Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood Twenty thousand extras, but work for one thousand at the utmost. One day we received an invitation to the private view of a film called The Life and Death of a Hollywood Extra. It was an experimental work by a young Serbian camera-man, who had not only the common ambition to reform the movies, but a dash of practical initiative as well. We were brought to an artist's studio. Men and women of the semi-intellectual classes were crowding politely together on insufficient seats. The darkness closed over us, and the amateur projector began to flicker its uncertain images on the screen. The Life and Death of a Hollywood Extra, an ambitious little scenario, had been produced with a capital of only twenty pounds. There was but one actor, and we understand that two arc-lamps and a camera provided the total equipment. Twenty pounds against the millions of the big movie corporations ; one small Serb pulling a long nose at Mr Goldwyn, Mr Thalberg, and Mr Lasky, and all the other magnates. Shadows, silhouettes, grotesques, cut-paper mechanisms ; cubism, futurism ; states of mind suggested by symbols, by superimposed images, by strange and novel tricks of light and shade. The figure of the extra, his forehead marked and numbered by the finger of Hollywood's deity, the castingbureau, pervaded the strange fantasy, at first hopeful, later sinking into despair, repudiated continually from studio doors by the relentless notice : " No casting to-day." Waiting ; waiting at the telephone for the call to work that never came, dreaming of the * break ' (magic word !) that should herald the fortune denied to him. Death at last by starvation and a grotesque ascent to heaven on a mechanical funicular railway, to be welcomed there by a glittering notice : " Casting today." Such was this little film, witty, full of new ideas and pattern-work, opening up fields of pictorial research. I>34]