“Film World Opens Doors Wide”

In November 1925, the New York American announced a “Motion Picture Contest” for children. For weeks it promoted that competition with articles and pictures of the entrants.

The top prize was $1,000, a trip to Culver City, and an appearance in a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie at a weekly salary of $200 with an option for a two-year contract. The judges included Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, and other MGM executives.

On 4 Jan 1926, the newspaper announced the winner: “little Irene Nanette Butler, of 425 Riverside Drive,” age three. More stories about her ran over the next two days.

Later in the year little Irene appeared in The Fire Brigade along with the winner of a similar contest in California. She never made another picture.

On 13 January, however, the New York American shared an additional story with these headlines:

Film World Opens Doors Wide to “Skipper,” 5

$1,000 Check Starts Child Toward Fame

Elmer Lowery, Second Prize Winner in New York American Contest, to Go West

In fact, Elmer’s surname was spelled Lowry, his family nickname was “Skippy,” and he had turned six years old in December. But he was receiving all the benefits of the top prize, more than originally announced for the second-place winner, so who could complain?

In February, Elmer Lowry started performing before the cameras in Culver City—not at MGM but at the smaller Hal Roach Studio, in its Our Gang series. From then on he was “Scooter.”

The New York American said the boy came from Roosevelt, Long Island. But on 8 Aug 1926 the Chattanooga Times–Free Press claimed him for that city:

Chattanooga Boy in ‘Our Gang’ Comedy

Elmer (“Skippy”) Lowry, a Chattanooga boy, now in Hollywood, will appear at the Tivoli theater during the first part of the week in the latest “Our Gang” comedy, entitled “Thundering Fleas.”

“Skippy” is the son of H. D. Lowry, who is now connected with the Read house. “Skippy,” who is only 7 years old, has shown for some time an extraordinary histrionic ability that won the admiration of friends and that made him participate in several benefit shows.

While in New York with his mother, the New York American opened a contest, looking for young talent in the motion picture field. “Skippy” entered and won a prize of $1,000, securing at the same time a contract with Hal Roach as one of the cast in all the new “Our Gang” comedies.

Elmer’s father was named Willard D. Lowry, but even the local press didn’t get that right.

Elmer’s mother heading off to New York was probably a sign of trouble in the Lowry family. On 25 May 1927 the Knoxville News-Sentinel ran this United Press dispatch out of Chattanooga:

“Our Gang” Boy Hardly Needed Father’s Aid

“Yes, judge, I provided for my children as long as they needed it, but they don’t need it now,” said William D. Lowry when applying for a divorce before Judge Yarnell.

“But why don’t they need your help; they aren’t grown?” asked the court.

“Well, you see, judge, the youngest, my seven-year-old boy, Elmer Camden Lowry, belongs to the ‘Our Gang’ kids in the movies, and he makes $350 a week himself,” was Lowry’s reply.

He got the divorce from Anna Lowry on grounds of desertion.

(A briefer version appeared in that day’s Imperial Valley Press.)

Anna Lowry having taken the children off to Hollywood, Willard Lowry declared that she had left him. And he got out of child support on the grounds that Elmer was making so much money for the family—$350 a week!

In fact, Hal Roach was paying “Scooter” Lowry only $60 per week.

Even more sadly, the same month that divorce came through, the studio quietly ended its contract with “Scooter,” as I related yesterday. The movies he made in early 1927 would be released through the end of the year, but he no longer brought in a steady income.

According to IMDB, Elmer “Scooter” Lowry acted in only one more film: a small role in Chinatown Charlie, an independent production now lost in whole or in part.

COMING UP: An ex–gang member.

Elmer “Scooter” Lowry’s Short Movie Career

Elmer Lowry was born in 1919 in New York City. By the age of five he was singing and dancing on stage. His family called him “Skippy.”

According to later articles, the boy won first prize in a dance contest and came to the attention of Hal Roach.

