Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1927)

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Tntimate Visits to the Jesse Lasky's life has been as intensely dramatic in coloring as any in all the romantic world of motion pictures IN the gold rush of '49 was an obscure person named Lasky, selling a miscellany of wares to the adventurers, and seeking, too, a fortune. He was a merchant, a vendor of all manner of things, notions. Now in the cycle of fate, his grandson, Jesse Lasky, has come back out of the golden west, also vending notions, grandiose notions in motion, like "The Ten Commandments," "The Covered Wagon," and "Old Ironsides." Now this Jesse Lasky is in essence a product of that epic romanticism of California, an inheritor and a personal consequence of the adventure era. The tradition has placed its stamp on him and claims him for its own. It rules him and ordains his life and thought and conduct without his consciousness, as automatically as the moon tides or the run of the salmon are ruled. Lasky's name is written flamboyantly into the heraldry of commerce and the typographical din of advertising and trade, in the boasting cognomen of the Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation. It is spelled in ink and gilt and electric. lights and cut into stone and cast into bronze, even on the medals issued to commemorate Adolph Zukor's birthday. "Lasky" registers on stock certificates, ledgers, billboards and theater fronts. The name is very much in business. Also Lasky has an office with the corporation in that amazing Pyramid of Adolph I, known as the Paramount Building, at Times Square, New York. There Lasky is surrounded with all the buzzing machinery of business, with phalanxes of assistants and tiptoeing, bowing secretaries. His desk is beset with telephones and date books and data files and box office reports and manuscripts and ranks of electric push-buttons and a loud speaking inter-communicator. There is enough machinery and apparatus of business to execute any executive. And yet there is in that office no atmosphere of business at all. Jesse Lasky in that setting is just as improbable as a 50 Jesse Lasky came out of the Klondike Gold Rush of '98 to find his Way to New York via a Musical Act in the Varieties. Then Chance Brought him to Pictures and to Success By Terry Rams aye Author of "A Million and One Nights" robin's nest in a street lamp, a phenomenon which can be seen but never believed. There is an elusive lack of conviction about that business setting. Lasky is unquestionably present, but not exactly there and of the place. He is robustly actual, tall, Teuton-blond in color and very blue as to eyes, precisely tailored and softly spoken, but eternally uneasy under all his calmness. Probably he is internally disturbed by induction and static from the whirring high-tension currents of business which eddy about just outside that fluttering fringe of secretaries. There is, or used to be, in his office a picture of Lasky standing on the topmost rock of a mountain peak. He Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky see some of their dreams come true with the building of the new Paramount studios in California