When the movies were young (1925)

At the Studio 91 The scene being set and rehearsals finished, there were left just the few moments while the property man added the finishing touches to the salt and flour snow (we had graduated from sawdust), to make the costumes wearable. So another girl and I grabbed the lot and rushed into a little Polish tailor shop in the basement next door and borrowed the Polish tailor's sewing machines so that we could put in the necessary hems and pleats. Zip went the sewing machines — there was no time to lose — for we could not afford two days of Russian exiles at three dollars per day. Nine o'clock was the morning hour of bustle and busyness at 1 1 East Fourteenth Street. But the actors in their eagerness to work were on the job long before nine sometimes. They straggled along from all directions. They even came by the horse-drawn surface car whose obliging and curious conductors stopped directly in front of No. II. And so curious became one conductor that he was not able to stand the strain, and he quit his job of jerking Bessie's reins, and got himself a job as "extra." Although the conductor's identity was never fully established, we had strong suspicions that it was Henry Lehrman, an extra who had managed in a very short time to get himself called Pathe, which was good for an Austrian. "Actors" — graduates from various trades and professions of uncertain standing, and actors without acting jobs, lounged all over the place, from the street steps where they basked on mild, sunny days, into the shady hall where they kept cool on hot days; and had they made acquaintance with studio life, they could be found in the privacy of the men's one dressing-room shooting craps — the pastime during the waiting hours.