Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Hollywood — The Qamera-man if you understand, and then somehow I got myself back again." Conversations on the movie set are often interrupted at the most interesting moment. Harry had to climb hurriedly back to his elevation. Rumour said that Harry's two-years souse was the result of domestic disappointment. At one time he and his wife had been sitting in an hotel on Broadway, New York, throwing diamonds out of the window to see the crowds scramble for them. He had been induced to settle most of his money on his wife, who had then died suddenly, leaving the whole amount to her lover. This was the shock that had driven Mr Hitzler to the solace of the whisky bottle. " I was turning in the days when Goldwyn and Lasky and a lot of other of these millionaires had only a hired garage to make pictures in. And that wasn't so long ago, neither," he said. "We played a fine game on Schenck, Lasky, and De Mille the other day at a swell dinner. We told them they all had to make speeches on the future of the movies and we were going to shoot them with sound. We brought in the lights and the cameras and the micro and set up the business just like the whole was real. I tell you they were all as nervous as cats. They stammered and got red and white. But there wasn't an inch of film in the cameras, and the micro wasn't connected up either. . . ." " D'l ever tell you how we got through the English censorship in the War? " he said, on another occasion. "We had to show all our takings to a coupl'a haw-haw colonels or something. They pranced into the projection-room slung round with great bags with locks on them. And every time we came to something they didn't like they'd say : " * Cut out that bit, Mistah Operator.' " And we'd solemnly snip it off and give it to them, and they'd shove it into the bags and lock it up so's it shouldn't [227]