Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood back to social respectability to get the child again. That is my story. Only a simple bit of life. But it is somewhat different from the ordinary movie plot, I think. And Von Sternberg is taking it on as soon as he has finished The Docks of New York. I was glad to get him, because he is a good director ; he has artistic and realistic ideas, and wants to do things differently. But you know that continuity-man of his. Have you noticed how he always is trying to drag Von Sternberg down to the banal, always with his mind on the box office ? And he has my story to make over. First they say : * Look here, Sam, weVe just done a story with that kind of atmosphere in it ; we can't do two, one after the other, exactly alike.' And so they have a brilliant idea. They are going to set it in Vienna — 1850 — and they are going to open the story with a carnival. Hell ! What have I to do with a carnival in 1850? Then they say: * Look here, Sam, we can't make her exactly a street-walker ; we'll just have to make it so she's poor and can't nourish the kid properly.' Then they say : * You know, old man, this unmarried-mother stuff won't go with the great American public, so we'll have to make it seem like she was seduced by the young man of the house; then he gets killed by accident, or something, and she has lost her secret marriage licence. But in the end, after she has worked up and got the child back, he turns up and proves that she was married to him after all.' Now what do you think of that ? " But that is the way these movie stories get made. And I'm going to get a thousand dollars' bonus on it, so I have to keep my mouth shut, because I've got a wife and kids over here. And to think that some of us come across imagining that we are the wise boys and are going to reform the movies ! Bah ! " "We lunched with a supervisor the other day," I said, " and he told us that you were all making the folk-art of [122]