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Page 20
"The Digest of the Motion Picture Industry"
Cam a!
An Aquatic Interview By wcm erskwe
=T.
It's customary to write nonsense about a comedienne. But I've always had a suspicion that it takes a lot of gray matter to get the ha-ha-s from the grown-ups and even the hollers from the children. And certainly under the twisted braids of Louise Fazenda is a generous distribution of brains.
For five years she toiled as patiently as any clerk over a ledger, until a gingham dress and those comedy touchs raised the laughs that shot her from obscurity. For a long, dreary stretch, she was just a bathing girl at Sennett's. Only, after studio hours, Louise would always hie herself home to her parents (Spanish Los Angeles was the birth-place of this girl of Spanish blood) and curl up on a divan with a book to shovel more food into her brain this way.
"I read everything from recipes to the Russian realists," she said to me climbing out of the water on the set of "The Galloping Fish" at the Ince Studio and shivering in her wet clothes. So unattractive was this chill work that a mother had purposely brought her "movie-mad" daughter just to watch Louise and discover for herself that being a star isn't all ermine cloaks and fan adulation.
"The director said if I was afraid he'd get a double. But I began to coax myself, said. 'Oh, that water is going to be all right,' and plunged in. 'And it was all right.' "
I wondered if unconsciously she wasn't giving me the key to her success, that mentai
attitude of harmony with any kind of work.
"I started out in a matter-of-fact way. No one discovered me. Teaching was what I was aiming at, when one Christmas time, needing some extra money, a neighbor who worked in a studio took me along. This insignificant part I obtained led to another, equally small. I crept, step by step, learning what were my good points, and when to flash them, for I'm not pretty. At first I was content to work just because I needed th money," she went on simply. "Then I grew to love the work just for itself and studied my own possibilities in it."
From mental concentration came the "tricks' that turned Fortune's face towards her. Now Louise is building a home in the Wilshire district.
"And according to the gloomy statistics of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce," I said to her, "you are one of the five who succeed out of the five hundred thousand who try."
"No girl ought to come here," she shook her head very decidedly, "without money or an anchorage. It was a little easier when I went in. But pictures are now new gold mines set on the spot of the old. And every bag has all the number it can hold sitting on it tight."
"Are you going to get all your development from books?" There was one at her elbow. "What about having your heart broken, so you can act better?"
"I admit that fifty per cent of a woj development comes from the smash-il the sentimental center. But the other!
per cent comes from the mind."
And with the smile of a care-free chil| plunged back into the icy water again.
1
"Pictures That Please Exhibitors"
MAURICE TOURNEUIt PRODUCTIONS
'Isle of Lost Ships" 'Jealous Husbands" ''Torment" "The Christian" "Lorna Doone"
| Current Pictures releasing through First National)
MAURICE TOURNEUR