By February 1926, Elmer was filming his first Our Gang movie, “Thundering Fleas.” His nickname became “Skooter” or “Scooter.” After a few months his weekly pay rose from $50 to $60. That year “Scooter” Lowry made eight Our Gang films, plus a cameo appearance in the feature 45 Minutes From Hollywood.

“Scooter” was never the lead character, but in the gang he stood out in a couple of ways. He was athletic, somersaulting around in “Shivering Spooks.” And though he was one of the smaller boys in the gang, he was cast as the tough guy; in “Seeing the World” he offers to beat up an Italian kid for no reason at all.

The July 1927 issue of Photoplay magazine contained this anecdote:

Rare intuition belongs to “Scooter” Lowry, smallest and most acrobatic member of “Our Gang.” He was twirling and twisting on a rail near Hal Roach’s office. At the door stood Roach, talking with a business conferee. “Scooter,” with small boy impetuosity, attempted to enter the conversation.

“Go on with your gymnastics, Scooter, and let us talk business,” Roach admonished.

But “Scooter” kept on with his turns and talk.

“Keep still, ‘Scooter’! I can’t even think with all that noise.”

“Scooter” arose with dignity—

“How did I know you were trying to think?”

Roach and his friend retired to his office.

That’s a cute story, but the actual incident might have had a darker side.

By the time that article appeared, “Scooter” Lowry was no longer on the Hal Roach Studio payroll. He’d been let go in April 1927 in the middle of filming “Olympic Games,” the fifth Our Gang movie made that year. The studio paid out three weeks’ salary and sent him off.

At that time a little blonde girl named Jean Darling was becoming a series regular. Decades later, fans asked her if she remembered what happened to “Scooter.” Darling replied, “I was told Scooter left because he was rather disruptive. That’s all I know.”

Looks like it might have been a bad idea to interrupt the boss’s conversation.

TOMORROW: How it all started.

“The urchin who treads on the garden hose”

Film narrative began with the figure of a mischievous child.

The very first movies were “actualités” documenting how people, animals, or machines moved around in real life. The novelty and spectacle of seeing those actions on screen provided all the entertainment.

As one famous example, in early 1895 Louis and Auguste Lumière first exhibited their improved cinématographe with footage of workers leaving their factory. Exciting!

That summer, the brothers decided instead to stage a fictional event for their camera. The result is the oldest known movie with a plot (beginning, middle, and end) and the oldest film comedy.

The Lumières claimed to take inspiration from a prank played by their baby brother Edouard, born in 1884. If so, Edouard may have taken inspiration from comics, since cartoonists had been drawing variations on this prank since he was a baby. Antoine Sausverd rounded up examples in this article for Topfferiana. Lance Rickman discussed their cinematic influence in an article titled “Bande dessinee and the cinematograph: visual narrative in 1895.”

A journalist for the newspaper Les Allobroges published an interview about this movie with the Lumières’ former gardener Jean-François Clerc in 1949. In translation:

Suddenly, one fine summer morning, the two young men came to find me at the end of the garden where I was working, followed by that little rascal Edouard, all three carrying an extraordinary set of equipment. Louis set up the tripod, Auguste added his crank box on top, and Edouard went to get a garden hose a few steps away. Here was a dark lurking mystery in which I was to pay the price, while raising myself to the rank of the world’s leading film actor.

When everything was set up, while Louis was already holding the handle of his curious box, Auguste said to me: “François, take the jet and water in front of you, without worrying about us. Edouard, by pressing with his foot on the hose, will give you or take away water.” Things went as agreed and that’s how I watered in jerky jets, the water sometimes splashing in my face, while Louis and Auguste kept turning their famous handle, continually directing the glass eye of this box at me.

No footage of this action featuring Edouard has survived. Clerc may have misremembered his costar, or that first footage was a test of concept and the brothers came back for a more planned filming. Louis Lumière himself said in a 1948 interview:

Although my recollections are not very accurate, I think I may say that the idea of the scenario was suggested to me by a farce by my younger brother Edouard, whom we unhappily lost while an airman during the 1914-1918 war. He was then too young to play the part of the urchin who treads on the garden hose. I replaced him by a young apprentice from the carpenter’s workshop of the factory, Duval, who died after performing his duties as chief packer of the works for almost forty-two years. As regards the waterer, the part was played by our gardener M. Clerc, who is still alive after being employed at the works for forty years.

