Photoplay (Apr - Sep 1918)

,ties*cF The Devil's Camera A very neat piece of work, and daring to say the least, was the ingenious publicity stunt "pulled" by the Bigelorws, Sam, and Dorothy By Frederic Arnold Kummer k**RLfe* )K<LxcmL± A beautiful young girl named Dorothy Carter had been kidnapped in broad day light, and had not been heard from since. R' EGULAR Sherlock Holmes, ain't you?" said Barry, the. Central Office man, with a nasty smile. "No," I replied, smiling back at him. "I leave all that sort of thing to highbrows like you. I'm only a motion picture director." Our little interchange of pleasantries took place at the International's office on Times Square, and Barry had come in to ask me some questions about New York's latest sensational crime. It had stirred the whole city, and not without reason. A beautiful young girl named Dorothy Carter had been kidnapped in broad daylight, presumably by white slavers, at the corner of Broadway and Thirtyeighth Street, and had not been heard from since. The newspapers were full of the thing, and I had been drawn into it because, singularly enough, I had witnessed the kidnapping. Illustrated by Charles D. Mitchell No — I made no .effort to rescue the girl — in fact I ' watched the criminals at work with a smile, as did the rest of the little group of bystanders. Even a policeman looked on good-naturedly, and went so far as to push back some of the eager crowd, in order that the struggling, shrieking girl might the more readily be bound, gagged and thrown into the waiting cab. Incredible, you say? Not at all. On the sidewalk stood a motion picture camera, with a fellow behind it grinding away like mad. Of course, everyone supposed it was a movie stunt. But it wasn't. I remember thinking at the time that the girl was certainly putting a lot of "pep" into her work, but no suspicion of the truth crossed my mind. It was not until I saw the papers the next day that I realized I had been present at a tragedy. The details were simple enough. Miss Carter was a southern girl, quite poor, who had come to New York looking for employment. She was unusually goodlooking. Her mother, with whom she lived, had hysterically reported her daughter's disappearance to the police. Barnes, the Central Office man, came to see me because an actor in the crowd, who knew me, had stated to the detectives assigned to the case that he supposed everything must be all right, since the International's head director was supervising the job. I think Barnes came to my office convinced that I was in league with a desperate band of white slavers. "So you didn't know it was a kidnaping, eh?" he asked me, quite unpleasantly, after I had explained my presence as a mere onlooker. "Why not?" "Because," I told him, "there was a real motion picture camera in action, and both the cabman and the fellow who seized the girl were in makeup." He laughed at this, and made the sneering remark above quoted about my being a Sherlock Holmes. "Sure they had a regular camera," he jeered. "You don't suppose these guys would take chances with a phoney one, do you? And why wouldn't they be in makeup? Them whiskers they had on wasn't only to fool the crowd into thinking it was a motion picture stunt. There was another reason. To prevent them from being recognized — traced." "The camera man wasn't in makeup," I remarked. Again the man from the Central Office jeered at me. "Sure he wasn't," he replied. "Camera men don't wear makeup do they?"