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“MO VIES ”
15
WHAT PICTURES HAVE DONE TO ME
By Ray Walker
“^10 YOU can’t take it, eh?” asked a motion picture exexutive faintly related to Herman Glogauer when I objected to their changing my . name to Ray Walker. Apparently he knew what he was talking about. Monogram Pictures have just broken the news that I am to be starred in “He Couldn’t Take It,” recently completed film.
But the motion pictures have more than my given name (Walter Glas in the limited space of this article to give some vague idea of what a player has a right to expect when in a moment of fatal weakness he allows the insidious cinema to make a star of him.
Look what they have done to that noble tragedienne and Shakespearean actress ( with whom I had the honor to appear in her last dramatic vehicle)
Miss Mae West. I can remember when the management eyed the waistcoats of incoming spectators apprehensively for the.4ell-tale badge of a municipal authority that might summarily ring down the curtain on her histrionic endeavors.
Now the police chief of any borough from Kalamazoo to Calcutta would consider himself honored with an invitation to come Up and see her some time.
But enough of that pitiful case. Let us consider the instance of another victim of the deadly camera, a poor downtrodden wretch who on closer examination turns out to be none other than your humble correspondent.
There was a time when I was a member in full standing of the UJA (Unemployed Juvenile Association). Ours was the life of pure Elysean pleasures. How grand it was to foregather in the lobby during intermission of the shows to which we had been invited and pan the performance of the leading man to death! How ennobling to sit around some Village wineshop — provided we could humbug the proprietor into serving us drinks on tab — and discuss the doom of the American drama (the first a pronounced as in gargling.).
So now what? So now I’m in the movies playing the parts I used to criticize. And other young men are gathering in some distant speakeasy — that is, restaurant — and roasting my performance. Can nothing be done about it?
Why should they have all the fun and 1 all the work? I can scarcely enjoy my steak sandwiches at the Ambassador for envy of the times when we used to starve to death in dear old Manhattan.
Will those days never return? Will I ever know the joys of obscurity and penury again? I’m afraid not.
Life goes on, and we, her uncomplaining vassals, must do her stern, inexorable bidding. Shakespeare might have said that. Now that I think of it, I’m not quite sure he didn’t.
And then there is the matter of ( Continued on page 48 I