We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
104 Hollywood Rajah
been put to work on what turned out to be the first production launched in the merged studio. This was an adaptation of a Broadway play, He Who Gets Slapped, a drama of a clown in the circus whose love for a beautiful bareback rider was doomed. He died defending her honor — in line with Mayer's taste for self-sacrifice. Lon Chaney, the distinguished character actor, was secured to play the clown. Norma Shearer played the bareback rider, and John Gilbert was assigned to play a handsome circus performer who loved the girl. Everything went nicely on the picture. Seastrom was allowed to have his head. Thalberg, his supervisor, only occasionally looked in on the sets.
When He Who Gets Slapped was finished shooting (and that was in a matter of a few weeks), Mayer called Seastrom to his office and warmly congratulated him. The picture was great, he told him, and done precisely as the company desired. It was good to have a director who could do things properly. Indeed, it was so gratifying that he would like to show his appreciation by tearing up Seastrom's old contract and writing a new one.
He noted the old contract called for Seastrom to receive ten thousand dollars per picture plus a percentage of the net profits of each. This, Mayer told the director, was hopelessly unfavorable to him. Net profits were impossible for him to check, Mayer said. The only way he could do it would be to hire a lawyer and put him on a full-time job. So why not just drop that business of the percentage of the profits and make a new deal whereby Seastrom would be paid thirty thousand dollars for canceling his old contract and then twenty thousand dollars each for his next three films?
This sounded fine to Seastrom. After all, he had not seen a single penny of percentage bonus from the Goldwyn Company. And he had no way of knowing that the distribution system of Loew's would be much more efficient in gathering profits than that of his erstwhile employer. He gratefully ac