Confessions of a Motion Picture Press Agent

Behind the motion picture scenes is a fascinating, curiosity challenging realm. Here is a narrative of actual experience that will be found instructive as well as amusing. The author contributed "A Theatrical Press Agent's Confession" to The Independent some years ago. As stated on the previous occasion, we can vouch for his integrity and fairness.

The following article is the first of a series of three dealing with the inner side of the picture industry. The other two which will appear in later issues of The Independent, will tell of the big film corporations, give a summary of past accomplishments and take a look into the future.

My entry into motion picture business was made thru a friend telephoning me: "Come to New York at once. I've the biggest proposition in the world's history, and there's a place for you in it." Three days later I presented myself in New York, my wife accompanying me. "It's a motion picture I want you to write about," said my New Boss, "with 11,946 actual scenes, 25,000 actors, 6,000 horses, cost $750,000, and is unquestionably the greatest dramatic and historical spectacle ever conceived or realized by the mind of man. Mrs. Press Agent," he added, turning to my wife, "beg, borrow, steal, or dig in the old stocking for all the cash you can lay hands on, and buy a better investment than United States bonds, I mean the $2 tickets for the opening night of our show. Mark my words, those seats will be selling on the sidewalk for $5 apiece, and you'll become a rich woman."

Strange to relate, everything turned out pretty nearly as the manager predicted, even tho my wife and I were too conservative to gamble in the tickets. The photoplay ran an entire season in New York and earned more than a million dollars, with all kinds of fancy prices paid for the seats. The manager and his executives moved down from Harlem to more expensive homes near Central Park. We ate in the best hotels, smoked perfecto cigars, were interviewed instead of interviewing, and when we journeyed afield were received like nabobs. I devoted myself to the composition of prose symphonies, concertos and on the manager's lyric theme of "11,946 scenes, 25,000 actors, 6,000 horses, and $750,000 production." These works were quickly gobbled up and duly printed. I cannot say we were exactly drunk with success, but we seemed to be living in a dream-world just the same.

Shouting to Indians "Stay dead, there. You're spoiling the show," is the easiest part of the director's job. Sometimes he has to show the heroine how to play her love scenes.

With the full tide of prosperity ensued a struggle for power among the four proprietors. These were the president of the company, who owned 51 per cent of the capital stock and was nicknamed Brutus from his sulking in his tent when things didn't please him; the producer, a happy, irresponsible genius whom we called Caesar; the author of the play, nicknamed the Old Gray Wolf, and the daring young showman, my managerial friend, who had carried the spectacle to commercial success.

The Old Gray Wolf carried dynamite about with him in the form of sensational publicity statements, which it was my duty to extract from him if possible and bury in our pigeonholes. The producer-genius, on the other hand, was a human skyrocket of fantastic invention and fancy; on his appearance, we had to shut up shop and win what of practical use we could from the scintillating verbal fireworks. The young manager kept a bunch of written "resignations" handy to forfend the demands and exactions of the other three. The Irish-American office boy called him "The Great Resigner," for it is recorded that in one day he threw up his job no less than eighteen times! This method of asserting authority by offering frequently to relinquish it, proved exceedingly effective. The amateurish, untheatrical schemes of the other bosses were squelched as they realized that they could not do without the general manager. In the end, he won their entire confidence and built up for them a splendid property.

Six months after the inception of the photoplay, Brutus and some of his friends organized a large "film program" corporation, for which I was asked to do the presswork. This was my long-coveted opportunity of gaining a more intimate view of picturedom than a New York run and hearsay information had afforded. As all our productions were to be made in California, I obtained the chief's consent to visiting the picture eldorado of Los Angeles and studying the studios at first hand.

On my arrival I found Caesar in the Chinese Quarter of the western city, staging a blood-curdling melodrama with the aid of a dozen Oriental laundrymen and his own matinee idols and heroines. The "Chinks" were having the time of their lives, for violence had long since departed from that peaceful district and it was as much fun for them to play highbinder as it is for an Apache to play "movie" Indian. The next day I sought out great Caesar's studio for mementos of the extraordinary cinema production that was still playing in the East. The mise-en-scene had vanished, but how about the armies, both human and equine?

