Picture-Play Weekly (Apr-Oct 1915)

Fake Movie Thrills Are No More WHO will devise an iron cross for the fearless tilm actor who jumps the hurdles with death and outgallops disaster ? Time was when the fake picture, cleverly devised, would satisfy the public, and a stuffed dummy went hurtling on to the seemingly certain doom of a tragic climax in the photo play. That day is fast passing. The movie picture stars, and often, too, the men and women in humbler roles, are to-day practically taboo as insurance risks, unless they can prove thej^ are not in demand for the outdoor pictures whose gripping realism makes men shiver and cry out in the abodes of the silent drama. In years gone by, the press agent found the task of keeping the legitimate actor before the public a labor often lost, j He had to devise jewel robberies and ' outraged police and abandoned children on the dressing-room threshold, in order to keep his proteges from being entirely beyond the realm of the real. Always the shining row of footlights loomed, like a sort of psychic fence, between the public and the theatrical star. To keep the star truly human, for advertising purposes, was often a sore tax on the ingenuity of his advance agent, i If some poor peanut vender could be ' lured from his peaceful occupation to plant a tin can full of black mud at the star's door, the result would be "Bomb I Outrage Thwarted" in the news next ' day, the press agent counted himself : thrice lucky, and the actor, swallowing ■ his pride in his art, consented in the name of the magic of the printed page. I And now these days are past. The moving-picture actor, as a part j of the day's work, injects his personality, ' his hair-raising adventures, and often i serious mishaps into the news of the I day, time and time again. Only the prei cautions taken by his director keep the [ greedy press agent from feeding fat on ' the accidents — often classed as incidents —which fill the life of the hero and heroine of the screen. The public demands that these men I and women take chances, and so the pi fake picture has died away, and in its !: place appears the picture whose realism ,': is sometimes the only plea, but a strong ' '>ne, for its existence, while the tre mendous effect of accurate detail in action under stress adds mightily to the big feature films for which the public now is clamoring. From aeroplane antics to plain, brutal slugging, the actor must be ''there." Well do I remember, as an instance of this, the terrific man-to-man battle in which ^^'illiam Farnum meets Tom Santschi in "The Spoilers," the big Selig feature. , I saw the production of the stirring scene. It was much longer drawn out than appears in the finished film, and at the end of it both men were battered and bleeding and weak as hunted rabbits. In the very start of the fight Farnum's eye and cheek were cut open with a blow from Santschi's fist. As they waded into each other, blood flowed freely, and there was no sparing of short-arm jolts or of vicious uppercuts in the serious effort to bring home the tremendous earnestness of the fighters. In the latter portion of the melee, when the bookcase fell upon them, F^arnum, big, strong specimen that he is, shot upward from his knee a right uppercut that staggered even the brawny Santschi. It caught him with trip-hammer force, square on the jaw. Many a weaker man would have gone down and out then and there. No more fearless film actor lives than Tom Mix, the Selig cowboy thrill maker. He must be made of steel and rubber, in some mysterious composition guaranteed to resist shock, for in no other way can his comparatively sound constitution and unshattered frame be explained to those who have seen him in action. }ilix once saw the famous Remington picture wherein a cowboy was dragged through the sagebrush by one foot, his crazed pinto beyond all control, and bound for destruction lickety-split. There was nothing for it but that Alix should do this same stunt in his next cowboy act ; and he did, sliding one hundred painful and gravelly yards over an unkind landscape. He emerged, grinning, breathless, weak, with more of the marks of earth upon him than the most enthusiastic nature lover would care to carrj^ His appetite for realism never seems to be satisfied. In another Selig release, as sheriff, it was up to him to be shot and to be saved by his watch. Now a real, good bullet, shot from a real, honest-to-goodness revolver, will not stop at any make of timepiece, not even to scrape acquaintance with an aristocratic Swiss repeater. For the first try-out, Tom got ready with a section of stove plate. Thus armored, the villain let fly at him. Whang ! Out went the muddled j\Iix, with ribs that showed the bruising effect of that terrific jolt for weeks thereafter. Once more he tried the trick, this time using a sandbag to absorb the momentum of the bullet. Even then the drive of the leaden pellet was hard enough to floor him. But Mix eats bullets and inhales the breath thereof. Fle hires an expert shot to lift his tousled locks with their breeze, where the camera must show a narrow escape. Real lead bites chunks from the earth on which he" stands when the Indians are after him. In his daredevil riding he is no more sparing of his own safety. With the camera turning constantly,, so that there was no possibility of a fake being made, Mi.x once jumped into a prairie schooner, rode away at a gallop, which developed into a runaway, and man, wagon, and horses catapulted down into a steep arroyo. The cowboy rider will always carry the deep scars that record his terrible injuries to legs, chest, and arms. In similar fashion, his horse has failed him in a leap from a cliff into the water, and he has emerged from the gravelly surf staggering but game, only to mutter to anxious directors : "Gee, I got a jolt that time !" Bone after bone he has broken, but certainly not so many as would have almost any other living mortal. Perhaps the narrowest escape was related to me while waiting for the stage builders from Chicago to get ready one of the imposing palace sets used in the "Adventures of Kathlyn," in which Tom Santschi, playing opposite to Miss Kathlyn Williams, was to appear. Santschi's close call was no accident, but it came through a peculiar coincidence, dating back to a sham battle in Chicago, from which Santschi was then far removed, at work in the Selig" jungle zoo. During the course of the battle, the supply of blank cartridges ran out, and some genius suggested soap for wad