Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star -dust in Hollywood carrying one of them things around he might get the idea you was lazy." " That's true too," agreed the first woman. " You gotta watch your step sure, or you'll soon fade out." " You gotta watch your step." Directors may waste thousands on shooting twelve reels when they need no more than seven, or on transporting location companies to dried-up lakes ; on buying books that are impracticable as films, or on keeping stars soaking in ice-cold tanks for several nights at £300 a night and then cutting out the whole scene ; but they do not waste money on extras. The extra who does not watch her step goes head first into the dustbin even more ruthlessly than does the outworn fluffy girl. Supply and demand : or, woe betide the extra who, in a seventeenth-century film, has an unreflecting chaw at her gum. Chewing-gum is the assistant director's bugbear. The much-advertised product of Mr Wrigley which spots the platforms of the New York Underground so thickly that one walks as if on rubber flagstones, the chewing-gum that the casual labourer or the children leave sticking to all the undersides of mantels, chairs, and tables, the chewing-gum that saves American lovers from conversation, yet lends their minds but a single thought, the chewing-gum whose minty flavour apparently assists the act of worship and gives Aimee Mcpherson's revival audiences the expression of cudruminative cattle, has cost the movies many a million dollars. The conscientious assistant director must have nightmares of chewing-gum. In his dreams gigantic jaws champ rhythmically — he may imagine that he has become a divided personality, one half of which is Mr Wrigley himself pouring out the hygienic blessings of his gum upon the eagerly receptive States, while the other half is trying to control a crowd of one million extras who chaw relentlessly. Von Stroheim, Hollywood's most sticklerish director, is notorious for having [238]