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192 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS
before I was allowed even to look at myself. Finally, however, I saw the test.
What a painful experience that was! I came out of the projection room a chastened man. Only one thought consoled me: the test proved that I could talk; there was nothing wrong with my voice; I didn't sound like a mug or a chorus boy. So I knew there was still hope for me if Paramount would let me make a picture.
But that was something of a hurdle, for Paramount was busy making pictures with people who had had stage experience. The pictures weren't very good, but they talked, and that was all the fans wanted. I sat around drawing my salary for quite a while before somebody decided that I was an expensive item of overhead and that, good or bad, I ought to draw at the box office.
David Selznick was then assistant to General Manager B. P. Schulberg. He called me in and handed me a screen play entitled Fashions in Love. It was an adaptation of The Concert, an old Ditrichstein play that had been purchased for Emil Jannings.
"If you like this script, we'll do it," David told me. "If not, we'll have to pay you off for the remainder of your contract. Read it and let us know by Monday."
That was Friday. I was back in Selznick's office on Saturday morning. "This suits me," I told him, "provided I can have a real picture director and not one of these new boys from Broadway."
I asked them to get Victor Schertzinger, who had given me my first role in Hollywood. He had once been a musical director, and since this was a picture about a concert pianist, I thought he would be a good man to do the job. Victor read the script and liked it, so we went into production early in 1929.
At that time the method of making sound pictures was very crude. We shot with three cameras enclosed in soundproof booths. The three cameras shot three different angles simultaneously, since there was no way of synchronizing separate shots to a single sound recording.
The scenes in which I was supposed to play the piano were all recorded at the same time the pictures were shot. I played a