Picture-Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1921)

Over the Teacups 49 ng and titling it, and he only recently reovered sufficiently to work over it." 'But Betty Compson doesn't like her part i that picture very well. She told me so. -he likes more genuine, more vivid, people." "Oh, well, " Fanny answered airily, "she ouldn't be expected to enjoy just going to ook at herself. She's not that kind of girl. Jut she is so beautiful that all I ask is to go nd look at her regardless of the part." " The 'Better Films' movement wouldn't get jnuch support from you then, would it?" I Lsked, trying to sound caustic. "Mercy, no," answered Fanny, as unruffled is a May morn or Gloria Swanson in a new rock. "We'll keep the authors and the di"ectors, because they seem to be nice people, ind if they enjoy talking about 'The play's he thing,' let them do it. But you know as well as I do that most of us go to pictures >ecause we like to see our favorites. There's jne exception to that rule — Rupert Hughes, )ut at the Goldwyn lot. He has written one picture, at least, that makes me shriek with oy. It is 'Dangerous Curve Ahead.' Just wait until you see it." Fanny is always distressingly superior when she has been lucky enough to see a pre-release showing of a picture out at the studio. "Speaking of scenario writers," I spoke up, have you heard about Harriette Underhill, [the girl who writes those sparkling interviews ? Well, two years ago she wrote a scenario in her spare time — she works on a newspaper, you know — and then just after she had finished it, she lost it. She searched everywhere, but it couldn't be found. And after that she was so busy that she never wrote another. A short time ago, a new man came to work on the paper — the son of the man who wrote the 'Torchy' comedies, incidentally— and when he cleaned out the desk they gave him he found the long-lost scenario. He gave it to M iss Underhill, who was just starting for Hope Hampton's house. They read it over together, and Hope Hampton liked it so well that she bought it." "W'onders never cease," Fanny murmured, looking over at Bebe Daniels' hat. I couldn't tell whether she meant that or the scenario. "Bebe is a colonel now," Fanny mentioned abstractedly, sketching the Daniels hat on the back of the m enu. "When she went home to Dallas to visit, the Ninth Infantry Officers' Club made her honorary colonel !" There was a terrible commotion just then. Every one seemed to be getting up. Constance Talmadge mislaid the films she and Dorothv Gish had abroad last summer, and onlv recently found them. Photo by Clarence S. Bull Mabel Normand returned to the Coast, livelier than ever after her resi cure. "Oh, it's Mabel Normand," Fanny told me excitedly, calling down from her vantage point as she kneeled on her chair to see better over the heads of the crowd. "She's just come back from the East, and everywhere that she goes she causes a sensation. She's been in a sanitarium, recovering from nervous prostration ; she's still thin as a rail, but she looks wonderful. Her Goldwyn contract expired a few days ago, and guess what she did. She signed a five-year contract to make comedies for Mack Sennett. Oh, how I hope that she will go back to slapstick. Her first picture is to be called 'Molly-O.' Doesn't sound very slapstick, does it ?" But Fanny was consoled a minute later, when coincidentally Wanda Hawley and a waiter with some wonderful French pastry arrived. "Don't offer me any," Wanda begged. "I