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for September 19 3 1
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The Smart Screen Magazine
THE EDITOR'S PAGE
ELP, help!
In the July issue of this journal, on this very page, I bragged about the way we pick 'em — how we point to a promising newcomer and say, "There's a future star!" and — presto! — it happens. And I asked our readers to speak right out with any suggestions they might have and I'd guarantee to put over the candidate. And now —
Letters, letters, letters! Here's a sample:
"I want to call your attention to a friend of mine. She dances, plays the banjo, and shows marked ability for handling even difficult dramatic or comic parts. I will appreciate anything you can do to put her over."
And another:
"I am a young man of twenty-two. I have been trying to break in to the movies for a long time, but no luck. Now I feel sure you will help me, as you promise 'Fame and fortune positively guaranteed in two years'. Please let me know what you can do."
I take it all back! I was only kidding. Little did I think when I frivolously penned those words that they would be acted upon in a big way. I can't put people on the screen. I wish I could. Then I'd be a great, big producer giving orders to Norma Shearer and Clara Bow and Clarke Gable — wouldn't I love to give orders to Clarke Gable! No. All I can do is to call the producers' kind attention to the talent that is running around right under their noses in Hollywood. And hope they will give that talent the break it deserves.
It isn't as easy as it looks, boys and girls. Once in Hollywood, once in the studio, once, even, under contract, it still isn't easy. There's Robert Allen, for instance. He's a handsome young man who screens like a million dollars in real, not merely movie money. He was posing for advertisements — you know, one of those dashing lads who is pictured gazing into space and pondering about his Dream Girl, who uses the right kind of rouge, powder, tooth-paste, and chewing gum — when a Warner scout saw and signed him. Allen screens well. He's a college graduate. An athlete. He has a pleasant, well-trained voice. He's in Hollywood. And yet the most you have seen of him on the screen is a glimpse here and there. He's been
Cartoon by Eliot Keen
Star's Maid: "Wait, Miss Lovely — you forgot your eyelashes!" i
one of the boys surrounding the beautiful heroine. He's had a line or two to speak. But that's about all. I had a letter from him the other day thanking me for picking him as a possible winner. I hope he won't mind my quoting from it: "Am peering into a cloudy horizon at the present writing — about to perform a graceful hyperbola from this into some more favorable sphere of the nebular system, hoping en route to be transformed from a faint flickering satellite into a nice new bright shiny star."
I hope so, too. Robert Allen seems to have all that it takes. But meanwhile, he has a long pull ahead of him. I hope he makes it. But the "friend who plays the banjo," mentioned above, had better not count on me to help her be a movie star. She'd better not throw away her banjo — yet.
Delight Evans