We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
There were tiro kids in Hollywood — Al and Ray Rockett — with an idea. The older heads scoffed, but they went ahead. "Abraham Lincoln" is the residt
It took them three years to work it all out. They did their own research work — seven months of it — and they made a really great picture
Lincoln and the Kids
I IN i 1
INCOLN? Why, his life can't be told in pictures!"
Thus declared the magnates when two kid producers in Hollywood announced their conviction that a great picture could be made on the life of Abraham Lincoln.
And it has been made. A picture which is "great," in its simplicity, its drama, its tender romance, its love-interest, which transcends the elaborate sex-appeal of the conventional movie-masterpiece and encompasses all humanity.
And those same kid producers made it — Al and Ray Rockett, after a light and a labor for their idea which lasted three years, fraught with meanness, jealousy and the embittering despair of deliberate handicaps. But the idea won, the Rockett Brothers won and the picture on which they had staked everything has emerged an inspired film-drama, a monument worthy of the man it celebrates.
The story of Abraham Lincoln they have told with a wealth of relevant detail and color. Hut the Rockett Brothers are more reticent about their own. These young men are not erratic artists, tilting at the wind mills. They are not impatient with the movies. They are not sanguine of "revolutionizing" them. What they wanted to do was put themselves
66
By Bland Johaneson
on the production map. They wanted a great picture, a sincere picture, one good enough to make the public as well as the industry pay attention to them. They knew what the public wants and the successful picture demands. And there was their story at hand — "the dramatic life of Abraham Lincoln.*'
Hollywood refused to be convinced. The consensus of expert opinion was against it.
They set to work. They wanted to hire Frances Marion to write the story, but they couldn't afford her usual fee. But when they told her of their ambition and plan, she not only wrote the continuity, but put S50.000 of her own money into the picture.
The Rocket ts spent months in research work at the Congressional Library. They made journeys into the backwoods to revive the fading memories of old men and women who had known the President. They located a living crony, and learned of mannerisms, intimate little characteristics. Then, they "found" George Billings, a man who never had appeared upon the stage or before the camera, who had neither the experience nor the technique to "act the role" of Lincoln, but had the imagination to live it. [ coxtixced ox page 114 1