Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Hollywood — The Ba?id of Hope It was received in a dull silence. " I don't think much of that," said a woman's voice behind us. " Silly and ugly I call it." We turned and stared at her. She was the apotheosis of Oshkosh femininity grown older. How can the movies improve with such as the chief critics of cinema values ? We rose from our seats to congratulate the young author. " Thank you," he answered. " I have been trying to get the studios interested in my ideas for a long time. They would not listen to me at all. But now that I have satirized them, and have shown how real films may be produced for little money, they have given me a good contract, to keep my mouth shut." He at any rate had his * break/ But he was no extra — he was not one of the twenty thousand hopefuls. He was an inventive young man with ideas and capacity. The other twenty thousand whom he had depicted by a single image were what? Camera-fodder, little more. Yet each, like a soldier of Napoleon, thought that he carried in his knapsack the baton of a marshal, or, in this case, of a star. " Some day," each thinks, " I shall catch the director's eye." In The Docks of New York the lads plugged one another with a will, each dreaming of his break. "Would it come this time? " In the big ballroom scene which Harry Hitzler was shooting every dancer moved under Griff's eye. Was the break coming now ? At night on Santa Monica beach in the travesty of Conrad each Moslem pirate paraded a stained skin with the ever-present hope that some extra vigorous gesture, some unparalleled ferocity of expression, would bring him out beyond his comrades. But, alas ! the casting-bureau had them in its firm grip. On its sheets, more remorseless than those of the Recording Angel — since the casting-bureau clerk never drops a tear, l>35]