University of Virginia Library

Edmund Goulding Prospers

Edmund Goulding[5] dropped in merely to have a look around. He expected to stay a day or two. He remained to become one of its greatest scenarists and directors. Now he is back in New York, with two of his plays in rehearsal and a novel on the press. He will return to Hollywood. Hollywood is not Hollywood without him, and there are a score of down-and-outers who miss the lift, the encouraging, snappy word and the dollar or two that Eddie was wont to slip into their hands so generously.

“Well, how do you like it?” asked a fa-

mous producer of Clarence Budington Kelland, after he had permitted the author to see the screen version of one of his stories. Falling into the producer's own idiom, Kelland replied:

“I ain't a-going to kiss you!”

Dorothy Farnum reminds one of Anita Loos[6]. She looks like a schoolgirl, a very pretty blonde one, and has the brain of a literary Napoleon. She tripped out of magazine writing and insinuated her way deftly to the very peak of scenario writing. Only master scripts are assigned her. “Beau Brummel,” “Tess of the D'Urbervilles,” the Garbo opuses, are from her pen. Like Frances Marion, she is possessed of exceptional beauty and brains. Frances Marion, incidentally, is without a doubt the greatest of the scenario writers. She is also a novelist.

Winifred Dunn, who wrote for the better class magazines before the movies captured her, looks like what we imagine Jane Eyre did. It seems incredible that this fragile girl is responsible for that epic of a pug, “The Patent-Leather Kid.” “Sparrows” is another original of Miss Dunn's.

Donald McGibney stayed long enough to adapt his Saturday Evening Post story, “Two Arabian Knights,” and hurried back to New York. But Hollywood had gotten into his blood. He is back now. He says he is competing with the butcher, the janitor, the mayor, the plumber and every other person in Hollywood as a scenarist.