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4 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS
young man in search of a job. But Cozzine was used to actors looking nervous, for in those days real actors seldom looked for a movie job until they were two weeks behind in their rent.
"You'll do— good type," Cozzine said after a quick glance. "Go down and wait in the yard. I'll send Wally Van down to take a look at you. He's starting a new picture tomorrow."
"The yard" was a large open space hemmed in by the various studio buildings— offices, projection rooms, property and wardrobe buildings, and the stages. At some time or other grass had probably grown there, but it had long since been trodden to death by the feet of hundreds of extra players waiting to be chosen for a day's work.
Once a person was admitted to the yard he was a recognized actor and might be selected to play a part. When I arrived, there were already forty or fifty actors waiting there, lounging in groups or reading morning newspapers. Some of them were real stage actors out of jobs, but most of them were Brooklyn youngsters with ambitions to be movie stars. Already the motion-picture studios had become lodestones attracting youth and beauty, but at that time their pull was mostly local. Vitagraph's ingenues and juveniles of those days were, for the most part, recent graduates of the various Brooklyn high schools.
I didn't know a soul. I was neither an actor nor an alumnus of a local high-school class play. I was just a young man with a mustache and a yen to be another Richard Mansfield.
Pretty soon Wally Van appeared. He was a dynamic little man who not only directed but also played leads in his own pictures. Originally he had been an expert mechanic in charge of all of Commodore Blackton's automobiles and racing motor boats, but he had graduated to the role of movie maker.
"Any experience?" he inquired.
"I've done a lot of stage work," I lied glibly.
"There's the part of a circus ringmaster in this new picture," he said. "Know anything about circuses?"
I assured him that I knew all about circuses; that I was, in fact,