Judge — September 17, 1927 — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL NUMBER My Story of the Infant Art As Told by Fesse Zucker to His Venerable Press Agent Petronious Lorentz A famous pose of Camille, as played by Miss Norma Swanson in Sarah Bern- hardt’s great stage success “Abraham Lincoln.” Ca- mille has just discovered that while she was sleep- ing one of the servants stole a molar and she is pretty mad. It is one of the dramatic moments of this great movie. =| REMEMBER ) one bright, y sunshiny morning during the ”Y | early ’90’s I was standing on : J} the sidelines of a movie set watching my first big thriller be unfolded for a yet unsuspecting public, and D. W. Griffith, then known only as a cheerful little fellow who sold hot dogs around the place, turned to me and said: “Jesse, the movies are just in their infancy. At the time I dismissed it as merely another one of the little rascal’s pleasantries, but now that I look back on that famous man’s career I feel that that passing remark was the brightest thing he has ever said. Thirty years later I was sitting in the throne chair of the Sadie Thomp- son room of our magnificent Blare- mount theatre. It was the opening night—our great drama, “God Gave Me § Appeal,” was having its world’s premiere. Naturally I was all a-tremble with excitement. It was a night to be remembered—a night that might have belonged to one of the Cesars of old; the world’s greate: movie executive sitting in the world’s greatest ante-room waiting for the dedication hour of the world’s greatest theater. Suddenly I heard a little squeal of excitement and looking up I discovered Alexander Woollcott, the famous song writer, scooting across the room on his kiddie car. “Well, Jesse,” he giggled with that giggle that won for him the position of chief giggler of the Algon- quin Tribe, “I am prepared to say that the mo are only in their infancy.” I was forced to admit, despite my ex- citement, that the waggish fellow had me there. But those are just some of the vicissitudes a movie executive must foregc My public perhaps will never know to what extremes we have gone to keep the movies in their present delightful stage of infantilism. Several years ago I conceived the idea, with, as some of my humorous colleagues chidingly describe as my unique genius, of the Blaremount school. We found that as our industry expanded and more and more pictures were demanded by a hungry and grateful public that our stock of movie actors and actresses was not adequate, what with the wear and tear of production and _ accidental shootings. Two years ago we had on hand only about sixty-five thousand famous young movie actre taking her rning sex appeal exercises. Slow, in this intimate portrait, was caught giving one of her ears an early work-out. Sarah Blow, eight hundred and ninety pounds of well made inhale-exhale actresses. We had many amateurs from which to choose, but frequently these youngsters would have strange ideas of art and literature, which they had brought with them to Hollywood, and we found that these eccentricities often inter- fered with their work. That is why I founded the Blaremount school for movie actors. Experience was not necessary—in fact we found that deaf and dumb school graduates learned our methods most read although deaf- 18 ness Wi requisite. By training these young hopefuls in our own peculiar technique we have been able to insure to the public a school of movie actors who will carry on the tradition that has made America the center of the motion picture indus- try. We sequestered these youngsters from any outside influence and while we gave them extra-curriculum in- struction and taught them to read and write, if they insisted upon it, under- stand that we did not encourage this radical tendency to such a degree that any Blaremount actor or actress will ever betray the infant art by any adult demonstration. The infant art shall remain infantile until the last toe dancer vanishes from Broadway. More recently we have been bothered by our staff of writers, but I solved that problem, too, by the Blaremount Test. As most of my readers know, all the prominent writers and play wrights in the world, with the excep- tion of Heywood Broun, now live in Hollywood in a special reservation pre- pared for them by the Blaremount studios. At first these writers, fresh from their journalistic typewriters, caused us much anxiety by producing errati: and, in a few isolated cases, origi- nal manuscripts. However, we evolved a little machine called the Blaremount Vacuum, which has been entirely suc- cessful. Now when a popular writer enters our reservation he is given a thorough going-over with this machine which uncannily withdraws all notes, fountain pens, memory books and ideas from his person, so that the new writer enters the reservation as pure and innocent of ideas a freshly-squeezed lemon. A few of the older ones object, but we give them little stacks of hun- dred dollar bills bound with snapshots of Otto Kahn, as experience proved to us that nothing contents the infant writer more than these curious little bundles of money. The directors, too, are subjected to this vacuum test once a month, in (Continued on page 32) not a _ necessary pre- comicbooks.com.