The procedure is to introduce the subject to the scout and get his promise to consider her for a test. Even if he eventually turns her down, the squab is on a string for weeks and has to be nice to her "benefactor." If she ever gets the test, she's hooked for at least three months, while the film is shipped to the Coast to await the verdict of producers and directors.
Actually, it's not necessary to know anyone to get consideration from the talent scouts. They're always looking for new faces. That's their business. Just barge in. (See page 301 for list of casting agents.)
But, suppose the candidate is lucky enough to run the gauntlet and find herself signed to the usual standard contract, which calls for $125 per week the first six months and options for seven years thereafter, at a slowly rising scale.
Should she take it?
We say, unless she wants the trip and a six-month paid vacation—no. She wants to be a dramatic actress. The odds against her making any talking screen role are about one in 500. If her heart breaks easily, movies will do it.
We tell her when she steps off the Super-Chief, with high hopes and enthusiasm, she will be plugged, for publicity, as a new star. A battery of photogs will greet her at Union Station. That afternoon she will get phone calls from every chaser in town, who will have learned everything about her by the grapevine from their opposite numbers in New York, who kissed her good-bye.
The first week will be a merry-go-round. She will dance till she's dippy at the Sunset Strip cabarets, meeting the biggies and the host of peculiar paranoiacs who infest the colony. She will go to swimming pool parties at mansions that look like De Mille film sets.
But the cabarets are fewer and not so glamorous as those she left behind. The people are duller, less intriguing. After a week, she'll realize Hollywood is pretty much Petoskey with palms.
Then will come the waiting—waiting for calls from the studio, waiting for appointments with the costumers, hairdressers, publicity department, still photogs.
She'll be snapped in every pose. If she's ultra-photogenic, she's sunk. For the rest of her career in Hollywood, while her gams are still straight and her figure otherwise, she'll pose cheese-cake for fan-mags and Sunday sheets—and find herself with a one-way ticket back to New York six months later.