Few of us managed to get unbroken winks. Between the creaking of one’s own bed and the snores from other rooms down the line (the walls were like paper) and the footsteps on the shaking porch, of actors going from room to room looking for something better than what had been allotted them, it was a restful night! All through it, at intervals, Charlie Craig kept calling to his bedfellow, “Don’t squash me—don’t squash me.” But the most disgruntled of all was Sennett. To every room he came calling “Hey, how many in this bed? Who’s in there? Got three in my bed; I can’t sleep three in a bed.” But responses were few and faint, and from Dell Henderson’s room came only silence. So after waiting in vain for help in his difficulty, and thoroughly disgusted, Mack returned to what must have been very chummy quarters.
There had been engaged for this picture a bunch of cowboys, rough-riders, headed by Bill Carroll, for we were to pull some thrillers in the way of horse stuff. The riders with their horses were leaving Los Angeles on the midnight train, due to reach Capistrano at 2 A.M.
It was all so weird and spooky that midnight had arrived before I had summoned sufficient courage to let myself go to sleep. No sooner had I dozed off than out of the black and the silence came a terrific roar, yells, and loud laughter, and pistol shots going zip, zip, zip.
These hot-headed Mexicans! Things happened here, and something dreadful was going to happen right now. I heard horses; and soon horses and riders galloped madly into the back-yard, right to the foot of our stairs, it seemed.
But it was only our cowboys who had arrived, feeling good, and full of the joy of life. Old Colonel Roosevelt knew all about this sort of thing, and would have appreciated the celebration. No thought had been given the boys’ slumber places, and so after a look around they docilely crawled up into the barn and were soon asleep in the sweet-smelling hay.
“The Two Brothers,” the picture we were to do, told the story of the good and bad brother. Good brother marries the pretty señorita in the Mission chapel.
An experienced and cultured gentleman was the French priest in charge of this Mission. He was most obliging and told us we could use whatever we liked of the wedding ceremonial symbols, which we did, but which we shouldn’t have done on this particular day of days—Good Friday.
The wedding was some spread. There were Spanish ladies in gay satins and mantillas, and Spanish gentlemen in velvets and gold lace, and priest and acolytes carrying the sacred emblems. They paraded all over the Mission grounds. Then the camera was set up to get the chapel entrance. While all was going happily, without warning, from out the turquoise blue sky, right at the feet of the blushing bride and the happy groom, fell the stuffed figure of a man! Right in the foreground the figure landed, and, of course, it completely ruined our beautiful scene.
On Good Friday in these Spanish-Mexican towns of California a ceremonial called “burning Judas” used to take place (and may still, for all I know). Old carts and wheels and pieces of junk in the village are gathered in a heap outside the Mission grounds, and old suits of clothes are stuffed with straw, making effigies of Judas. The villagers set fire to this lot of rubbish and to the Judases as well, and the evil they have brought during the year is supposed to disappear in the smoke from their burning bodies. The handsomest Judas, however, is saved from the conflagration for a more ignominous finish. A healthy young bull is secured and to his formidable horns this Judas is strapped. Then the bull is turned loose, so annoyed by this monstrous thing on his horns that he madly cavorts until Judas’s clothes are torn to shreds and his straw insides are spilled all over the place, and he is done for, completely.
Now while we had been rehearsing and taking the wedding scenes, the sacristan, a little old man to whom life meant tending the Mission and ringing the bells at the appointed hour, had been covertly taking us in, and when he saw our gay though holy processional start into the very sanctum of the Mission on Good Friday, his soul revolted. No, that he would not stand for!