Motion Picture Classic (1923, 1924, 1926)

Don Gillum Director Jack Conway shooting the football scenes of "Brown of Harvard" with William Haines as the Cambridge gridiron hero International Newsreel Constance Talmadge marries Captain Alastair Mackintosh, an Englishman, and announces she will leave films Letters to King Dodo HOLLYWOOD. Dear Majesty: Obedient to your request to be kept informed upon the march of progress in Hollywood, I am writing to apprize Your Majesty that our immediate craze is war pictures. Your Majesty well knows the ovine nature of movie producers, who all follow each other like sheep when some bell-wether happens to show the way. It was inevitable that the success of "The Big Parade" should set loose an avalanche of war pictures, altho if anybody had shown the script of a war story to a producer six months ago the unfortunate author would have been thrown out of the office. But the amazing particular of this situation is the way in which the various' arms of the United States military organization have been put to work for the movies. Lasky had barely completed "Behind the Front," with Raymond Hatton and Noah Beery co-featured ; Warner Brothers had no more than christened their war baby, "The Sap," featuring Kenneth Harlan, than William Fox went them one better by purchasing the original stage play, "What Price Glory?" — the play that was responsible for launching the craze for war-time stuff. But Metro-Goldwyn had been quietly preparing for the filming of a leatherneck epic to be called "Tell It To the Marines." And M.-G. had a contract with Major General John A. Lejeune, the commandant, giving the exclusive right for one year to film marines for photoplay purposes ! "What Price Glory?" is about marines at the front. Fox expected to take scenes of the real leathernecks in camp, on the drill field, at combat practice — thus cutting the cost of extra talent. So Saul E. Roger, his lawyer, proposes now to sue the United States Marine Corps. He will allege monopoly, conspiracy in restraint of trade, and so on. ' 58 Our military establishment has never boasted any great dignity, but the Marines have a tradition to maintain. The tie-up with the studio must have been made for publicity purposes, tho why General Lejeune desired publicity for his leathernecks when there are more applicants than can be recruited under congressional appropriation is puzzling to decide. A dreadful thought comes to me. Suppose it should be necessary to call out our military again, to make the world safe for democracy, and we should find that all our forces had been farmed out to the movies and were unavailable ! Hollywood. Dear Majesty: I am happy to say that now I can supply Your Majesty with the data on Elinor Glyn requested in your gracious communication of recent date. Your Majesty sought to know why Madame Glyn's characters so rarely die with their boots on, as is the usual fashion in movies, but endure long, lingering death agonies in bed. The reason is explained, I think, by the circumstance that Madame Glyn receives one dollar a word for her scripts. At a dollar a word Madame's characters can well afford to utter an ah, an oh and a couple of ughs before passing into the great beyond. Even a series of inarticulate gurgles just at the end will rate a dollar a gurgle. When I visited Madame Glyn on the set, it was her Tea Hour. Everybody had stopped work to sip. The electricians, I noted, satisfied themselves with an extra chew of scrap. Your Majesty may recall my mentioning that Madame Glyn is accustomed to select potential star material by means of a subtle quality which she is able to perceive and which she calls for short — It. In "Love's Blindness," the film on which she was engaged, Madame had