"Huh!" grunted a propertyman to whom I addrest my question. "Twenty-five thousand people and six thousand horses, did you say? Feller, take it from me, there might have been a matter of 600 actors on the lots, includin' supers, an' mebbe they was as many as sixty or seventy-five cowpunchers and ponies in one of the big rides. Say, how long you been in the movin' picter business?"

Without committing myself on this point, I moved on to the next studio, the headquarters of an ex-blacksmith who had become famed for "stunt" comedies of the hair-raising order. "Honest John" greeted me with hearty Irish handshake and made me free of the works. They were a wonderland in which a child could have wandered happily for days. Every mechanical triumph- the dreadnaught, the howitzer, the submarine, the airplane, the complexus of railroad transport- was reproduced in toylike miniature. "Closeup" photographers worked the cameras as the little machines performed the most alarming, gravity defying evolutions. In other branches of the laboratory, an acrobat jumped off the roof of a twenty-story skyscraper by means of a neat fall from a table to the floor. An aerialist hung desperately to a parachute in mid-air while actually dangling from a steel rod fixed on a platform, with an umbrella cover suspended over him. The beautiful heroine was "thrown to the lions," but without appeasement to their appetites or danger to her, because of an invisible wire barriers that separated 'em.

"Shades of Baron Munchausen!" I remarked to myself. "And then they tell us that pictures never lie!"

On a trip to a third studio I was still more astonished to find an old friend, the former traffic cop at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second street, New York, transmogrified into a Wild Western hero. He was hooted, chapped and spurred, carried a "gun" in each hand, wore a big knife in his belt, a bandanna kerchief around his neck, and his $50 Stetson sombrero was held in place by means of a leather band passing under his chin.

"How do you like it, Bill?" I asked.

"Pretty well," he replied. "The beer ain't as good as it is in New York, an' the cabarets are poor. Eats are all right, an' the sleepin's fine. This new leadin' woman of ours had me worried some, but the Boss tells the director to give me all the closeups, an' I guess that'll tune her down a bit. Oh, I'll be in to see you in the Broadway office in a couple of months! They give us a reprieve from this here condemned City of the Angels twice a year, an' we go back East to see what living is like."

Inspection of "cutting" and "assembling" was the next step of my experience, for which I entered a darkened viewing chamber with the director, the editor, and the stenographer who took notes under the light of a tiny electric bulb. As the critical committee saw the inchoate picture flashed on the screen, and ordered excisions here, rearrangements there, and captions or titles inserted in still other places, the notetaker followed them closely. The typed directions were afterward turned over to the cutter and assembler, who scissored and repasted the film and saw to it that additional captions were drawn, photographed and inserted. The film editor- unlike the newspaper man- works in the dark, talks instead of writes, corrects a moving instead of a still object, and indicates the changes instead of personally performing them. Yet just as high a level of skill is necessary. The editor of your picture is equally important with the editor of your magazine or newspaper.

The director, manuscript in hand, looks very much out of place in the splendor of this Persian garden (in Los Angeles, U.S.A.). But this time he's part of the picture.

One morning toward the close of my stay, I was invited to go out upon "location," as it is called, and view a Mexican battle. The time of starting was officially bulletined as 7 a.m., but in the loose, unbusinesslike methods of direction it was several hours later before the entire caravan got under motion. I amused myself by observing the activities of the numerous open-air stages where no less than ten companies were rehearsing or acting before the camera. The scenario department had placed these ten companies in as many historic eras, each with its own peculiar fashions and settings. At times the work halted and the players and periods would mix, Miss 1915 chatting merrily with a bearded Babylonian monarch and Cleopatra exchanging confidences with Joan of Arc or Helen of Troy. Over in one corner John the Baptist was talking to the Spanish cigaret girl, Carmen, who was blowing smoke rings in his face. Sam Houston and Davy Crockett discussed militarism with the German Crown Prince, gentlemen of the cloth joked grass-skirted ladies from Hawaii, whilst the venerable Don Quixote, forgetful of his Dulcinea, was illustrating the fox-trot with a belle of drawing room comedy. About half past ten a noted New York actor, his face made up in the dreadful whiteness of a clown's, burst forth from his dressing room and called out to all and sundry: "Am I good? Am I good?" He was to be the Yankee star of the Mexican battle aforementioned. His leading lady looked like a pygmy, albeit a very trim and chic one, and I wondered how in the world the pair would "register" in the film as representatives of New York's 400.

