| Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks | [Frontispiece] |
| PAGE | |
| Elsie Ferguson | [16] |
| Mr. Goldwyn, Mabel Normand and Charlie Chaplin | [17] |
| Alice Terry | [32] |
| Bert Lytell | [33] |
| Mr. Goldwyn, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford | [48] |
| Barbara La Marr | [49] |
| Clara Kimball Young | [64] |
| Mr. Goldwyn Acting as Host and Waiter | [65] |
| Lou Tellegen and Geraldine Farrar | [88] |
| Theda Bara | [89] |
| Mabel Normand | [112] |
| Maxine Elliott | [113] |
| Mary Garden and Geraldine Farrar | [128] |
| Will Rogers Bids Pauline Frederick Goodbye | [129] |
| Charlie Chaplin | [160] |
| Rupert Hughes | [161] |
| Jackie Coogan | [176] |
| George Fitzmaurice | [177] |
| Rodolph Valentino | [192] |
| Maurice Maeterlinck | [193] |
| Eric von Stroheim | [208] |
| “Charlie,” “Doug” and “Mary” | [209] |
| Constance Talmadge | [224] |
| Norma Talmadge | [225] |
| Samuel Goldwyn and Seven Famous Authors He Won to the Screen | [240] |
| Gouverneur Morris | [241] |
BEHIND THE SCREEN
Chapter One
IN WHICH IS FILMED THE BIRTH OF A NOTION
It was something more than nine years ago that I walked into a little motion-picture theatre on Broadway. I paid ten cents admission. As I took my seat a player-piano was digging viciously into a waltz. Upon the floor a squalid statuette lay under its rain of peanut-shells.
And all around me men, women, and children were divided between the sustained comfort of chewing-gum and the sharp, fleeting rapture of the nut.
Only a decade ago! Yet this was a representative setting and audience for motion-pictures. Likewise typical was the film itself. For, as were practically all productions of that day, this was only one or two reels. And, faithful to the prevailing tradition, the drama of to-night was Western.
I looked at the cowboys galloping over the Western plains, and in their place there rose before me Henry Esmond crossing swords with the Young Pretender, wiry young D’Artagnan riding out from Gascony on his pony to the Paris of Richelieu, Carmen on her way to the bull-fight where Don José waited to stab her.
Why not? Here was the most wonderful medium of expression in the world. Through it every great novel, every great drama, might be uttered in the one language that needs no translation. Why get nothing from this medium save situations which were just about as fresh and unexpected as the multiplication tables?