Breaking into the movies

by John Emerson; Anita Loos

Finally, apply light carmen to your lips and make sure you do not overdo it.

There are numerous special recipes for producing pallor, scars, bruises, and the like. Blackface make-up is done most successfully with charred cork dust mixed with water to produce a heavy paste. Tom Wilson, the best known player of negro parts in the movies, who played in "The Birth of a Nation," and more recently in our own special production, "Red Hot Romance," advises amateurs to use this recipe and, further, to high-light the natural lines of their faces by scraping off the cork with a sharp stick, wherever a line is to show, and letting the natural white of the skin appear.

High-lighting for most character parts is a special art. Such characters as Indian faces or the weather-beaten and wrinkled countenance of an old sea captain may be done in brown with white high-lights. You should ask your cameraman to help you with high-lighting, as it is very difficult.

There are tricks of make-up which alter the entire character of the face. For example, by shading the outline of the face with red you can make it appear much thinner. In this case the grease paint is slightly reddened—or, if you desire, darkened—near the ear-line. If you desire to make your face rounder and fuller reverse the process and lighten the grease paint at its outer edge.

If your eyebrows and hair are dark, you can tinge them gray by rubbing the hair with mascaro and then combing. If they are light, white and black grease paint, applied alternately and then combed, will do the trick. Beards and bushy eyebrows are made of crêpe hair and glued on with spirit gum. As a matter of fact, if you are really serious about making a career of movie acting, it is best to grow, so far as possible, the hirsute appendages required in your parts. For an unshaven tramp or a Robinson Crusoe effect, for example, it is much better to go unshaven for a week or so than to produce a false effect by attempting to imitate the real thing with crêpe hair.

Glueing on a Crêpe Hair Mustache.

John Emerson is affixing a villainous mustache to Frank Stockdale. Spirit gum and crêpe hair are used.

Finally, lest you be left in the position of the man who starts his first ride on a motorcycle without knowing how to shut the power off, we may add that all this nasty mess of grease paint and powder and gum and hair will come off in an instant when cold cream is applied. It is hard to feel natural in make-up at first; but presently you will forget that you have it on at all.

All of the necessary cosmetics may be secured through any drug store or theatrical costumer. If you want to find out how you will look in the movies, it is not necessary to have a film test made. Just buy some make-up and have someone take a few "close-ups" of your head with an ordinary camera. But do not retouch the negatives—for movies are not retouched, you know.