Photoplay Magazine Cover — page 24: what you’re looking at

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

Larry Semon ia no John Barrymore, but he ian't kidding himaclf, and thats a gfreat start He may say he's crazy. but heasn't. If it's cTazy te get $100,000 a year to stop custard piesa, bring on your bakeries It’s No Laughing Matter This business of making comedies OU'VE got to be crazy to do it,” says Larry Semon I'll say you do! A fat man stood on a platform about twenty feet high and dropped a large pail filled with very gooey. smeary, thick soapsuds on the unprotected and innocent head of another fat man below. The pail, which had been previously broken and tied up with string, broke and the soapsuds Niagaraed all over the man’s head and eyes and mouth and nose and ears and down his open shirt front, and seeped through his collar and trickled down his back. Then they took a big towel and wiped him off and dried his hair and brushed it, so that it looked all nice and then— they did it all over again, When they began to do it for the ninth time, I emitted what I suppose sounded like an exclamation of protest. It felt like one. so I suppose it sounded like one. “What'd you mean, you got to be crazy to do it?” I asked, “Well,” said Larry Semon, “Don't you?” “Do you think anyone that’s sane is going to stand up there and let you throw seapsuds on their head like that for two hours and enjoy it? Do you think anybody that can have a good time saying good morning to a custard pie or falling on their anatomy continuously all day and not mind it a bit, can get by an alienist? “No wonder most comedians are sad away from thetr work. They ought to be “A comedy is only as funny as its gags. The comic is of secondary importance. I have thirty-two members of my company in stock. including property men, technical men, cameramen, assistant directors and actors. I expect them not only to be ready to do any doggone thing I ask ‘em to, but to cat, sleep, think and read gags. Now you can’t do that and not go crazy “How can people spend their lives falling into ponds and pies, and off tressles and girders, and chasing up and down hills, without getting a trifle different? Now, understand, I 24 don't think it’s a thing in the world wrong to bea little crazy I'd rather be crazy and successful and happy, than so darn sane, and a failure and miserable.” He got up, took a small, black leather book from the voluminous pockets of his short high pants. It was just an ordinary, commonplace little book—the kind of little black book that always makes all the trouble. Larry Semon consulted this one earnestly and I was trying to determine whether he was planning to blow up the Vita- graph studiom-when he said, “Now my script says that the next thing we do is in the theater, so let's go over to the theater set.” | TROTTED patiently by his side as we crossed the rough and rugged hills that divided us from the lot. Finally I gathered up courage enough to ask, “Is that your script in that little black book?” “Sure,” said the slapstick comedian. “I write it up every night. like a diary, with the next day's work.” Oddly enough Larry Semon comes of a good old Quaker family, too. New England, But perhaps Larry Semon comes by his comical antics naturally, after all, New England, like Indiana, has been noted not only for poets and fiction factories. It has turned out a multitude of antis and pros. Most of these legitimate. Occasionally, though, there is a tendency to the freakish, the bizarre. But not many like Larry Semon. If he’s eecentric his brain cells are all there. He knows how to coin them into dollars, Every caper he cuts adds to the national exchequer. His income tax grows that fast. This character he is establishing in his films, he originally drew when he was a famous cartoonist on the New York Sun He left there to act ‘em instead of draw ‘em—that’s all Like a nightmare come truc. And—well, you know what Std OTM GDOOKS (0)