The Motion Picture Studio Insider (1935)

22 Motion Picture Studio Insider June, 1935 FORMER RACE DRIVER Speedway, Airplane Experience Aids Klein In Running Huge Fleet By HARRY MACPHERSON CASES of what are termed “appropriate casting” are numerous in Screen' land. This not only applies to the screen dramas, themselves, but to all the positions associated with the making of pictures. Your story writers, for instance, are quite generally veteran playwrights. Publicity staff members are almost all exmewspapermen. Song writers are graduates of the Tin-Pan Alley “popu¬ lar” field. Thus it is appropriate that studio transportation departments, em¬ bracing all the automotive equipment employed for diversified use, should be manned by men trained in the motor car industry. Warner Brothers-First National stu¬ dios not only have the biggest transpor tation department of all Hollywood, with a total now of nearly 300 pieces of mo¬ torized equipment — but they also have a department chief who has long been noted in motordom. This transportation head’s life has been colored by the gla¬ mor of automotive adventure. He is Art Klein! Klein, who has headed the Warner de¬ partment for the last five years, is wide¬ ly known in auto circles of America and Europe. His is a name to conjure with wherever men foregather who have known teh romance of the industry of gas and oil and wheels. Any man-on-the-street of mature years remembers when Art Klein was a famous racing driver; when no im¬ portant race on the blistering boards or the dust-clouded dirt tracks of America was complete without the name of “Klein” on the entry boards. What your average person, however, does not know, is that Art Klein is one of the real pio¬ neers of what may be aptly termed the “motor car game.” This phrase has become stigmatized in recent years by the motor car mer¬ chandising industry for the very good reason that manufacturers, distributors and dealers have wished to divorce au¬ tomobile selling from anything savoring of a “racket”. But it may be used ad¬ visedly when talking about the early days of the business, for then it was truly a “game”— a jolly, romantic and adventuresome business interlinked with the danger of racing and the unantici¬ pated happenings incident to embryonic automobile operation. Klein, as a youth, started out with the Peerless Motor Car Company of Cleveland, O., working as a mechanic and road-tester, he was with that pio¬ neer firm from 1906 to 1907 and then Art Klein — 1908 to 1910 — he worked as a “road expert” for the old Stoddard-Dayton factory in Dayton, O. “Modern road men would be sur¬ prised at what I had to do in those days,” commented Klein yesterday. “It is no exaggeration to say that I would often be sent by the factory away down to Miami, Florida, just to work on a single motor car whose repair would only take about a half hour. Then I might be shipped to Denver, or, perhaps, back to Toledo. Individual car repairs were the rule rather than the exception.” Klein started his racing experience with the Stoddard-Dayton people, for, at that time, all racing teams were spon¬ sored by manufacturers, as they still are One of the many ancient cars owned by the Warner Brothers' First Ffational studio for use in pictures. Practically all of these cars still run under their own power and provide genuine au¬ thenticity to pictures of the 1910 Era.