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W. C. Fields
picture enterprises on Long Island. He signed with Hearst believing he was to edit the Cosmopolitan magazine, but when he reported for work Hearst sent him out to the studio. "I don't know anything about pictures," Le Baron told him. "Neither do the people that are making them," replied Hearst. Hoping to be fired quickly, Le Baron converted Frank Borzage, a leading man Hearst had imported from Hollywood, into a director and turned out a spectacularly quick film treatment of a book he'd liked, Fannie Hurst's Humoresque. The picture bore the hallmarks of an ignoramus, was hailed as a classic, and was widely showered with gold medals. Le Baron decided that the medium had possibilities ; to bone up, he attended several movies, since he had previously seen only a handful, all of which put him to sleep.
Le Baron and Fields made a felicitous team of employer-employee. Le Baron thought Fields was hilariously funny, both personally and professionally, and was content to put up with a great deal of bullying, minor fraud, and humbug. Fields, for his part, trusted Le Baron, insofar as he trusted any human being, and was amenable to limited counsel and direction. Among Le Baron's first acts, upon acquiring the stormy petrel of the Follies, was to assign a director with whom Fields might work in some semblance of peace. Looking around, he decided that a new man named Gregory La Cava and Fields had many points in common. La Cava had come to Paramount as a gag writer from the New York Sunday Herald, for which he had done a cartoon strip with Milt Gross. He was interested in animated cartoons, and trained most of Disney's first artists. His first directing job for Le Baron was on an automobile racing picture starring Richard Dix. The original director on the project had withdrawn, saying that he knew nothing whatever about racing. "What do you know about racing?" Le Baron asked La Cava. "Everything," replied La Cava quietly. It later developed that he'd never seen an automobile race in his
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