The Moving picture world (May 1922)

May 6, 1922 MOVING PICTURE WORLD 47 Take This To Your Local Editor and Ask Him To Print It No. 3 ''Camp Followers** in Hollywood By BEULAH MARIE DIX I DON'T claim that Hollywood is peopled entirely by angels. Indeed I know of no community in America so blessed. I doubt however, if it is so completely overrun with devils as the stories current just now in press and pulpit would lead one to believe. The wickedness of Hollywood, as you know, is supposed to come from the motion picture people. Who ARE the motion picture people? You know, in the studios of Hollywood and Los Angeles some 30,000 people are employed. Quite a little army! Among them are electricians, seamstresses, camera men, writers, carpenters, bookkeepers, painters, stenographers, interior decorators, a host of laboratory men and women. All these, who derive their livelihood from the studios, are surely motion picture people. Are they hopelessly damned? Well, no, there is a chance for them, perhaps, it is regretfully admitted. The real sinners are the producers, the directors, and the people who act in the pictures. What makes a motion picture actor or actress? His (or her) say-so? Every New Yorker knows that fifty per cent, of the men arrested in New York give their profession to be "stock-broking." Every old resident of a college town knows that every hoodlum arrested claims lo be "a student." Every one who has ever smiled at poor human nature remembers how, in the old days, every little soiled butterfly on Broadway who had once carried a spear in the chorus labelled herself ever after "a chorus girl," or, more likely, "an actress." We have the same phenomenon here in Hollywood and Los Angeles. A certain type of pretty, weak-headed girl will always gravitate toward the place where she believes her prettiness can be exchanged for a good time and easy money. Many, many such girls drift into "moviedom," and the police matrons of Los Angeles and the Girls' Studio Club of Hollywood are not able to head all of them back to home and mother. If such a girl has worked for a week — even for a day — as an "extra," she is a "motion picture actress" ever after. Where such girls come, there come also the men who prey upon them, and they, too, given one day's work as an "extra" or taking on themselves the job of "managing" these girls, are henceforth "motion picture men." These are the pitiable and sinister figures that follow our industry as inevitable as hordes of pilferers and pleasure-seeking women follow an army, and for all their lamentable actions, the industry, to which they do not in any sense belong, must bear the blame. The existence of this horde of "camp followers" accounts for many of the charges of irregular living brought against motion picture actors and actresses, but it does NOT account, I grant you, for all of them. There have been incidents in the lives of some of the people who are prominent upon the screen as disgraceful as incidents in the lives of citizens in other professions. But did you ever stop to reckon what actual per cent, of picture actors and actresses have been involved in scandal? You know the ones who behave themselves don't get into the papers. When Miss leaps out of one matrimonial bond and into another with the celerity of a society leader, the racy tale is "news." When my dear old friend, Edythe C , hurries home from the studio where she has added another portrait to her notable gallery of grandes dames, and cooks dinner for the actor husband who she still adores after twenty-five years of married life — well, that's not a sensation. Who cares if she does? When a certain star takes more bootleg whiskey than is good for him, the story is whispered about with unction and hinted at in the press, but when Jack H , equally a star, walks down Hollywood Boulevard, leading his baby son by the hand and radiating proud fatherhood in every glance, the pleasing sight isn't copy. There are some vicious, weak-headed people in the profession with more money than brains to use it. There are probably in Los Angeles and Hollywood, as in other cities of equal size, a small number of unfortunates (some of them "in the profession") who in the sequel of the Volstead act, are slaves to the drug habit. There are others who drink far more than is needful, and whose sole idea of "a good time" is a drunken revel. These people are not, however, in the majority nor even in a large minority — and why should a profession be condemned, lock, stock and barrel, because of the lapse of the feeblest and frailest of its exponents? Of course you are not unfamiliar with that count in the indictment against HoUjrwood and the motion pictures to which Dreiser (I regret to say!) has lately given currency: "No girl can succeed in pictures unless she yields herself to the director." This charge, now brought against the pictures as if it were something quite new in iniquity, has been brought with equal plausibility against the opera house, the theatre, the department store, the business house, even against our public schools. I fancy that as long as women are women and men are men, and the power to promote lies in the hands of men, that charge will be brought forward in every art and industry. Darmour Editing Selznick News An error in a news story sent out by the publicity department of Selznick Pictures Corporation relative to the engagement of John C. Cutting as a member of the Selznick staff has caused some little confusion throughout the trade. Editor of Brain Exchange Mr. Cutting was engaged as assistant editor of the Selznick news reel and as editor of the Brain Exchange, the weekly house organ published by the Selznick company. The erroneous statement was to the effect that Mr. Cutting had been engaged as editor of Selznick News, a positon which is still capably filled by L. J. Darmour. Petition in Bankruptcy for Wid Gunning, Inc. A petition in bankruptcy against Wid Gunning, Inc., was filed in the United States District Court, New York, April 24, by the Chalmers Publishing Company (Moving Picture World), Exhibitors Trade Review and Exhibitors Herald. Assets of the Gunning Company were listed at about $5,000 and liabilities at about $100,000. Desmond Recovering William Desmond, the motion picture star, who was erroneously reported as fatally injured in an accident on location at Truckee, Cal., is recuperating at Universal City. Just how long it will be before he can resume work is not known.