millionaire, an angel without but a harpy within, and after
opening up Reel One with scenes in a Yukon dance hall speedily would
move all the important characters to New York, where the plot thickened
so fast that only a succession of fade-outs and fade-ins, close-ups and
cut-backs saved it from clabbering right on Mr. Connors' hands.

The rest would be largely a matter of continuity and after that there
was nothing to worry about except picking out the cast and the locations
and building the sets and starting to shoot and mayhap detailing a head
office boy to stall off the author in case that poor boob came butting
in kicking about changes in his story or squawking about overdue royalty
statements or something. Anyhow, what did he know--what could he be
expected to know--about continuity or what the public wanted or what the
limitations and the possibilities of the screen were? He merely was the
poor fish who'd wrote the book and he should ought to be grateful that a
fellow with a real noodle had took his stuff and cut all that dull
descriptive junk out of it and stuck some pep and action and punch and
zip into the thing and wrote some live snappy subtitles, instead of
coming round every little while, like he was, horning in and beefing all
over the place.

And besides, wasn't he going to have his name printed in all the
advertising matter and flashed on the screen, too, in letters nearly a
fifth as tall as the letters of Mr. Lobel's name and nearly one-third as
tall as the name of the star and nearly one-half as tall as the name of
the director and nearly--if not quite--as tall as the name of the camera
man, and so get a lot of absolutely free advertising that would be
worth thousands of dollars to him and start people all over the country
to hearing about him? Certainly he was! And yet, with all that, was
there any satisfying some of these cheap ginks? The answer was that
there was not.

There was never any trouble, though, about casting the principal role.
That was easy--a matter of natural selection. If it could be played
vampishly from the ground up, and it usually could--trust Mr. Connors
for that--it went without question to Vida Monte, greatest of all the
luminaries in the Lobel constellation and by universal acknowledgment
the best vampire in the business. In vampiring Vida Monte it was who
led; others imitatively followed. Compared with her these envying lady
copy cats were as pale paprikas are to the real