W. C. Fields : his follies and fortunes (1949)

CHAPTER NINETEEN T JLhi he debut in motion pictures of the man who was to become that industry's most famous comedian took place on Long Island in 1925. D. W. Griffith, a nickelodeon pioneer who was noted principally for "spectacles," many of them quite stark, had been assigned by Paramount to do a film version of Poppy, starring Carol Dempster, a winsome cinema ingenue of the period. It was the custom of movies then, as now, to strive for popularity on the basis of their "stars," with the result that, through the years, the public has been treated to such masterworks of casting as Wallace Beery as Long John Silver, Robert Walker as Johannes Brahms, Shirley Temple as Henry the Eighth, George Arliss as John L. Sullivan, and Martha Raye as Camille. Paramount, meditating on Poppy, regretfully discarded Fatty Arbuckle and "Freckles" Barry, and turned to Fields as a last resort. It was an inevitable choice; Fields had made the part and could play it in his sleep. Paramount rather hoped that he would, for it was the company's plan to trim Eustace McGargle to the bone so that Miss Dempster could shine the more brilliantly for her following — a mixture of shopgirls and male equivalents of bobby soxers. The plan ganged badly agley, as the poet Burns had suggested that it might. Fields appeared at Paramount's Long Island studio IQ2