The vividly costumed "armies" having departed in the lumbering autobusses about 10 a.m., the rest of us started an hour later by motor cars for the grounds. The irony of the cinema placed me next to an "efficiency expert." He talked all the way out of "overhead," costs and economies- a sing-song drivel that bore as much relation to the terrific wastage of film-making as voodoo incantations would bear to the for times of war. Happily relieved from him by our arrival at the desert-and-cactus location twenty-five miles out, I turned to watch the Yaquis and Mexicans deploying over the landscape. The director bossed them with a leather-lunged voice reinforced by the megaphone. The head Yaqui was an American actor, much bedaubed with chrome and magenta, but the others were Hopis and Apaches who love to "play savage." On the other side the motley battalion of Los Angeles "Mex" were led by a onearmed Irish-American soldier of fortune who had stolen cattle and robbed haciendas with Villa.

Both sides got away to a flying start, the Yaquis first, carrying everything before them as they shrieked the favorite war cries and discharged the blank charges of musketry against the foe. For running ability I have never seen the "Mex" equaled; every mother's son of ten could have won a prize in the Olympic races. Later the Mexicans came back and "cleaned up" the Yaquis, the latter performing many thrilling death-agonies in the course of their supposed extermination. The more lively of them, however, would not stay in the picture, they bobbed up repeatedly to watch what was going on; to which the director angrily shouted at them: "Stay dead there! You're spoiling the show."

Between the two big battles the celebrated New York thespian I have alluded to, performed prodigies of single-handed valor, rescuing his inamorata, defending an adobe house against the attacks of the cutthroats, and firing off much ammunition. He seemed to take it all joyously like a kind of picnic, and to this amazing zest in action I attribute largely his popularity with the public. At the end of a perfect day we returned to Los Angeles, the players dispersed, and the film record of the strenuous proceedings was developed and printed. When I looked at it twenty-four hours later, the pygmy leading lady had somehow become a most personable young heroine, and the clown-whitened face of the star was unduly whitened no longer, but just the right complexion of a New York City youth plucked bodily from Fifth avenue and thrust into the Mexican wilds.

Ten days in Los Angeles! I regretted the fate that compelled me to leave the mimic world and return to the New York grind. Somehow the tang of the unreal, happy-go-lucky life had gotten into my blood; unlike the ex-policeman actor, I didn't long for Broadway cafes and could have stayed in Madcap Land a year. Yet business sense told me that most of the folk I had met were wilful, spendthrift children. Caesar’s studio was run in a helter-skelter, buggermugger style that (in spite of his having made the big spectacle for $110,000 instead of $750,000, as claimed) boded ill for the success of our new weekly film program. No business hours; no collocation of resources at fixed times and places; "artistic jealousy" of stars that sometimes stopped a production for days together: I had never seen anything like it in my fifteen years' experience of theaterdom. The cinema had sent the actors out of doors and, for the nonce, had given them unlimited resources to play with. They were enjoying the bonanza era as only grown-up children could enjoy it. Perhaps all of us were touched with the same frenzy. Daydreaming of some great future Morgan or Rockefeller that should organize the films, I handed my suitcases, loaded with photographs, up the Pullman car steps and journeyed back to New York.

I had had some inkling of the studio extravagance during my trip to Los Angeles. The directors wanted to make the best pictures, lacked business judgment, and set no limits to the salaries paid. Stage actors who had been getting $500 or $600 a week in New York, found that they could go to the coast and reap thousands. An instance was the celebrated lady who received the lump sum of $15,000, the use of a house and yacht, and all expenses of her stay for five weeks' posing. Not all the stars made good. But they all had to be paid, and this was only the preliminary expense.

The directors-general earned king's ransoms, and were surrounded by a little world of courtiers whose pay bore no relation to hard facts. Costumes, furniture, settings, were shipped in wholesale from New York when they could not be obtained in Los Angeles. The leaders, of course, were the actors, and the merry game went unchecked, as under the terms of the contract the directors got $40,000 a feature and could spend it as they liked.

"Confessions of a Motion Picture Press Agent," The Independent, August 24, 1918, pages 326, 344, 345.

© 1999, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)

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