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The CLOWN turns RINGMASTER Larry Semon now a 'Director
As Told to JJ thai Vincent Wilcox
"it**
^HAT admonition sums up my philosophy of life. I have evolved it through encountering some most disheartening obstacles, and I believe, overcoming them by grimly refusing to be beaten regardless of the consequences.
No one in the motion picture profession it seems to me, had more to overcome than I. I was born and reared right on the stage, for my parents owned their own show and travelled the country, back in the days when dance halls and tent shows were quite common, in the West. My first recollections are of scene shifting and shifting for myself, which was not a very happy life. Being born with a singing voice, it was up to me to earn a living when still a little fellow, singing between the regular acts of the show. And the practical education which I received from fellow actors, listening to them recite their lines and recount their travels, was a good one indeed. I recall that one winter the entire troupe
C[ Larry Semon and Doro' thy Dwan in his Col' lapsible Six. Larry is now directing Eddie Cantor.
G[ Larry was a famous cartoonist on the T^ew Tor\ Sun — he wrote his own scenarios — he played the leading parts — he pic\ed out one of the prettiest girls in Hollywood for a wife. That's hoiv to be a director.
was stranded in San Francisco. Wc went hungry that season and my bed was more often in a loft than anywhere else, while the comforts of home were conspicuous by their total absence. These sufferings that we endured made my parents determine to take me from the stage. I was sent to my relatives in Georgia, where I had two years of schooling. While there I met with an injury in a football game that affected my voice. Then my parents insisted that I should study art, for which I had showed some talent.
At the age of eighteen my name was fairly well known in cartooning circles in New York. One day while sketching on a motion picture lot, a suggestion of mine was well received by a picture company and an opportunity was given me to direct a one-reel comedy. I accepted the offer and received the munificent sum of sixty dollars for writing, directing and acting the comedy. (Continued on page 78)
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