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HE AIMS AT THE STARS
Meet the man whose “Screen
Snapshots,” for twenty years, have revealed the real heart of Hollywood
BY FRANCES MORRIN
For twenty years Ralph S ta u b — through his Screen Snapshots — has recorded an intimate history of Hollywood and its people. . . .
He has photographed the stars at home, with their children, working for the war effort, at parties — going about the daily business of living. . .
He was the only man in Hollywood to film all of the major stars in uniform — a difficult project on which he spent five months traveling to six different locales to catch his subjects in action, to photograph Alan Ladd on K.P. peeling onions, Bob Stack teaching gunnery technique, Clark Gable as gunnery student, and Gene Autry at a Phoenix, Arizona, camp where Ralph had to wait two days before Gene’s superior officer would allow him off duty. For this Screen Snapshots Staub received an Academy Award nomination.
He filmed the late Valentino, fencing, boxing and living at Falcon’s Lair, just as he will soon make a similar record of the second “Valentino,” Columbia’s Anthony Dexter. His first film on Joel McCrea won Joel a film test. He was the first to film Jean Peters, whom the public came to know as Carole Lombard. And later he was on hand to photograph Carole when she took off on the bond-selling mission from which she never returned. He took his first Screen Snapshots of John Wayne when he was an extra in silent pictures, and he has enough film on Mary Pickford to make a full-length feature. Years ago he turned his camera on Bill Boyd when he was a dramatic star in “The Volga Boatman.” And recently he completed a short on Bill as Hopalong Cassidy at his Los Angeles playground called Hoppyland.
When Staub first started making Screen Snapshots, he was a one-man company; producer, camera man, director, film editor, electrician and
LORETTA YOUNG greets Ralph at Beverly Hills Hotel, where he filmed Photoplay’s Sixth Annual Gold Medal Awards
property man all rolled into one. With the years and the change from silent film to sound, his staff grew gradually to fourteen. However, in all the twenty years he has been featuring Screen Snapshots he never has paid any star to appear in one of his short subjects and he’s still on the friendliest terms with all those he has photographed.
The only change he has made in the Snapshots came about last year when he was photographing Photoplay’s Gold Medal Awards dinner. The radio Master of Ceremonies, who was to have interviewed the stars as they came into the Beverly Hills Hotel while Ralph was photographing their arrival, was held up in a traffic accident. So Ralph stepped up to the mike and ad libbed with winner John Wayne and other stars. Columbia officials so liked the genial graying Ralph in his new role of emcee that he’s now added “actor” to his list of jobs. Recently, wearing his cowboy shirt which all the Western stars have signed, he went rarin’ out to the Sheriffs’ Rodeo at the Coliseum to get it on film. Gene Autry allowed that Ralph looked real sharp in a ten-gallon hat.
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