Both Norma Shearer and Shirley Temple Want to Make **Gertie M: 1
Six Boys as Stars Two of the most famous stars a in the market for the same film sto writes Stephen Watts to the "Sunday Express" If one guessed for a week one could not think of two more dissimilar—Shirley Temple and Norma Shearer.
What you may guess now is that they would play different parts. The subject is John Van Druten' new play, "Gertie Mano," now running in London. Gertie Maüde is a musical comedy girl of nice, ordinary parents, who is promoted to be a leading lady. She has the bad luck to fall in love out of her own class—which gives the play its point.
Miss Shearer, whose presently planned films are "Pride and Prejudice" and "Marie Antoinette" will want a change after that, so a modern play is being sought for her.
Hunt Stromberg, who seems to have succeeded the late Irving Thal-berg as M.G.M.'s principal producer, saw "Gertie Maude" recently and thinks it could be made into a very suitable film for Miss Shearer. But these little sawn-off streets by the water's edge are labelled "Dead End."
Kingsley put the life of these slums—some of them lying right under the uplifted noses of the ritziest "apartments"—into a play which one American critic neatly summarized as "provin that boys will be boys until they gcow up to be gangsters."
There are adult parts, too, and Goldwyn xat Sylvia Sidney, Joel McCrea and Humphrey Bogart in these. But the kernel of the drama is the kids, so Goldwyn decided to have the originals. They are so authen tie that trouble began the moment they were put on the train west. Most of the journey to California they whiled away the time playing baseball up and down the aisles of the train, 4o the extreme discomfort of the other passengers.
The great Goldwyn they called "Pop" on sight and treated with an irreverent familiarity that shocked the studio. AN but one of them being under eighteen, they had to go to school. there is also the part of a little girl in the play, an important part. She one of those strictly logical, persistently inquiring children. And she is also stage-struck. Van Druten wrote his play round these two characters.
They nearly drove their teacher crazy by having a system of bogus emergency calls by which one or other was always being summoned to rehearsal
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.