So Mr. Griffith compromised: “All right, I’ll put you in the background and you can sit down.” At that the women became more amiable and agreed to help out the perspective. And in the last few hundred feet of the second reel, they joined the dead emigrants and were covered up in the whirlwind.
The final scenes were reserved for the days immediately preceding our departure for the East. As soon as they were taken, the company would be dismissed to make the necessary preparations prior to leave-taking. So to their pet establishment the women beat it to have their hair beautifully and expensively washed and lemon-rinsed, and were all in readiness for the California Limited, when a re-take was announced. Static in the film!
To their burial places once more they were rushed, and again the boys stood by and again poured the cornucopias of sand over them, ruining completely the crop of nice clean heads. Few got a chance at another fashionable shampoo. The majority had to be contented with just a home wash—or to take the sand along with them.
CHAPTER XXIV
EMBRYO STARS
We fell to the lure of the Bret Harte story this winter. We advanced to the romances of the hardy Argonauts, and the “pretty ladies” of the mining towns. What a wealth of picturesque cinema material the lives of the rugged forty-niners afforded!
Dell Henderson was featured as the handsome gambler, Jack Hamlin; and Claire MacDowell as the intriguing lady of uncertain virtue; Stephanie Longfellow as the rare, morally excellent wife.
Blanche Sweet was still too much the young girl to interpret or look the part of Bret Harte’s halo-ized Magdelenes. Mr. Griffith, as yet unwilling to grant that she had any soul or feeling in her work, was using her in “girl” parts. But he changed his opinion with “The Lonedale Operator.” That was the picture in which he first recognized ability in Miss Sweet.
The outdoor life of the West had plumped up the fair Blanche, and Mr. Griffith felt at this stage in her development she typified, excellently well, buxom youth. Why wouldn’t Blanche have plumped up when she arrived on location with a bag of cream puffs nearly every day and had her grandmother get up at odd hours of the night to fry her bacon sandwiches? She soon filled out every wrinkle of the home-made looking tweed suit she had worn on her arrival in Los Angeles.
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Way, way up on the Santa Monica cliffs we built a log cabin for Blanche Sweet to dwell in, as the heroine of “The White Rose of the Wilds.”