Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood their values moving from their legs to their throats. Exsailors or farmers saw themselves for ever cut off from posing as millionaires in the future even if they kept their jobs. Who knew whether California, Kansas, Louisiana, or New York might not become accent-conscious and demand that their films should be produced by native sons ? The North and South might come again into conflict. And England, of course, would be asking for its own mincing vowels. Over the stars a nightmare of the microphone loomed like a critical and implacable ear. As for the extras, the twenty thousand hopeful, they could but see in those great sound-proof walls that mounted slowly before their eyes the death of the great spectacular scene and the banishment from film production of surging crowds such as gave them the more stable part of their meagre pittance. More authors were hurried from New York — young dramatists who, for £60 a week, were set to write dialogues and conversations that should be fitted into stories already continuized or for films that were already in the process of being * shot/ This was called * dubbing.' Continuity-men began to shiver in their shoes to think that in the near future they would have to write their literary hash a correct length ; for it was clear to the meanest intelligence that, no matter how one might cut a silent film from twelve reels down to seven, no such scissors legerdemain could be practised with the dialogue printed in light waves along the edge of the film itself. Hollywood was a strange mixture of jubilance and dismay. The early secrets of movietone were zealously guarded. Here again, as in the case of Charlie Chaplin, we could feel hopeful, since, with their usual spendthrift haste, the studio had imported from New York a prominent theatrical producer at a snug salary some six months before his services could be utilized. He had little to do except to draw his pay, [276]