Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Hollywood — The ^Authors a practitioner. For his first story he had received a bonus in addition to his normal weekly salary, although the finished product resembled the original little more than the everprevalent popular and democratic tomato-sauce resembles the fresh, refined real tomato. He had also been allotted the larger cubicle vacated by Miss Wynne. For his second play he received, we understood, some £400, and felt so wealthy that he was able to move from the modest bungalow dictated by his Eastern ambitions into a real house, to buy a Buick car (that certificate of gentility), and to hire a Japanese chauffeur. The task of earning this extra £400 had been little more than the perception of an incongruous contrast in the personalities of two stars, that of Noah Beery with that of Florence Vidor, the smartest of Society types. Then he had devised a milieu in which these two could naturally meet and love, Chinatown. After that, with his previous experience of a story in the hands of the continuity, he left the plot almost virgin in blankness. Clearly Ornitz was learning the ropes; whatever the story he had written might be, it would have come out like the majority of its predecessors, a compromise with Oshkosh femininity. So he saved himself the trouble by writing as little as he could. Many of the Chinatown scenes were taken at night. The Chinatown streets had been hastily transformed from a German set, which before that had been a street in a French provincial town, and before that goodness knows what. Now and again we would meet him wandering disconsolately through this false slum. He seemed to be suffering from an evil fascination, attracted like the murderer to the spot of his crime, and from time to time he noted and shuddered at Oshkoshian alterations, even to the slight sketch he had provided. " TheyVe gone and made Aaron a Harvard graduate who's gone wrong," he muttered. " I know that he will end as the long-lost son of a millionaire. " [127]