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meeting dear old Will Day brought a selection from his wonderful exhibit at the South Kensington Museum of ancient apparatus of Kinematography, so that there were veterans then both inanimate and human, united once more.
During this year colour-films and stereo-films were both continually cropping up, with little success for the one and none for the other. Sound films on the other hand were beginning to show signs of being a practical proposition, and the de Forrest 'Phono-film' embodies the embryo of all that the present sound films have now successfully accomplished.
Meanwhile I, and half a dozen of the players who had taken the principal parts in 'Rye,' were doing a little entertainment turn on our own. It should be mentioned that the stage 'presentation' which I had produced for this film at its first showing at the Scala had been very successful and attracted a great deal of attention. When the film was afterwards completed I thought it would be good fun to take a London theatre and give it a run. This idea was financed by Jimmy White. The theatre I wanted — one of the largest — had another film running at the time, but I was told that I could have the first refusal after the run came to an end if I paid two hundred pounds as a deposit to secure it. I did that and the run came to an end after several weeks, and then another show was put on with no word said to me about it!
My natural protests were met with a bland smile at my credulity and ignorance of theatrical usage and I realised that I was beaten, for a remedy would be too costly for me. So I fell back upon the Scala, which is a beautiful theatre but too much off the beaten track.
I cannot describe this special 'presentation' without a lot of drawings and diagrams which would be uninteresting. But it gave the effect of a huge picture in a gilt frame which at first showed nothing but the ordinary title familiar on every silent film. This gradually dissolved into a stage scene with the living actors going silently through their parts. That dissolved into another title filling the frame, to be replaced again by the appropriate scene and so on. That sounds very bald but the effect was quite magical and as the actors were 'personal appearances,' the whole thing went with a swing and pleased everybody. So much so that I persuaded Sir Oswald Stoll to come and see it with a view to putting the 'act' — without the film, of course — on at the Coliseum.
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