We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
48 When the Movies were Young
"Then if I promise that if you fall down as a director, you can have your acting job back, you will put on a moving picture for us?"
"Yes, then I'd be willing."
It was called "The Adventures of Dolly."
Gossip around the studio had it that the story was a "lemon." Preceding directors at the studio had sidestepped it. Dolly, in the course of the story, is nailed into a barrel by the gypsies who steal her; the barrel secreted in the gypsy wagon; the horses start off at breakneck speed; the barrel falls off the wagon, rolls into the stream, floats over a waterfall, shoots the rapids, and finally emerges into a quiet pool where some boys, fishing, haul it ashore, hear the child's cries, open the barrel, and rescue Dolly.
Not a very simple job for an amateur. But David Griffith wasn't worried. He could go back to acting were the picture no good. Mr. Arthur Marvin was assigned as camera man. There were needed for the cast: Dolly, her mother and father, the gypsy man, the gypsy man's wife, and two small boys.
Upstairs in the tiny projection room pictures were being run for Mr. Griffith's enlightenment. He was seeing what Biograph movies looked like. Saw some of old man McCutcheon's, and some of Wally McCutcheon's, and Stanner E. V. Taylor's one and only.
That evening he said to me: "You'll play the lead in my first picture — not because you're my wife — but because you're a good actress."
"Oh, did you see Mr. Taylor's picture?"
"Yes."
"How was it?"