Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
Show People
A colonel's daughter from Georgia comes to Hollywood to be a tragedienne and is a hit the moment someone throws a pie.
Hollywood made fun of itself early, and rarely this well. Marion Davies plays Peggy Pepper, who wants drama and is good at slapstick, then gets her drama and a new name and becomes unbearable. King Vidor shot it on the MGM lot and in the streets of 1928 Los Angeles, so it doubles as a document of the place. Davies was the best comedian among the great stars and is merciless about the kind of star the papers said she was. Watch the studio scene where Peggy meets the real Marion Davies, takes one look and pulls a face. Charlie Chaplin turns up asking for her autograph, and she has no idea who he is.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- King Vidor
- Photographed by
- John Arnold
- With
- Charlie Chaplin · King Vidor · Douglas Fairbanks · Q242416 · Louella Parsons · Norma Talmadge
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Two comedies about the movies from inside them. Keaton's projectionist dreams himself through the screen into the picture; Davies's Peggy Pepper walks through the studio gate and finds the picture is a factory. Both know that the joke and the trick are the same thing.
Two years apart, MGM sends a hopeful from the sticks to Hollywood and lets its own stars play themselves. In Show People Marion Davies becomes a star; in Free and Easy Keaton becomes a joke, and the cameo stars line up to watch.