Different sources say young Duval’s first name was Daniel or Benoît.

In late 1895 the Lumières began to exhibit a 40-second movie variously titled “Le jardinier (The Gardener),” “Le jardinier et l’espiègle (The Gardener and the Mischief-Maker),” and finally “L’arroseur arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled).” That movie has a clear plot. The boy steps on the gardener’s hose. Puzzled, the gardener peers at the nozzle, The boy hops off the hose, making water squirt into the gardener’s face. The gardener chases down the prankster and spanks him. The gardener goes back to work while the chastened boy walks off (with a glance at the camera).

The next year, the brothers filmed another version in a different garden with more depth of scene. This time, the prankster was played by a 22-year-old factory employee named Léon Trotobas. In 45 seconds the action comes full circle with the gardener spraying him back. (Some writers treat this as the first version. I’m agreeing with the sequence described by Movies Silently and others.)

“L’arroseur arrosé” was such a hit that the Lumières commissioned Marcellin Auzolle to draw a poster showing an audience enjoying it—the oldest known movie poster to show part of an actual movie.

Other moviemakers like George Méliès copied “L’arroseur arrosé,” sometimes exactly, sometimes trying to top the action. The 1899 British version, “The Biter Bit,” runs more than a minute and shows the gardener chasing the prankster (another man) around a tree before spraying him. Thus film slapstick grew.

Are You Gonna?

“Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” performed by WJM (William Lipton, Jeremy Yun, and Max Simas, with guest bassist Collin Simas, uploaded to YouTube on 9 May 2013)

“Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” performed by The Runarounds (William Lipton, Axel Ellis, Jeremy Yun, Jesse Golliher, and Zendé Murdock, uploaded to YouTube on 10 Feb 2023)

The Runarounds was formed in 2000 for a television show that finally went out on Amazon Prime this month. The five musicians cast as slightly younger musicians for the series have been playing and writing songs together in the meantime, and they’re now touring the east coast.

In the series premiere, the characters bond over the song “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?”, originally by Jet. As the cast notes in interviews, and as this pair of videos shows, most of them have had fun playing that song since they were kids.

“To do it exactly like Douglas Fairbanks”

In 1976 Robert Parrish, an Academy Award–winning film editor and less heralded film director, published his first memoir, Growing Up in Hollywood.

Parrish opened his life story with a incident about himself as a seven-year-old in Columbus, Georgia. He was born in 1916, so that would have occurred in 1923 or so.

This lively anecdote, full of evocative detail, starts with an older boy urging little Robert to fetch some curtains so the neighborhood gang can recreate Douglas Fairbanks’s famous stunt in The Black Pirate: sliding down a ship’s sail with a knife stuck into the canvas to slow himself down.

Robert found a sheet, which the gang hung from an oak branch. The older boy supplied a butcher knife. While most of the fellows slapped wooden swords at each other on the ground, they sent the seven-year-old up the tree to try the stunt first. The scene ended [SPOILER!] with a broken arm.

While he recuperated, Robert’s mother took him to her third viewing of D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms. During that show, he saw a “coming-attractions trailer for Intolerance,” with a shot of director Griffith setting up the action. From then on, Parrish wrote, he was interested in who was in charge of making the movies.

In 1926, the Coca-Cola Company transferred Robert’s father to Los Angeles. He got the chance to work as a child actor in the background of some significant movies, including a couple of Our Gang shorts, Speedy, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Big Trail, and City Lights.

Performing with Fairbanks in The Iron Mask, he learned the secret of that stunt in The Black Pirate. He even got to try it with all the unseen safety effects working. Thus, as in many well-crafted narratives, the details Parrish laid out early came back to have added meaning later.

