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Mob Scenes Have Been the Training Schools
Adolphe Menjou had a long and trying time struggling to gain screen notice. Above, Mr. Menjou in a minor role in "Clarence," starring the late Wallie Reid. Agnes Ayres was leading woman. That was in 1922.
Mary to her carriage in a short scene; he was so nervous that he broke into a perspiration which was so profuse that Miss Pickford noticed it and asked him if he felt all right. At a dinner party at Charley's recently, Mary reminded him of the incident jokingly.
In "The Ten Commandments" Charley was the bugler who started all the parades (and there were plenty), and in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" Charley helped hold up some of the Gothic arches in the street scenes. There were bits in "The Leather Pushers" with Reginald Denny and in "The Sea Hawk" with Milton Sills. Comedy at Sennett's was a flop because Charley could not do the "take it big" and the "double takeum" bits of comedy business indispensable to a comedy role. Rin-Tin-Tin got the billing and the electric lights when Charley worked in a picture with him. Madge Bellamy was doing "Sandy" at this time, and Charley got the role of "Timmy," which, in turn, got him a Fox contract. He was loaned by Fox to Paramount to appear in "Old Ironsides" and "The Rough Riders."
Charley says, "I believe two years is the limit that a person should work as an extra ; after that the danger is of becoming shopworn, so
Three years ago George Bancroft was playing minor roles. At the right in this scene from Mildred Davis's "Too Many Crooks." Lois Wilson is listening at the door.
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that nobody wants you. One year's experience is not enough ; over two is too much. I believe the most important thing to help one get ahead in pictures is the way one conducts oneself. Extra and bit work is good for the head ; it won't swell after all the kicks you get as a small timer. A knowledge of human nature is another thing extra work gets for you if you are smart enough to take it. Boys who get the breaks quickly because of being good-looking and wearing snappy clothes well, usually have to begin all over again; conceit makes them flop at first."
JANET GAYNOR knocked *-» about doing extra work, ranging from comedy bits at Roach's to Westerns at Universal, and was getting ready to starve to death when she took the test for Ann Burger in "The Johnstown Flood" at the Fox studio. "I was certainly a sight in those days at Roach's," says Janet. "They gave me bathing-suit roles mostly, because I had no other wardrobe, I guess." She laughed. "I was no hit, because I wasn't a beauty and I wasn't snappy looking. I just didn't fit." She mused a moment. "I think extra work and small parts taught me how important it was for me to work hard, harder than other girls that were more in demand than I was."
Colleen Moore has had a long enough and a great enough success to make her opinion on this matter of bits and extra work worth considering. Her experiences are graphic as the little star tells them.
"I started in the old Chicago Essanay Company when H. B. Walthall and Nell Craig were the stars there. I did some extra work; my first bit was as a maid walking into the room with a tray. I was so nervous,