Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1931)

"You would, of course, know that every girl in our show would like to have the charm and grace that Miss Greta Garbo has. It is my opinion that we have girls with much more beauty. But there is nothing as beautiful to me as the thing some of us lack — personality. It is the wish of us all to see Miss Greta Garbo enact 'Devil's Due,' by Phyllis Bottome. We would be so grateful if you would let Miss Garbo know that we are rooting for her and are waiting impatiently for her next picture. Follies Show Girls, Ziegfeld Theater, New York City." hat she wore in the period picture 'Romance' and fit perfectly into the modern scene. "Women saw Garbo. They saw how lovely she looked. Women have copied Garbo before — as witness the long bob. Garbo is one of those rare women with style courage, who can make a fad popular. She definitely popularized the new hat. "Paris could make thousands of hats of this type — but women would not have worn them had they not seen Greta (larbo in them." IT was a super-super-super-special-feature in the shooting. A supervisor walked onto the set, and glared. He beheld some small potted palms. "Stop!" he screamed. "This is a BIG production. We've got to have BIG palms." Shooting was held up for two hours at a cost of $2, 000. 00 while property men replaced the little palms with BIG ones. Ho, hum. IT is truly one of the most astonishing and sensational results of Hollywood. That a tall, slim girl who entertains the world by appearing in movies should be able to change the course of an important business, to alleviate, even in a small way, a nationwide depression; to have a finger in big financial matters simply by wearing a hat, is a thrilling commentary on the influence of the motion picture. THE milliners of the world take off their hats to Greta Garbo — their Empress Eugenie hats. They are grateful to her for making the Eugenie hat so popular that it sold to over a million women in America. Hat manufacturers that had been on the verge of bankruptcy were deluged with orders and thousands of unemployed were called back to work to supply the demand. Was Paris responsible for this rage? It was not. Greta, sitting silent and apart in California, was responsible for it all. Listen to the words of Ferle Heller, one of the most famous and outstanding milliners of New York: I WAS in Paris when Suzanne Talbot introduced what you call the Empress Eugenie hat. As a matter of fact, the Empress Eugenie is a trick name thought up by some smart advertiser. What it really is, is the return to the feminine in styles, a reaction to the mannish clothes worn during and since the war. Suzanne Talbot felt that the romance of hats should return. So she included that type in her collection. "Thrilled by them, I brought back a number of models. But my customers, who are among the smartest and wealthiest women in New York, would not buy. They were afraid. They did not see them on the streets. They thought they'd make themselves ridiculous, even when I explained that it was the new movement and that they were truly straight from Paris. This was more than two years ago. "A ND, then, what happened? Greta Garbo made a film called 'Romance.' It was a period picture. In order to portray her character she wore the clothes of the time — romantic clothes, topped by a hat pulled over one eye and a feather at the back. At the time that picture was released Garbo's clothes were 'dated.' They looked strange, even ridiculous. But today Garbo could walk down Broadway in the JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG has had many invitations to become an inmate of Hollywood studios but he won't be lured from his New York atelier. Having escaped the terrors of "No Man's Land" he says he has no intention of chancing the horrors of what he calls "Yes Man's Land." " JOHN OTT, Co-Worker of Edison, Dies When Told J of Death of Great Inventor." That newspaper headline appeared the day after Thomas A. Edison, among whose other great inventions was the kinetoscope, grandfather of the motion picture projection machine of today, passed on. The name sounded familiar. I turned to Terry Ramsay e's history of the motion picture, "A Million and One Nights." And there it was, in that work which was based on a series of Mr. Ramsaye's historical articles which ran in serial form in Photoplay for three years. JOHN OTT started to work for Edison fifty years ago as a mechanic in his experimental laboratory. He brought along his brother, Fred. Fred was the life of the laboratory and was the first actor to perform before a motion picture camera. A picture of him taken in the act of sneezing was the first motion picture comedy and the first "close-up." Another picture of him, taken sitting at a desk while a mischievous office boy slipped up behind and shook a pepper box, causing him to sneeze again, was the embryo of scenario construction, the first screen gag. That was in 1893. JIMMY DURANTE'S favorite joke: J A gangster approached another gangster: "Suppose we kidnap the daughter of a millionaire and hold her for ransom." "No! No! I'll kidnap no girls for Ransom. Let him get his own girls." 26