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Facing Death
By Scott Pierce
As a result of this insatiable demant for thrills, nerves of chilled steel art^ as indispensable an adjunct to a modern film comedian as freckles are! to a dill pickle. Disregarding the ever-imminent rustle of the (mm
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HOLLYWOOD has a number of workers who would never be rated as good risks by any insurance company that was in its right mind, but, taken as a class, there is no single group in the Film Colony that flirts more consistently with death, havoc, and destruction in the course of its daily labors before the camera than do the movie comedians
In fact, in order for a film comedian to get his name in electric lights over a theater, it is apparently first necessary for him to run imminent chances of getting that same name on a marble slab over a neat, grassy mound.
For reasons known entirely to itself, an American picture audience wishes its hair to stand on end at the same time its funnybone is being tickled. The nearer a comedian can come to a violent and spectacular exit from this vale of tears, the funnier that comedian apparently is.
If it is funny to see a comedian nearly fall ten feet, it seems to follow necessarily that if the comedian nearly falls a hundred feet it is ten times as funny. A situation that is only mildly mirthful when a comic is being chased by a hungry bulldog becomes really sidesplitting when the pursuer is a. man-eating lion,
Chills are an essential running mate to chuckles. Custard pies nave given way to boiler explosions, street scenes to skyscraper roof-tops, trick flivvers to racing airplanes, and banana skins to landslides.
Jimrrue Adams made them shudder in the above scene when he reposed flat on his back on a slanting board that projected from the top of an oil derrick. Harold Lloyd surely risked his life in the scene on the right — taken from "Safety Last." The spectators gasped for breath when he did his stuff on the skyscraper
Reaper's black robes in the near distance, the successful comedian must not only laugh at Death, but must win still greater laughs in SO doing. It is doubtful if anv comedian
Above is Buster Keaton being propelled by the business end of a boot from the train. He doesn't allow accidents to shatter his nonchalance or nerve. It takes a deal of pluck to face a lion — even one of the Hollywood brand. The girl who is being used for a cushion hopes the big brute is on a diet
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