Mack Sennett all dressed up and grouching on a leather settee in the hotel lobby, waiting for his prey! He would not be handed dry, old sandwiches all his days. He was out for steak, red and juicy. He got there and has stayed put.
Henry Lehrman patting his inflated chest! He got there, but stayed put the littlest while.
Charlie Chaplin, who topped them all, working while others slept, out on excursions with the milkman!
Tommy Meighan of the genial smile and Irish red-bloodedness. He got a chance, and the ladies liked him. Nice personality, and good actor, even so.
Not alone in the movies is it easier to get there than to stay there. Chance sometimes enters into the first, but to stay there means ears attuned, feet on the ground, and heaps and heaps of hard work.
CHAPTER XXVIII
“THE BIRTH OF A NATION”
Late in the summer of 1912 the Kinemacolor Company of America, a subsidiary of the English company, started the production of movies in color at a studio in Whitestone, Long Island. The year of Kinemacolor’s endeavor also marks Mr Griffith’s last year with Biograph, for he went to the Mutual with Harry Aitken while I became leading woman with the Kinemacolor.
Messrs. Urban and Smith had rather startled the world with their color pictures of the Coronation of George the Fifth of England, and the Durbar Imperial at Delhi; and even though their pictures were a bit fringy, they were becoming ambitious for honors in color movies along dramatic lines.
Great things were achieved in America in the movies, and great things might have been achieved in America in Kinemacolor, but it was destined otherwise. Kinemacolor was fated to be but a brief though fruitful interlude in color-photography in the movies, which, for some seemingly mysterious reason, is so long in arriving.
Sunshine being imperative for Kinemacolor, southern California’s staple brand could not be denied, and soon the company left its studio in Whitestone and repaired to the modest little town of Hollywood where it took over the Revier Laboratories at 4500 Sunset Boulevard.