Shirley Mason and William Collier Jr. Are in love and engaged, but Hollywood is calling -- or so Miss Mason imagines. So with her mother, Florence Turner's savings she heads out to sunny California. But the road to movie stardom is harder than she though, and her first chance at being more than a background extra is a disaster. She can't tell the people back home, so she goes from poor to broke and thrown out of her rooming house. Then comes the telegram from home saying her mother needs an operation to save her sight; send $500. So she appeal to Hollywood wolf John Miljan, who makes it clear that he doesn't want her to pay it back in money.
Hollywood was making a lot of movies about how tough it is to make it in Hollywood about this time, but this one is pretty much a melodrama, with Gale Henry to push the plot forward and wield a soda siphon when needed. With a script credited to Anita Loos, I was expecting something frothier, but it isn't here.
Miss Mason was the youngest of the three Flugrath sisters. The eldest, Edna, became a star in British pictures and retired form the screen in 1923. The second, Viola Dana, was a big star in the late 1910s, and largely retired from the screen in 1929, when Miss Mason did. Someone should do a book about the three of them.
This is the 25th dvd issued by Ed Lorusso, financed via Kickstarter. The print was in great shape, the score by David Drazin is lively, and there's even a bonus short offered, a Mary Pickford movie from 1911.
