"One of the big troubles with the fillum business," he observed sagely, "is the way it's made a lot of people rich what wasn't never meant to be that way. And take it from me, pictures ain't never going to be right, really, until most of that bunch gets out of the business or gets over their surprise.
"Independence," he mused, "is one of the dangerousest weapons a person can put in the hands of an ignorant guy."
Next to himself and his amours, the thing Barry Nolan took most seriously was Comedy, so much so that he clothed the word with the capital even in his private meditations, and devoted a good part of his professional life to perspiring efforts to interject Comedy into the pictures he directed, especially those in whose composition Comedy, as he conceived it, had no business to find place.
Thus with the picture upon which his genius was at present engaged. Over the unfolding of its story the Comic Spirit did indeed preside, but manifested only in the rustle of its satiric wings, in a whisper of wit ever and anon animating the speech of its creatures; never in the head-on collision of two actors trying to pass through one doorway in opposite directions, never in the capers of a cross-eyed comedian dogged to his undoing by a pack of wild pies. So that Nolan felt it devolved upon him to save the picture by distorting situations integral in its plot and by devising others for interpolation, to the end that Comedy, the Comedy of the cinema, of physical mishaps and deformities, might mow and bow upon the screen its bid for guffaws.
If the results he gained were often lamentable, Lucinda ceased to offer comment when her first diffident strictures had been ungraciously overruled. It would be time enough to fight for a decision, she reflected, when the picture was ultimately cut to length and assembled; in which process much of this deplorable stuff would be sure to go by the board, for very lack of space.
Piqued to find her so unresponsive, Nolan issued secret orders that his most ambitious comic flights were not to be shown Lucinda with the other rushes, and confined further efforts in the vein to scenes in which she took no part.
And it was thus that the Comedy Feet crept up on her unawares.
Some time subsequent to the Battle of the Supper Club Set, when his equanimity seemed to have been completely restored, Nolan acquainted Lucinda with the details of an utterly unique method of screen introduction which he had invented, all out of his own head, with a view to lending distinction to her début.
By this device the public was first to make her acquaintance through the medium of a close-up framing two pair of dancing feet, Nelly's (that is to say, Lucinda's) and her professional partner's. Then, as these rested, the partner's feet were to be eliminated, and the close-up, after lingering one fond, reluctant moment on Lucinda's ankles, was to travel up her person until it hovered upon her head and shoulders.
If not strikingly novel, the business seemed simple and innocuous enough to Lucinda, and she posed for it according to instructions and without misgiving.