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74 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS
ing mice came waltzing out from under the stove. I shooed them into the shoe box and rushed them back to the Bronx Zoo.
"Dr. Ditmars," I said as I returned the mice, "I will never be the same man again in a ballroom. I have learned to detest waltzing/'
It wasn't long after that when I decided I had had enough of slapstick comedies, Literary Digest jokes, and Mr. Van Buren. Charley Burr, a friend of mine, was planning to make a moving picture, but he knew very little about production. He had a scenario, some actors, a director, and a partner who claimed to have money, but he had no one to do the hard work. I convinced Charley that I knew all about picture making and he gave me a job as supervisor and unit manager. For all that responsibility I demanded and got a salary of $100 a week. But if I had been paid twice that amount, it wouldn't have been half enough for the grief I went through on that picture. My job eventually combined the duties of wet nurse, chief mourner, holder of the crying towel, head liar, and whipping boy. It was a mess!
The name of the picture was The Silent Barrier. The barrier was supposed to be the Swiss Alps, but the biggest barrier was a stack of unpaid bills. We went up to Lake Placid to shoot Alpine snow scenes. William Worthington was the director and the cast included several unknown actors and a real Swiss mountaineer.
We had rooms at the Lake Placid Club and were looking forward to a pleasant winter vacation. On the first day of shooting there was a glorious snowstorm. We made beautiful long shots of the mountaineers wending their way over the mountainsides. Worthington was delighted. 'What magnificent shots," he kept telling me. "This picture is going to be sensational!"
There was no time to make any medium or close shots that first day, so we planned to shoot those later. But it never snowed again the whole time we were up there. All of the medium and close shots had to be made with a crew of men tossing confetti in the actors' faces.
Then came Saturday— payday— but the money that was supposed to come from New York failed to arrive. I told everybody