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Ways to Film Success? 223
into the talking pictures, but the ending has been more pleasant than one who knew nothing about acting or talkies had any right to expect.
I had no dreams and no ambitions to go on the films. I love New York and the life on Broadway and Fifth Avenue. One night I was at the Central Park Casino with a party. In walked a man who was well known to everyone but me as a big executive in Radio Pictures. Within a few hours he had offered me a contract to study for pictures in Hollywood, I could have been no more surprised if he had walked in and offered me the Koh-i-noor diamond.
At the end of January I signed a contract with David Selznick, and at the end of February they had cast me as leading lady to Richard Dix in The Roar of the Dragon. This was another piece of colossal good fortune, for there is a saying in HoUjrwood that it is lucky to play opposite Richard DLx. There is something about him which helps a novice, and Hollywood youngsters aU long to be in his pictures. I know why.
Dix taught me more in the few weeks spent on making that picture than all the directors, assistant-directors, camera-men, make-up artists and other experts had instilled in me during the weeks of training. Though I cannot thank him for the fact that I ever came to Hollywood it is entirely due to his help that I shall stay here.
•'I DID IT BY ACCIDENT"
—by RICHARD ARLEN
{Paramount Player)
r ITERALLY, I got into pictures by accident ; in fact, I was carried ■*-^ in on a stretcher.
I had left America before she entered the fighting, to enlist as a member of the Canadian Flying Corps. I had been to France ; I had fought ; and in 1919 I found myself free, white and twenty. A little too free, indeed, because even in those spacious days livings were not so easy to pick up. For a time the Texas oilfields gave me some sort of existence, but eventually I arrived in Hollywood with just twenty-two dollars and quite a lot of hope. It really is lucky that hope springs so eternally, because I was down to my last cent while making the rounds of the studios. For three weeks, indeed, I could allow myself only fourteen cents a day as living expenses.
Practically my last dish of pork and beans had gone when some kindly being gave me a job on the Paramount lot. I had been striving to break my way into films with dreams of starring parts and bright lights ; I was in films all right, but my job was in one of the film laboratories and consisted largely of delivering messages on a motor-cycle.
That machine was the indirect author of my eventual success. I was speeding down one of the " streets " in the Paramount Studios when I achieved a wonderful skid and ended up in a heap against the wall with a broken leg. There is a hospital on the Paramount lot, and they took me there. I don't know what guiding star brought one of the casting directors to my bedside, but there he arrived, and I suppose it was sympathy more than anything else which prompted him to promise me a job as an extra when I recovered.