Page:Spider Boy (1928).pdf/255

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Lawrence and everybody else connected with this picture is cashing in on?

My name's not worth a damn in pictures, Ambrose insisted hotly, and you know it. The great picture audience has never even heard of me. Why, that's actually one of the inducements that Griesheimer held out to me when he was trying to persuade me to sign, that it would increase my public.

Say, Deacon—Lawrence was perspiring freely in his effort to explain—where do you think you are? This is Hollywood, Hollywood, not the Louvre. Of course I know your name isn't worth a damn in pictures. Griesheimer knows it too. Everybody out here knows it. The point is they want to think it is. Why else do you suppose you're hauling in the dough? Why, Griesheimer probably never even heard your name pronounced before you came out here. It's francs to pancakes he never saw your play or even knew that it existed. He's been told that you are important and he wants to believe you are important. He wants to believe it so badly that he has signed a contract with you that Harold Bell Wright couldn't drag out of him.

Did you ever hear of a commodity called class? Well, that's what these cloak and suit clowns are wistful about. They want to pull class into the