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.
14
RALPH BELLAMY
A versatile actor peers into the future and sees strange goings-on in cinema circles around the year 2,000, when even Baby Leroy is a doddering old veteran.
were surprisingly impressed by certain antiques starring two of the most distinguished guests, the Honorahle John Cooper, beloved dean of actors, and Professor LeRoy Weinbrenner, governmental chief of the National School of Arts and Sciences.
In their childhood, back in the '30s, my venerable friends were known as Jackie Cooper and Baby LeRoy, respectively. Their worldwide popularity brought them as much fame as the now forgotten adult stars of my day.
For sixty-odd years, I have painstakingly collected and preserved a picture library — films, sound records, cameras, projection machines, et cetera, of that hectic era which had
People of this age have to go to museums to see a gangster.
Rafph Bellamy, just turned ninety-six, dreams about the now forgorren
Garbo, Chatterton, and Crawford, and misses the funny stories about
producers he used to hear in 1933
I When "Looking Backward," by Edward Bellamy, was published in 1887, it had a wider sale and a deeper influence than any book of its time. Ralph Bellamy, one of the screen favorites of to-day, has written an imaginative article about Hollywood in the year 2000, paralleling the fantasy of his famous cousin, the novelist.]
IT is the night of November 19th in the year 2000. The time is a half hour before midnight. I am alone, seated at the library desk in my Hollywood apartment, alone with my memories and a book. I am ninetysix years old. Back in 1933, when I was twenty-nine and a picture actor, 1 never dreamed that I would live to such an old age. Perhaps the book I've been reading has had something to do with my reverie. It is "Looking Backward," a prophetic fantasy of the world in the year 20f)0, and it was written by my cousin, Edward Bellamy, in 1887.
My guests have departed, after voicing their amazement at the fulfillment of so many of my cousin's farsighted predictions. To add to their incredulity — and amusement — I entertained them by exhibiting some quaint old films.
While the guests of this generation were amused at some of the crudities of the early sound pictures, they