Long, Hard Row for Film Extras

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 992, 7 June 1930, Page 27

Long, Hard Row for Film Extras

AMATEUR SEEKS WORK AT ELSTREE THE GIRL WHO SOBBED "I have made my debut on the talkies. I am appearing with Miss Edna Best and Mr. Owen Nares in ‘Loose Ends,’ which British International are producing at Elstree,” wrote a correspondent of the London “Daily Chronicle” from the English film centre recently. It is not exactly a leading part, but if you look very closely at the scene in the underground lift, you may be able to pick me out from the 40 others. That is, provided the Cockney charwoman has not got between me and the camera. It happened this way: With visions of my name in flashing electric lights, and of my picture in the papers as a new “discovery,” I boarded the train for Elstree—that train which must seem to the ambitious aspirants an escalator to him fame. "PRACTISING FOR DAYS” There was a number of them on it. In my own compartment, a young girl broke down and began to sob convulsively, and to go on sobbing for nearly ten minutes —to my great consternation. I tried to think what Ronald Colman or John Gilbert would do in the circumstances. Just when I was plucking up courage to console her, she turned to me with a beaming smile. “Was that anything like the real thing?” she asked; "I have been practising it for days just to show the director what I can do.” At the studio the casting director put me through a cross-examination His remarks were not encouraging. “But isn’t there any role I would suit?” I pleaded. "Well,” he said, with devastating frankness, "you might do for a bank clerk or a railway porter . . .” “Wouldn’t I do for a journalist, say?” I asked maliciously.

“Good heavens, no, man,” he said with startling force. “The man we want as a journalist must be tall” (1