However, the dates in Parrish’s story don’t add up. The Black Pirate was released in 1926, the year when the family moved to Hollywood, and not three years before.

Intolerance was released in 1916, and Broken Blossoms in 1919. So would a first-run city theater have shown Broken Blossoms four years after its release, with a “coming-attractions trailer” for a movie that was three years older than that?

It seems clear that Parrish’s memories of early movies ran together in his head. In assembling his memoir, he cited movies that had become part of the film studies canon by the 1970s but probably weren’t what he watched in 1923.

But what about the story of trying to slide down a sheet like Douglas Fairbanks and breaking his arm? That was a more particular and memorable experience than sitting in a cinema. And yet Parrish described that stunt being inspired by a movie that didn’t exist until three years afterward. Furthermore, there’s no sword-fighting melée at that point in the The Black Pirate.

I haven’t found any review that points out that discrepancy. In his 2008 biography of Fairbanks, Jeffrey Vance quoted Parrish from his memoir and an interview without noting the age gap. The Golden Globes website silently changed little Robert’s age from seven to ten to match the release date of The Black Pirate.

I offer a different explanation. The movie that the Columbus gang were trying to emulate wasn’t The Black Pirate but Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood, released in 1922 (YouTube). That movie showed Fairbanks sliding down a tall curtain—just as a whole bunch of guards run around with swords. The stunt in The Black Pirate was designed to outshine the earlier scene. And it did, both on screen and in Robert Parrish’s memory.

Marking the Many Media of Oz

Tori Calamito, host of the Oz Vlog, is doing a live online event called “Defying Gravity: The Evolution of Oz from Page to Stage to Screen” for local libraries.

The event description says:

This exclusive Zoom program offers a rare glimpse into over a century of Oz storytelling, from L. Frank Baum’s original book series to the latest Broadway productions and upcoming film. The Oz Vlog will share treasures from her extensive memorabilia collection while exploring how the Land of Oz has evolved across different media. Whether you’re a longtime fan of the 1939 MGM classic, a Broadway enthusiast who’s seen Wicked multiple times, or curious about the upcoming Wicked: For Good, this program has something magical for everyone.

Come prepared to be amazed by the depth and breadth of Oz’s influence on entertainment, and leave with a deeper appreciation for the wonderful world that has inspired some of the most popular characters of all time. This program is sponsored by The Oz Vlog who is donating her time to this event!

This event will take place on Wednesday, 30 July, starting at 7:00 Massachusetts time. Folks can register for this event through the Burlington Public Library.

In a similar vein, on Saturday, 16 August, Worldcon in Seattle will feature a panel discussion on “Oz: America’s First Multimedia Franchise,” organized and moderated by Eric Gjovaag.

That description is:

Known around the world for the famous film adaptation, The Wizard of Oz is back in everyone’s minds thanks to the current two-part Wicked movie. But Oz started life as a popular novel, which then spawned a Broadway musical, a series of other books, early silent movies, and more. Oz is a franchise that always grows and changes with the times. Learn more about the origins of The Wizard of Oz and how it has been reinterpreted on stage, television, and computers and in movies, comics, toys, games, and more from 1900 to the present day.

Panelists are A. J. Hackwith, J.R. Dawson, and Terri Ash. Eric will also moderate a panel the next day on “How The Wizard of Oz Has Shaped Science Fiction.”

Easy Cases Make Good Law?

The Washington Post and Forbes reported on how five US Supreme Court justices recused themselves on a copyright infringement case.

Four of those justices have book deals with Penguin Random House, a party in the case. There’s no obvious reason for the fifth justice’s decision, but people suspect some similar financial interest.

Some court observers saw these justices’ choice as an indication that they were paying more attention to ethical issues. Others saw danger in how many justices have income from book sales, potentially making it impossible for them to rule ethically about publishing law.

I have different thoughts. First, book income pales in comparison to the other outside income justices receive for appearing at exclusive legal conferences, especially compared to the work involved.

Furthermore, Justice Clarence Thomas has received millions of dollars in value through vacations, vehicles, and other presents for no work at all, and then repeatedly failed to disclose those gifts.

