Screenland (May-Jul 1926)

SCREENLAND Ethel Doherty Climbs to Success (Continued from page 21) something which perhaps you haven't, and which may be the very thing that's keeping you in the rut out of which she has climbed. That was determination. She set her mind on breaking into the movies via the scenario path, and hell and high water couldn't — but here's how it happened. Like many others, Ethel had been adding to the troubles of studio scenario editors by sending in dozens of quite unsolicited manuscripts. The fact that they always came back made Uncle Sam several dollars richer and Miss Doherty several degrees more determined. Realizing that she was assaulting the citadel from the wrong angle, like a good general she changed her tactics and planned an attack from within. While still keeping on with her teaching, she studied shorthand o' nights and, not having a husband to dictate to her, she pressed her mother into that service. At the end of the school year she felt herself qualified to disfigure anybody's letters, so she looked up the addresses of several film companies in the phone book and hied her forth on her new attempt to conquer the enemy. And now Lady Luck, who has a fondness for grit, saw to it that there should be a vacancy in the stenographic department of the big Lasky studio in Hollywood; and Ethel grabbed it quick. Six months she toiled there, and hard months they were, too. As she herself admits, she wasn't a very good stenographer, but she could spell and she knew what the writers were talking about when they used big words. "And here's something else that was hard," she reminisced, while I held my pencil poised, waiting to know the worst. "Some ill-bred people enjoy making a stenographer feel that she is in a menial position — do you know what I mean? I had never experienced anything like it in my life, and of course it hurt. I tell you this because you are going to write a story directed to ambitious girls, and it's just as well to know ahead of time what you're going to be up against. There is no royal road to success in the movies — ■ unless you have a pull, which I never had." She paused for a moment, and I silently wished that the "ambitious girls" could catch the spirit of DO which was expressed in her wide-set, fearless eyes and the strong line of her chin. Then she told how a friend in the cutting department had let her help cut a picture on nights and Sundays. At first she just rolled up the film after the cutter had pulled it apart, taken out the necessary scenes, and patched it together again. Later she was entrusted with cutting whole episodes "on her own", under the cutter's supervision. "So, six months after I entered the stu.' dio," she went on, "when they were looking about for somebody to go with Penrhyn Stanlaws as his cutter and script assistant, I drew the place, because I was prepared. Then began an intensive course lasting nearly five years in the best place of all to study the method of making pictures. I was on the set on every picture, doing the mechanical work of keeping the script, giving the camera boys numbers, keeping my eye on a million and one details of costume and matching action from the long shot to the close-up, keeping track of props, in which hand they were carried by the players, and so on. All the time I was studying the director's methods, for my own benefit — seeing how he used business to bring out the drama in action instead of words. I cut the picture in my own time off the set — nights and Sundays while we were shooting — and finished it after we were through with the actual camera work and before the next picture began. "It was a strenuous, absorbing, intensive five years. No one could stand the strain unless she loved it; but I am in better health today than when I was teaching school. My friend and I have often laughed at ourselves when we caught each other singing and whistling about the silent laboratory on Sundays, working while the rest of the world played. We had to admit that it was more fun cutting a picture than going to see a football game or throwing a party. "But that's the thing every girl isn't willing to do. It is singleness of purpose and interest that gets you anywhere. If a 'beau' is of more importance than geting the picture done on time — well, of course! Many an engagement I have had to break at the last minute, because I would have to work at night. And some friends I have lost, because they were unwilling to believe that it was true that I had to work. "While doing all this, I never lost sight of the ambition to write. Whenever I had a breathing spell between pictures — waiting for titles to come through, or perhaps a few precious days when the starting date of a picture was delayed for some reason — Iturned instantly to my stories. I had my portable typewriter in the cutting-room and I could lose myself in a story in no time." After cutting and acting as script clerk for a number of Paramount directors, Ethel was assigned to the James Cruze unit, and did this work for him for a year and a half, cutting ten of his big films. By this time she felt that she was making good headway in her fight for recognition, but she wasn't satisfied to remain a film cutter, so she decided to make a frontal attack, as they say in West Point. Cornering one of the production supervisors one day, she told him she wanted a chance to prove that she had "story sense". Apparently she told him the idea, or else he was impressed by the set of her aw when she had him in the corner; but whatever the reason, the fact remains that soon afterwards this supervisor asked her casually one day if she would like to write the screen adaptation of "The Vanishing American". You can imagine whether or not she wanted to do it! This picture was one of the big plums of the year, a story which many of the experts would have given their eye teeth to do; and her she was, a com"parative unknown, asked if she would "like" to do it! That day is marked with red ink on Ethel's life calendar! Well, she fixed up Zane Grey's tale of the noble red man so that Richard Dix and Lois Wilson could make it into a beautiful and successful motion picture "special" — ■ and she helped them do it, too. She went on location with the company, out into the desert of Arizona, nearly two hundred miles from a railroad. If she had worked hard before, in the days when she was just a script clerk and cutter, she did it twice over out there surrounded by heat, dust and injuns. Why? Because at last she had found her niche in pictures; she had forced the citadel to make terms. After five long years of the hardest kind of detail work, at last she had succeeded in breaking through into the ranks of the successful. 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