Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1926 - Feb 1927)

10 He Rolls His Own Richard Dix explains how he and his director, Gregory La Cava, evolve their popular screen comedies, from the moment the scenario — which sometimes is nothing more than a scrap of paper — is placed in their hands. By David A. Balch PART of the painful impedimenta of screen success, it would seem, is a multiplication of cares and worries concerning the mechanism of the vehicle one rides in. In the beginning, an actor of the silent stage is a spoke, as it were, in the wheel of the cart that carries him; he revolves, indifferent to the destination of the cart itself, content to consider himself a spoke and nothing more. Later, if he becomes anything at all, he changes — for the sake of the metaphor — into the hub, or rim, or whatever is most important in the life of a wheel ; and then we may consider that his troubles have fairly begun. For his vehicle may carry him uphill or down in public favor, and nature has made it easy for a wheeled vehicle to coast. Thus. Richard Dix, a star now in his own right upon the silent stage, has reached Part Two of a star's existence, and the vehicle that carries him —his pictures, as it were — has become a matter of concern more vital to him, let us say, than his breakfast. And mindful of the journev that leads either uphill or down. R'ichard is, literally, "rolling his own." "How do you do it?" we asked him, in the seclusion of his dressing room out at the Famous Players-Laskv studio on Long Island. He had commenced stepping out of a Graustark costume that was a miracle of military coat, patent-leather boots, and glove-fitting breeches. It was the suit he wears when, as a prince, he encounters all manner of amazing adventures in "Say It Again." his current picture. A stack of fan mail of the most insinuating character decorated one corner of his dressing table — stationery of variegated hues that covered the entire chromatic scale. There were letters addressed variouslv and hinting of importance, such as — "Personal for Richard Dix." "Richard Dix, Strictly Personal," and "Richard Dix, Confidential." Ah, well, we concluded softly, such was screen fame. "\\ ell. I've had my troubles," he replied, ridding himself of a contrivance that resembled a ballet dancer's skirt. Strange fellows, these princes ! "And it has reduced me, finally, to a state where I eat. sleep, and dream pictures. In fact, I'm like the postman who. on his day off, went for a walk. I spend my Sundays over here at the Long Island studio, watching reels of film, looking for a thought, for a suggestion, that may point the path to some possible improvement. I still hunt for new ideas. Pictures now are my whole existence." We watched him as he stood there divesting himself Richard, who was given almost complete control in the making of his recent comedies, spent day and night devising gags for those films. of the thought before. somme, thin but good ! trappings of princedom, a little thinner, we than we had ever remembered having seen him Perhaps the fans like him that way — like conIt was two years exactly since we had last seen Richard, and he had changed in the interval, it seemed, ever so slightly, had grown more serious in manner than he had been when we first knew him. Work, we decided, had done it. "My last three pictures," he continued, "have been comedies, for Mr. Lasky and I have both felt that people want to laugh more than they want to do anything else. When I say 'people,' I mean the inhabitants of small communities who make up the majority of picture patrons. For instance," he illustrated, pausing in his effort to drag off a patent-leather boot, "I was ouj: last night with a man named Brandt, who owns a big string of Brooklyn theaters. Brandt told me that of all the theaters in the Lnited States, fully seventy-five per cent of them have a seating capacity of not more than two hundred persons. That means," he added, "that we play, in the overwhelming main, not to Broadway— not to the Rivoli nor the Rialto, nor to the Metropolitan in Boston — but to little out-of-the-way places whose inhabitants are what the politicians call 'the backbone of the nation.' " Richard glanced at himself in his full-length dressing