When the movies were young (1925)

58 When the Movies were Young Ruth Hart, Jeanie Macpherson, Flora Finch, Anita Hendry, Dorothy West, Eleanor Kershaw (Mrs. Tom Ince), and Violet Mersereau helped out occasionally. Gladys Egan, Adele DeGarde, and Johnny Tansy played the important child parts. Though I speak of playing "principal parts," no one had much chance to get puffed up, for an actor having finished three days of importance usually found himself on the fourth day playing "atmosphere," the while he decorated the back drop. But no one minded. They were a goodnatured lot of troupers and most of them were sincerely concerned in what they were doing. David had a happy way of working. He invited confidence and asked and took suggestions from any one sufficiently interested to make them. His enthusiasm became quite infectious. In the beginning Marion Leonard and I alternated playing "leads." She played the worldly woman, the adventuress, and the melodramatic parts, while I did the sympathetic, the wronged wife, the too-trusting maid, waiting, always waiting, for the lover who never came back. But mostly I died. Our director, already on the lookout for a new type, heard of a clever girl out at the Vitagraph, who rode a horse like a western cowboy and who had had good movie training under Mr. Rainous. He wanted to see her on the screen before an audience. Set up in a store on Amsterdam Avenue and 160th Street was a little motion picture place. It had a rough wooden floor, common kitchen chairs, and the reels unwound to the tin-panny shriek of a pianola. After some watchful waiting, the stand outside the theatre — the sort of thing sandwich men carry — finally announced "The Dispatch Bearer," a Vitagraph with Florence Law