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.
78 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS
The fire department turned out to aid in filming fire scenes and the police department cooperated in the making of crime pictures. On a Sunday it was no surprise to see a bank holdup on Hollywood Boulevard in a real bank borrowed for the occasion by some picture company. Passing pedestrians stopped to watch famous stars perform, and if a few more extras were needed, they were recruited from the curbstone audience.
When it was necessary to shoot an automobile accident, the police obligingly roped off the street, the fire department hosed down the pavement, and some reckless stunt man came careening down the street and piled up against a telephone pole. Meanwhile the cameras ground and the native residents stared in openmouthed admiration of the stunt man's daring.
Often it was unnecessary to hire more than a handful of extras in order to stage a street scene that today would take 200 members of the Screen Extras Guild. Parades, lynching mobs, and columns of soldiers might appear on Hollywood streets without warning, preceded by a truck on which a grinding camera was mounted. The citizenry would line the curbs or join the mobs just to get into the picture. In every drugstore and restaurant near the studios bathing beauties, cowboys, silk-hatted heavies, and heroes in sport shirts, all in make-up, were a common sight. And there were no autograph hunters then and only a few curious tourists.
Private homes and ranches were borrowed, free of charge, to shoot exterior scenes. Or, if no one was home, the movies companies simply "stole" the location for their background. Parks and public buildings were at the service of the picture companies, too.
Sometimes Hollywood's early residents were dumfounded and shocked by the antics of the movie crowd, but the real-estate salesmen and the merchants were delighted by the prosperity that movie money had thrust upon them.
At the time I arrived in California very few of the so-called movie colony lived in Hollywood. Most of the actors, directors, writers, and other creative workers lived closer to the center of