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It's the Breaks tkat Make 'Em
Hardly a player gains a foothold in the movies without the aid of that lucky chance, which is called in Hollywood "a break." Some of the more extraordinary examples of luck are entertainingly recounted in this article.
B)) Houston Branch
The break of the year was that of Ruth Taylor.
June Marlowe owes her break to the fact that she lived next door to a director.
IN the dictionary the word "break" has a rather woeful definition, which places it in the class of things most persons wish to avoid. Webster's estimation of the word is not shared by Hollywood. In the chimerical land of the cinema, nine persons out of ten are looking, hoping, and praying for what they call — a break.
In fact, the greater part of the population of Hollywood subsists on the vague notion that a 'break will come, and in one stroke set them well on the road to fame, with a secretary to answer fan mail, and a home in Beverly Hills. For a break, in the vernacular of the studios, is a strange quirk of circumstance which suddenly lifts the struggling unknown from the depths of obscurity to a precarious perch on the portals of success, and sometimes catapults the lucky one, in a meteoric blast, into the brilliant glare of public adulation, where they either wither under the intense rays, or blossom into the luxuriant flowerings of the celluloid bouquet.
The odd thing about the worship of this elusive word is that it can offer a hundred tangible miracles a year, and as a result attract disciples by the thousands. It keeps the apartment houses and hotels of Hollywood filled faster than the real-estate operators can build them. Scoff if you will, but a fortnight's sojourn in Hollywood will quickly convince you that the whole structure of filmdom is founded on breaks.
The Klondike had its sour doughs who were just about to turn their backs on fortune, when they tripped and uncovered the hidden
pocket of the yellow mineral. Hollywood has its George Bancroft.
Bancroft prospected in Hollywood for two years, and didn't strike pay dirt. He had packed up and had bought reservations on a train to New York, when James Cruze sent for him to play Jack Slade, in "The
Pony Express."
Gwen Lee, the seductive blonde of Metro-Goldwyn pictures, owes her present contract to a fly. Just an ordinary house fly of the too-common variety. Gwen was just a bit of atmosphere in "Pretty Ladies," one of several girls supporting a human chandelier in a studio reproduction of a Ziegfeld revue, when a fly took upon itself to light on her bare and shapely limbs. Now Gwen was not in a position where she could use her hands to brush the fly off her — ahem — knee. She wriggled. The fly didn't notice her wriggling, but Monta Bell, the director, did. It struck him as a very funny bit of business, and Gwen struck him as a very pretty girl. The result was that a fly was painted on her limb for. the rest of the picture, and a contract was the ultimate reward.
James Murray and RayJohnny Mack Brown's spectacular work in a football game won him a contract.