BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE:MOVIES

EARLY MOTION PICTURE HISTORY IN NEW YORK CITY

"In 1911 Thomas A. Edison had an idea for talking pictures
and the first experiments were tried at an uptown studio.
Gus Edwards arranged to have (EDDIE) Cantor, Truly Shattuck,
a well-known prima donna, and me make the original tests.
These tests were tried in a theatre, but were way out of
synchronization, and that was the end of that. Now and then,
during the lay-off season, I used to manage to do bits in 
the few pictures that were being made in New York and
Long Island. I played in one called The Other Man's 
Wife in 1917, produced by Warner Brothers, in which 
nearly the entire Warner family appeared."

George Jessel. So Help Me: The Autobiography of
George Jessel (New York: Random House, 1943)
**

THE LONE RANGER WAS NOT THE FIRST WESTERN COWBOY
STAR TO HAVE A HORSE NAMED SILVER

"After the war, (BUCK JONES) and his wife, Odelle Osborne, 
whom he had met in the Miller Brothers show, toured with 
the Ringling Brothers circus, then settled in Hollywood, 
where Jones got work in a number of Westerns starring 
Tom Mix and Franklyn Farnum. Producer William Fox put 
Jones under contract and promoted him as a new Western 
star. He used the name Charles Jones at first, then 
Charles "Buck" Jones, before settling on his permanent 
stage name. He quickly climbed to the upper ranks of 
Western stardom, playing a more dignified, less gaudy h
ero than Mix, if not as austere as William S. Hart. 
With his famed horse Silver, Jones was one of the most successful and popular actors in the genre, and at 
one point he was receiving more fan mail than any 
actor in the world." 
    FROM THE BIOGRAPHY OF BUCK JONES ON IMdB

IMdB Trivia goes on to say that Buck Jones Sued Republic Pictures for making Lone Ranger movies, saying it stole his idea. He was making movies in the '20s and into the '30s where he played a Texas Ranger who rode a white horse named Silver and he claimed he originated the yell; "Hi-Yo Silver". He lost the case.
**

TACT


I told the camera man he had made me look gorgeous 
in “The Garden of Allah” and asked why he hadn’t done 
it in a film we made much later. He said, well he was 
eight years older.

Marlene Dietrich

**
ARRIVING MONDAY…ARRANGE OVATION.

Cable to Adolf Zukor

Quoted in The New Yorker (March 21,1994)

NAME ABOVE THE TITLE

When he made his other masterpiece, The Bank Dick, in 1941, no other star in Hollywood had above-the-title billing and carried contractual responsibility for writing and directing as well as performing. ...

"You've heard the old legend that it's the little put-upon guy who gets the laughs, but I'm the most belligerent guy on the screen. I'm going to kill everybody. But at the same time I'm afraid of everybody -- just a great big frightened bully. There's a lot of that in human nature. When people laugh at me, they're laughing at themselves. Or at least the next fellow. ..."

from Make 'Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America	
 by  Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon	 (NY: Twelve Hachette Book Group, 2008)
**

ABOUT FINDING THE RIGHT TITLE FOR NORTH BY NORTHWEST	 

“The project went through a number of titles –
In a Northwesterly direction, In a Northwest Direction, 
The CIA  Story, Breathless, The Man in
Lincoln’s Nose – before finally settling on North
By Northwest. MGM’s preferred cast was
 Gregory Peck and Cyd Charisse, the latter because 
she was under contract and the studio didn’t know 
what  to do with her now that musicals were faltering  
at the box office.”

Quoted in Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise 
by Scott Eyman (NY: Simon & Schuster,
2020)

**
AUDIENCES IN THE DAYS OF SILENT MOVIES IN HONOLULU
  
Audiences in the days of silent pictures were often
noisy and sometimes unruly. On the night of February
10,1905, a riot by nearly five hundred Chinese broke
out in the Chinese Theater on Liliha Street during a
kinetoscope malfunction. "There was first a rush to
smash the machine," reads a front-page article 
published the next day, "wild disorder...the familiar
Chinese cry to rush the police...Then the mob
attempted to wreck the box-office." Police eventually
restored order."

Yunte Huang.Charle Chan: The Untold Story of the 
Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with
American History (New York: W.W.Norton & Company,
2010)

NOEL COWARD'S QUIP ABOUT PETER O'TOOLE

"The young Irishman who played T.E. Lawrence in David
Lean's spectacular 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia was 
arguably one of the most physically actors ever to 
grace the screen. NoelCoward famously remarked that 
if O'Toole had been any prettier, the film would 
have been called Florence of Arabia."

Neil Hickey. ADVENTURES IN THE SCRIBBLERS TRADE. 
(Bloomington, Indiana: iUniverse, 2015)