Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 309, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 December 1912 — PERIL IN “MOVIES” [ARTICLE]

PERIL IN “MOVIES”

Actors in Animated Pictures Continually Risk Lives. Being Kicked by Horses, Attacked by Bedouins and Falling From High Places Some of “Stunts” Enacted During Day’s Work. London.—Acting in front of the camera for moving pictures isn’t quite as soft a job as people not in the know are apt to imagine, says a London correspondent. Grave risks have to be taken, and more or Jess serious accidents are quite common. Sometimes these even result fatally. The other day, for example, a man named Bittner descended in a parachute from the Column of Victory in Berlin, with a view to being cinematographed as he was falling; but something went wrong with his apparatus, and the unhappy parachutist was dashed to death. Similarly, a picture player named Dums was killed on the railway last year while acting a part. The unfortunate man was only supposed to be run over by the approaching train, it being the intention to substitute a dummy Hgure at the last moment./Ilut the rails were slippery, the drived was unable to pull up the engine in time and the actor was mangled to death beneath the wheels. No viewing on the screen the superb riding of pretty Alice Joyce, the famous exponent of "cowgirl” parts in western dramas, would suppose that any horse qould ever succeed in throwing her. As a matter of fact, however, she was met with several accidents. Miss Gene Gauntler, of Kansas City, has been exceptionally unlucky. Only quite recently she was attacked by Bedouins in the Sahara, and had to fight hard to get away. In Florida she was nearly engulfed in a quicksand. In a battle scene in “The Girl Spy” she kicked by a horse and nearly killed. In another war scene there was a premature explosion of a caisson that hurled her unconscious, but ft made a great picture. A naval lieutenant is another picture player who has had many narrow escapes, his latest exploit in this

direction being a fall from a high cliff near Brighton. Once, too, he was badly wounded in .a sword duel with a picture player antagonist. Of course the injury was quite unintentional and accidental. Alfred Brighton, a clever young American picture player, lost his life in the Hudson river a year ago. He had to leap into the water and rescue a girl who was supposed to be drowning. While swimming toward

her he was observed to throw up hi* arms, sink once or twice and struggle frantically on coming to the surface. The spectators on, the bank applauded wildly, imagining it to be part of the performance, and the operator kept turning the handle -of his machine, while shouting to the drowning man to ‘‘Keep it up!” Only when he had sunk for the third and last time did anybody even begin to puspect that anything was wrong.