The Photo-Play Journal (Jul 1919-Feb 1921)

February, 1921 25 return home. But when I got there, I found that I still had the wish to be away in my veins, and it wasn't long before I was off again, this time to Chicago. There was hard-sledding there, and when I saw an advertisement in the paper calling for a tall young man for a theatrical production, and the ad saying that experience wasn't necessary, I jumped at the chance, and began my histrionic career, playing in the mob scene of a dramatization of 'Parsifal.' My salary, so to speak, was $5 per week. "On the strength of this I managed to connect with a road company which went broke in a small Canadian town. I beat my way back to the States, joined another road company, which also gave up the ghost in a shocking manner. In fact, so did the next three companies I went out with, and I began to think that I was a Jinx, and more. But by this time I knew that Jinx or not, I had found the thing I wanted to do — act. So I made faces at Nemesis and stuck to my last. "Maybe that was the reason that my luck began to change. At any rate, I was associated with companies which didn't instantly start to go broke, and before long I was playing with stock companies which actually showed a profit at the end of a run. "During one summer I went to New York for a vacation, and doing so, did a fateful thing. For a Kalem representative offered me a movie job ! Like most professional people, I despised the movies at trfat time, but it was summer, the lean season for actors, and I signed up. My salary was $40.50 a week and I spent my off-hours trying to figure what the 50 cents represented. I never solved the problem. "Winter came, and I went back into stock, in New York, however. But winter fled, and summer came again, as it has a habit of doing, and I returned to the screen — this time permanently. In the next few years I did pretty nearly everything. The films weren't so highly specialized in those days, and I was actor, director, and writer. But with the growth of the industry, I gradually resumed my real position as an actor. "How did I grow to be a star? That's hard telling. I know that it sounds banal, but I worked hard, and that may have had something to do with it. As nearly as I can make out, I was made by the public, to whom I am under a real debt of gratitude. They asked theatres to let them know when I was to be seen there — that was when I was still a leading man — and by and by some of the theatres began to advertise the stars opposite whom I played 'with Tom Moore.' This got to the ears of Mr. Goldwyn and naturallymy worth underwent a change, and I made the leap over that tremendous chasm which separates a leading man and star. And that's all, I guess! "What kind of picture do I like to play in? Ah, that's almost as difficult a question as the vexed question of Ann's age. Only yesterday I was thinking of how different my roles have been during the past year! In 'Lord and Lady Algy,' I was a member of the English nobility; in 'The City of Comrades,' a down-and-outer; in 'Stop Thief,' a burglar ; in 'The Great Accident,' a small-town politician ; and in 'Officer 666' both a gentleman and a fake policeman. So you see that I'm not prejudiced against many roles. "I always like best the part I happen to be playing at the time, I suppose. If I'm a swell, why it seems to me I can be happy only when wearing evening clothes after six o'clock and having a valet to start my tub and lay out my togs. But, in the next picture, I may be a drunken bum, then it seems to me that anything except an unshaven chin and shifty, bleary eyes are all out of the scheme of things. "Nevertheless, there is a real continuity to all these roles — I mean the continuity of human nature. I think I can say with real sincerity that I have been more than ordinarily fortunate in the themes which I have been given to interpret, from the elemental to the farce spirit. I wouldn't underrate the latter, either. Getting laughs by rapid-fire action is surely just as legitimate as by any other methods. The important thing, after all, in the expression of the humorous side of life is to get people laughing, and pretty nearly anything that does that is legitimate. That viewpoint of mine explains, in a way, why I am particularly fond of playing in farce comedies. "My opinions and reactions have naturally enough grown out of my experiences. And I've told you enough of my early life to make you see that whatever else my adventures weren't, they were certainly varied. Hoboing my way to New York at sixteen, going broke again and again on the road, seeing life in many places and in different aspects, has taught me, I hope, something about men and women. And that 'something' is what I try to put into my work on the screen. "The screen, let me tell you, is all right. That doesn't mean that a good deal of the criticism directed against it isn't justified. The trouble with such criticism, however, is that it doesn't take into account the enormous progress which the motionpicture has made during the past years, and particularly, during the past five years. I've seen in an intimate way the change in motion-picture, from the old to the new. "The development of the story has been magnificent— that is, the development of the story element in the pictures. It isn't too much to say that in the old days any kind of story was good-enough. But no longer! Now we have to have real stories and that fact is important, for it means that the photoplay isn't in its baby stage, any longer. It may not be wearing long pants, as yet, but it is certainly out of its swaddling clothes. "Rupert Hughes wrote the photoplay 'Hold Your Horses' on which I'm now working and when we at . tract men of his calibre to (Continued on page 55)