Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Hollywood — The ^Artist of the Film and staff protested that American audiences would not recognize English officers if they did not wear khaki. A minor fixed star, formerly a Russian general, told us that once he had been appointed as technical expert on a film to be called The Volga Boatmen, " They wanted to put it into the present day and make it a Bolshevist film," he said. " But I told them that Volga boatmen haven't existed for over fifty years. They got all the details and all the costumes wrong. Oh, absolutely. And because I really tried to get things right and tried to insist they paid me my money and turned me out. I tell you that the job of the technical expert is to say : * Yes, that's all right ; yes, that's all right ' — whatever they do. We call them * yes men,' over here, and that's about the truth, too." On another film we met an earnest Frenchwoman, trying to supervise the manners of the French aristocracy. " I've just managed to stop Menjou as a count from giving large cups of cafe au lait to his solicitors, who call on him at eleven in the morning. But I can't stop him from having a wedding in the drawing-room. I tell him that he must be married at the mairie and at the church, but he says that American audiences won't recognize a swell wedding if it isn't in a drawing-room." On the sets of Fairbanks' Twenty Tears After everybody, hearing that we came from Paris, said to us : " Oh, this film is going to be a masterpiece. Why, we've got the best French expert on the costumes of the period to supervise it. We brought him specially from Paris." Later we met a grizzled old Frenchman, showing in spite of his years the stiff vestiges of his military training, who sat in a labelled chair staring rather gloomily at the heterodox proceedings. " I was in my Paris studio," he said, in a plaintive and puzzled voice, " and Monsieur Fairbank he come to me and [187]