers (Dec 1926-Dec 1927)

"The Thrillproof Age" An Amateur Presentation at New Haven APPREHENSIONS of the staid editorial writers of the New York Herald Tribune to the contrary notwithstanding, practically none of the fourteen ladies and gentlemen— and you had to be either one before they would even consider you as a prospect — whose names will go down through the ages as the cast of "The Thrillproof Age" is going to Hollywood with any of those six reels "neatly bound around with blue ribbon and sealed . . . with the plaudits of the folks at home." Not that there weren't enough plaudits forthcoming from the rioters who stormed the Lawn Club at New Haven on the night of December 4 in order to be the first to see the six-reel thriller ! And not that Yale University has a monopoly on blue ribbon in the state of Connecticut. They all simply came to the conclusion that Hollywood, compared with New Haven, offered practically nothing in the way of advancement — what with every body being so respectable and all. The Vamping Scene By Kenneth E. Nettleton Furthermore, Hollywood can boast of no club which will compare with the Motion Picture Club of New Haven, now in the process of formation. Great oaks, such as that club will, from little acorns, like the story of the merry widow and her seven suitors which eight home movie fans of New Haven filmed last winter, take their growth. Of course there were a few intermediate stages in the development of the oak such as "The Thrillproof Age." "The Thrillproof Age" was filmed last August, September and October at odd moments — as odd as married business men and married women with dishes and children to wash would necessarily require. The story is about three flappers who think they are thrillproof. ' I 'HE first scene was laid in an * exclusive summer hotel. To get the proper degree of exclusiveness a private home with very large grounds was appropriated. And in the next scene, when the flappers drove off to an inn in Maine, they really only went to Cheshire, Conn. It was there that three young bachelors decided to give them a thrill and attack the inn with two veteran guides of the Maine woods. It was perhaps a little unfortunate that the planned onslaught came at the precise moment when two rum runners from the Canadian border sought to settle some minor differences with the innkeeper, giving force to their arguments with lead. Nevertheless the pandemonium which followed gave everybody a chance to run in and out of a lot of doors and jump out of a lot of windows. Following what might be termed a general exodus came a general disappearance in the woods, in which practically everybody got lost. All of which takes only a few paragraphs to tell but sixteen hundred feet to film, what with eighty-six art titles, titles and sub-titles, and scenes which were taken months before the filming began and which were spliced in to great advantage. "T)EOPLE have asked what dif■*■ ficulties were encountered in the filming of "The Thrillproof Age." That's a story in itself. Inasmuch as the picture was produced primarily for the amusement of the players and with no fixed scenario to follow, it was not obvious at first that there would be any difficulties at all. The plot having been built up around the players and the locations which were available, it didn't even seem that there would be the usual problems of finding talent and locations. Nevertheless as enthusiasm spread and more people began clamoring for parts, the players' {Continued on page 31) Thrillproof? Seventeen