“Then that means we’ll get another chance in a picture,” said Janet, and she felt her heart beating like mad.
“Indeed it does and you’ll be in the biggest feature the Ace company is producing this year,” Helen’s father assured them.
Chapter XXV
THE STARS VANISH
Janet and Helen did get rôles in “Kings of the Air” and even though they were very minor parts, both girls were elated. They were cast as waitresses in the restaurant which served the pilots at the main western terminal of the air mail line.
Almost every contract player on the Ace lot was in it, with a good, substantial rôle going to Curt Newsom, who was taken out of Billy Fenstow’s western unit long enough to play the part of a bitter field manager. Even Bertie Jackson got a part as a gold-digger who was out to get all the information she could from the pilots and was suspected of selling secrets to a rival air line.
Janet and Helen saw little of Helen’s father for the next few days. He was immensely busy on the details of the production and a complete airport was set up out in the California desert for one of the major sequences would revolve around this lonely outpost on the air mail route.
The sequences in which Janet and Helen were to appear were shot at Grand Central at Glendale, actually in the field restaurant and were among the first to be taken.
Janet had only four lines and Helen had three. All of them were in a brief scene with Curt Newsom and his encouragement helped them through for it was hard work under the glare of a brilliant battery of electrics. What made it all the harder was that Mr. Rexler was with the company the day this particular sequence was shot, but somehow they managed to get through with it. After that they were free to stay with the company and watch the rest of the shooting schedule until Billy Fenstow called them back for his next western.
It was during the second week of shooting that things started to go wrong. There were innumerable little delays that were maddening in themselves and when a dozen of them came, almost at the same time, even level-headed Henry Thorne showed signs of extreme exasperation. The cast was large and expensive and a dozen planes had been leased. The daily overhead was terrific and each day’s delay sent the cost of the picture rocketing.
When they went on location out in the desert Curt Newsom, lunching with Janet and Helen, gave voice to his fears.