Screenland (Nov 1938-Apr 1939)

Tyrone Power's Location Diary continued from Poge 31 company and although we will work in Pineville, the town hasn't enough accommodations for all of us. I found a room in a private home on the outskirts of Noel, Missouri, a picturesque summer resort town in the heart of the Ozarks, eleven miles away from Pineville by pavement, eight miles by gravel. Others of the troupe found nice accommodations here, too. Director King has a nice room in a beautiful white house, commanding" a grand view of the little town and the majestic hills. (They're called mountains down here, but I mustn't take the word too seriously. In California we have mountains that are really colossal.) The rest of the troupe got in by train today, Hank Fonda, Donlevy, Nancy Kelly, Randy Scott, and the rest. The entire Ozark country gathered at the little brick station in Noel to welcome them. Sidney Brown, our company business manager, had come ahead of us and had been busy throughout this region for weeks, hunting out places for the troupe to find room and board. They are all comfortably located, now, though scattered over the countryside. Our hosts are extremely hospitable. My own landlord tells me they've been having pretty hard times down this way — the arrival of our company was an economic Godsend — but there is no talk of defeat, no crying of the blues and no whining. August 29th Actual filming started today. Our first scenes were made on the "old Crowder farm." It's a small place, run by the widow Crowder, who is one of the kindliest people I've met. The place offers so much scenically that George Barnes, our ace cameraman who is a veteran of many scenic locations in his time, broke down and turned *on the exclamations. Naturally, Duke Green, our technicolor cameraman, was all het up about the color possibilities and had his camera set up in record time. It got pretty hot during the day, so Mrs. Crowder dipped up a big wooden bucket of clear, cold spring water for us. I've never had wine that tasted better, and the rest of us who worked today, Randy Scott, Hank Fonda, Brian Donlevy and Nancy Kelly agreed with me. The work seemed to me to go pretty well, and when the end of the day came Henry King had a big smile on his face. That means he's satisfied ! I hope we can keep it up. King is a great guy and it's because of folks like him and Darryl Zanuck that I have learned to get over the haunting taste of beans, coffee and pie — which i got on the cuff in a New York Deanery, while waiting for a chance to get on the stage, which opened the patch to Hollywood. No, I can't ever forget that, and I'll be eternally grateful to those -who gave me the opportunity to work for something more than beans and coffee. August 3 0th — September 2nd Mrs. Crowder's two grown-up sons went to work for us today as bit players. For a sequence in the film, we had to toss a bomb into a big, rambling farm house and set it afire. (Not actually, just smoke to simulate flames). It became the duty of the Crowder boys to help us form an old-fashioned bucket brigade to put out the fire in their own home. They told me how our business manager had leased the farm, put a new roof on the house since a new roof treated with Hollywood's special paint looked more ancient than their old roof, and how all the neighboring farmers had stood around while Hollywood workmen built a duplicate of a bedroom in the farmhouse back of the barn. It was here they had to film the death scene of my film mother, Jane Darwell. Sheriff Bone and his hard-working deputies roped off the front yard and the barnyard of the farm so the crowds would know where to stand \yhile we were filming. The crowds, by the way, instead of making noises and spoiling scenes, were as helpful and co-operative as humanly possible. I've never known folks so mobile and easy to manage. I haven't been on many locations (except for "Suez" and "Lloyds of London"), but I venture to say no veteran of the screen — or, for that matter, the stage, ever saw such wellmannered crowds. There were days when as many as 50,000 people watched us making a scene. September 3rd This is a special day on my calendar because I attended my first dance in Noel. It was at Shadow Lake where Mr. Marx Cheney runs a restful and picturesque resort. There is a big dance floor and dining room, overlooking crystal-clear Elk River. "Hank," Randy, Nancy, and the rest of us danced, not only among ourselves but with the girls of Noel. I've never been in a given area so crowded with goodlooking girls before in my life. It's true we have beautiful girls in Hollywood, but they are brought there from every place in the world. In the Ozarks, they just come by it naturally. Beauty, here, is pretty unanimous. There are plenty of autograph seekers, but it's fun writing in their books, on scraps of paper, hats, pocketbooks or anything they happen to have handy, because they are so appreciative. But the crowds — and the town is always crowded, for a mile or two around Noel one has difficulty in finding parking room — never bother us during mealtime. They wait until we are through and then become one of us for the evening, doing their best to make our stay a pleasant and happy one. September 4th These next days are to be eventful ones. We're going to film the great train robbery and stage the big jail break from the little, old red-brick courthouse in Liberty, Mis souri. We won't be in Liberty, actually, but in Pineville, which looks today more like yesterday's Liberty than the modern town of Liberty does. It took considerable work to make the town look that way. We built a big hotel, saloon, marshall's office, newspaper building, took down all the telephone poles and lines and put the lines underground. Old-fashioned board sidewalks were built over concrete ones and, what will never cease to amaze the visitor to Pineville, to say nothing of its citizens, the town's pavement was buried beneath six inches of dirt. Only last December, after generations of living with dusty, dirt streets, Pineville proudly unveiled its paved streets. And just a few months later, Hollywood's miracle finger found it out (after Director King had flown over 15,000 miles in search for just such a colorful, unspoiled countryside as this) and put thousands of truckloads of dirt over the pavement. Of course everything will be restored. The only thing we will leave behind will be the money spent with the good folk of this region and the thousands that the tourists are bringing in while we are here. September 5th Henry King has an uncanny ability to discover and uncover things. Imagine finding" a ten-mile stretch of railroad on the old Frisco line near Southwest City — eight miles from Noel ! It was here he decided to film the great train robbery. King also discovered an old engine and three passenger cars that had been used in the time of the James Boys. They were all reworked, repainted and put in top condition for the filming. All this shop work was done in Little Rock. I never will forget the thrill of standing atop the coal tender with two big singleaction 45's. in my hand while the oldfashioned train shook, swayed and rumbled down the track — all the while the technicolor camera was recording the scene. I kept thinking of that other time, years back, when Jesse James really held up a train, only a few miles from the exact spot where we were now re-enacting that scene in color. The roaring fire in the firebox threw out a red-hot glare at every shovel of coal. I don't know whether it Garbo, back to make more Hollywood fil hairdressers denounced as outrageously ns, meets the press, wearing a hair-do that out of style, and heavy ribbed stockings. 71