Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Hollywood — The Band of Hope held up the action of a huge crowd costing hundreds a minute because the sword of one of the characters was not correct (which among so much carelessness seems a little like a gilding of the lily), but many a young woman with a chaw of gum stuck to her palate has wasted more money than Von Stroheim and has ruined all her future prospects of any possible * break/ For there is no mistaking the familiar action, the long, deliberate movement of the chin, the vertical elasticity of the lips, the inwardly turned expression of the eye, as if contemplating the sweetened flow of saliva toward the digestive tract. You cannot mistake it for toffee-eating, nor even for its first cousin, the mastication of a tobacco-plug. In any film the period of which predates Mr Wrigley's birth it is the one anachronism that American audiences cannot fail to perceive, and, tolerant of almost any inaccuracy in European manners or customs, they are intolerant of this. If he averages two days' work a week the ordinary extra can be considered lucky. He earns a salary of £i a day for crowd work and £i ios. if sufficiently distinguished to wear evening-dress. A salary of £2 or £3 a week in America means nothing less than starvation. So that an extra must use his wits if he would not be left behind by his competitors. For instance, a young cavalier in purple velvet confided to Jo : " They called for a lot of us to be picked for this job, 'n then they weeded us out. ' You're no good,' they says to me. * Bad luck ! ' I answers, but I just slips round while they weren't looking and I joins up with the row of accepted ones. Three times they combed us through, and each time they turns me out, but I only says, * Ain't that too bad?' and slips in amongst the picked ones again. And here I am, and I don't know that anybody is complaining of me." A few days later Jo heard the same lad trying to teach his [>39]