STORY OF A DREAM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 May 1940, Page 9

STORY OF A DREAM

GRACE MOORE'S OPERA. This is the story of dream which began away back in 1930, and which finally became a reality a little over a year ago. The dreamer was the singing star Grace Moore, and the subject of her lengthy reverie was a screen version of the opera ' Louise." In the summer of 1938 she quietly went off to Paris, went into a conference with some picture people over there and emerged several months later with her vision, “Louise,” safely projected on the screen. As far back as 1930, said Miss Moore to a New York interviewer, when she first appeared in motion pictures (as Jenny Lind in "A Lady's Morals"), she had begged and pleaded, first with M.G.M. and then with Columbia, to let her make “Louise,” her favourite of the lighter operas. But they put her through what she referred to as her “first movie phase” in “A Lady’s Morals” and “New Moon.” Her “second phase” began with “One Night of Love” and continued through, as she put it, “three or four remakes of the same.” In 1938 Julien Weyler, a French theatre man who had been after her for four years with an offer to star her in a picture, finally won her over and on June 28 of that year Miss

' Moore sailed for Paris to start work ' on her dream-scheme, the old Gus- ' laVe Charpentier opera, Charpentier, 5 himself an old man, was brought l down out of his Montmartre diggings , to assist in the preparation of the screen version; George Thizi of the Paris Opera was engaged to play the tenor role of Julien; Abel Gance was called in to direct. The Saale Gaveau, a concert hall,

was used for recording the music, and there, for three weeks, the company and an orchestra of 105 musicians laboured to put the score on disks. Then the actual shooting began. “We did it at the Paramount studio at Joinville,” said Miss Moore, “but all of our out-door work was actually done in the streets of Montmartre, right where Charpentier first met the real Louise, first kissed her and made love to her. Oh. it was wonderful! Never in Hollywood did ] work as 1 did on this picture. Out there they used to put so many lights on me that I looked like a washedout angel. In Paris we used two lights. And one camera! Just one camera! “I tell you, I did things which in Hollywood I wouldn’t have done for 1,000,000 dollars. For instance, we had one rain sequence which it took three whole nights to shoot. They wanted to let a double play my part in this sequence and take the soaking for me, but every one was so jolly and it was all so exciting that I did it myself. I took the soaking—but afterwards I spent three days in the American Hospital with flu!”