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considerable sum for us to be splitting three ways. If you figure it out, it came to almost forty-two dollars a week for each of us. And if the girl didn’t work out, we would have lost our initial hundred-dollar advance, which was supposed to cover the first two weeks of shooting the scenes with her leading man.
    The leading man we found was Harry.
    Knowing what I now know, I wish we had never laid eyes on him. In fact, knowing what I now know, I wish Harry had got hit by a bus on the first day of shooting. Or even the second day. Or a falling safe from a high building. Or a catastrophe in the subway. Harry was a dope. He wasn’t even good-looking, but thatwas okay because we didn’t want her leading man to be too good-looking as that would run contrary to the intent of Solly’s script when it got to the play-within-a-play sections which were actually the major sections of the movie. Harry was working daytimes as an insurance adjuster, and he was reluctant to accept our offer at first because he was very conscientious about his job, and he didn’t want to get to work tired in the morning. I should tell you at this point, though I hold no hard feelings, that it was Ben who brought that dope Harry around. They had gone to high school together, and Ben remembered him from the locker room as somebody who was not too spectacularly built, which was also in keeping with the tone and the intent of Solly’s beautiful screenplay.
    Anyway, we told Harry that our shooting schedule, as far as it concerned him, would be from eight p.m. to midnight, and then he could go home and get a good night’s rest before he went to his job at the insurance company. We told him that twenty-five dollars a week was really just a token payment, but the work was not exactly disagreeable, and besides we were willing to pay him five percent of the profits once the picture broke even and we were all on the way to becoming millionaires. We did this because we felt certain he would begin talking to the girl later on when they became acquainted, and we didn’t want any jealousy on the set about who was getting a percentage and who wasn’t. It was offering him the percentage that did the trick. Up to then, he was only mildly interested; we had shown him pictures of the girl—fully clothed, of course—which Ben had taken the minute we signed her, and though she was very nicely shaped, in fact very marvelously shaped, she wasn’t too beautiful in the face, though she did have a nice innocent and sophisticated look about her. Harrywasn’t too sure he wanted to make love to her in front of a camera. He said he had gone out with much prettier girls in his lifetime, which frankly I found hard to believe when you consider this was Harry the dope talking. But when we offered the five percent, he all at once decided that maybe it would be all right for him to lower his standards just this once, provided it really wouldn’t take more of his time than from eight to midnight. We told him that as the shooting went on, he would be required to perform even less and less, and he agreed to work for us. So there we were. We had our script, we had our leading players, we had this big old loft to shoot the movie in, and we had our dream.
    So we began.
    It was very difficult to explain Solly’s script, especially to a pair of dopes like Harry and the girl. The first thing she wanted to know was what the CAST OF CHARACTERS page meant. That particular page was at the very beginning of the script, and it looked like this:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  CAST OF CHARACTERS
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  (In Order of