Universal foolishly thought the gink would be grateful for the opportunity they gave him so they turned loose the noisiest advertising and publicity they could. That queered it. He started going loco then and he’s three laps ahead of a flea-bitten coyote ever since.
Stroheim spends more money now on his own clothes than he guaranteed to make that first picture for. Out here where every director has to look like a Hartschaffner ad touched up by a futurist painter he manages to hold the jazz record. What a swath he cuts with the extra girls!
As for his pictures—if he reaches a cent less than five hundred thousand on this “Foolish Wives” he’s making now he’ll probably be so peeved he’ll try hari-kari. Why, do you know, Liz, he’s spent enough money building Monte Carlo’s up at Monterey to relieve the housing shortage in six states!
Do I blame him? Not a bit. If he didn’t toss the coin that way people wouldn’t believe he was one of the biggest directors. His company would probably fire him for getting old-fashioned. Then they’d bail Ponzi and put him on the payroll.
Once you hadda put a close-up in every ten feet to be ranked an up-to-date director; now you have to find new ways for filling up the Home for Incurably Insane Cashiers.
Another fellow whose boss has to make the money with a machine is this here fellow Holubar. I think that Holubar and Stroheim musta formed some sorta grudge when they hung out together on the Universal lot. Now they take it out on the boss by racing neck and neck on the Expenditure Extravaganza.
Holubar’s just finished his first independent feature starring his wife, Dorothy Phillips. “Man, Woman and Marriage” they calls it. Al Kaufman, who supplied the money, must agree that this married life is expensive. Here’s one way they ran head-long into the subtreasury, Liz:
Holubar decides that a little prehistoric stuff showing a battle of the Amazons with the Male Brutes would be good stuff. So five hundred horses and five hundred dames are hired and turned loose for the action. The janes are in the near-nude, and beside you can’t expect that many girls in one city to know how to handle horses, so quite a few of them take a tumble when the battle reaches the rough stage. The first thing you know the ambulances are chasing to the Holubar lot as though they belonged in the story.
Continuity calls for the women losing the battle for the obvious reason disclosed when a later scene shows three hundred of them nursing babies. A hurry call is sent out for three hundred infants willing to yawl a few hours for the movies. How that assistant director got ’em I don’t know—but he did.
“Shucks,” says someone then. “Now we gotta get three hundred women to nurse the infantry.” That was a tough assignment—but some miracle worker produced the women.