After the Thomas scandals broke, conservatives tried to build up Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s book deal into a comparable brouhaha. Justices had been publishing books for years before that (Thomas among them) without attracting so much criticism.

So while I do see the potential ethical problems when judges have financial interests aligned with large media companies, I don’t think that’s at the top of the list of what needs to be fixed at the Supreme Court.

Second, I looked at the case that the five justices recused from, Baker v. Coates et al., through this PDF. A man decided that Ta-Nehisi Coates had plagiarized his self-published book and sued not only Coates but lots of other people and corporations involved in other things Coates has written: The Atlantic Monthly, Disney (as owner of Marvel Comics), Oprah Winfrey and Apple (for broadcasting an interview), and so on. 

The filing includes pages and pages of side-by-side comparisons between Coates’s writing and the plaintiff’s—which show very little similarity. Unlike some plagiarism claims that make the news with obvious parallels, such as Pete Hegseth’s senior thesis, this one reveals no smoking guns. It doesn’t even offer water pistols.

A lower court dismissed that claim with prejudice—i.e., totally swatted it away. An appeals court upheld that decision. The Supreme Court’s inaction cements that result, but I think it’s extremely unlikely the court would have accepted this case anyway. The justices probably wanted nothing to do with it.

“Seeing all those curls lying on the floor”

Frances Hodgson Burnett finished Little Lord Fauntleroy with young Cedric still wearing the same clothes and hairstyle as when he started.

For boys who disliked that book’s fashions, however, the moment a lad could have his “love-locks” cut became a rite of passage. It was akin to transitioning from skirts to breeches, and later from breeches to long pants. It signaled not only growing older but also moving away from maternal influence.

The slapstick comedian Moe Howard described such a moment in his memoir, Moe Howard and the Three Stooges, published posthumously in 1977. Born in 1897 as Moses Horwitz, he recalled having ringlets as a boy in elementary school:

My school career began in September 1903, when I was six. Whenever I attended school—which in later years wasn’t very often—I was constantly fighting. I fought on my way to school, in school, and on my way home. As I said before, my hair had grown very long, and every school day I would awaken a half hour before everyone else so my mother could wind finger curls through my hair; they reached almost to my shoulders. There were about twenty of them in all, and they resembled a bunch of cigars stuck on my head. Knowing that it was my mother’s greatest delight to spend that half hour arranging my curls, I didn’t complain. But soon it became the battle of my school career.

After recounting lots of fights over how “girly” he looked, Howard recalled meeting a couple of boys who befriended him anyway—but still didn’t like the hairstyle.

I gazed into Donald’s mirror and saw my curls hanging down, a good ten inches long. I glanced over at Donald and Rusty, two normal-looking young boys. I looked in the mirror again, and then something on Don’s dresser caught my eye. A shiny object with black enamel handles. I looked at myself again, trying to create one last impression.

I grabbed the scissors and, with my eyes closed, began to circle my head, clipping curls all the way around. I didn’t dare to look at the floor to see what had fallen. When I finished, I dropped the scissors, afraid to look at myself. Tears quietly flowed down my cheeks.

When I finally opened my eyes, I found Rusty and Don pointing at me and laughing hysterically. I couldn’t resist looking into the mirror. I choked up. There wasn’t a laugh in me. There in the mirror I caught sight of the haircut that was to make me famous in the 1920s. I laughed, then I cried, and I shuddered seeing all those curls lying on the floor and realizing that I had destroyed one of my mother’s few pleasures. . . .

My brother Shemp spotted me first. He let out a war whoop. “Take a look at your son with the fright wig. He thinks it’s Halloween, and what do you know, it’s not a wig; it’s a brand-new haircut.” Then Mother, Irving, and Jack came in. They stared speechless for a moment. Then Mother looked at me. I looked at her and the tears welled up in my eyes, then the tears welled up in hers. She said softly, “Thank God you did it. I didn’t have the courage.”

Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel offers a semi-fictional treatment of the same transition. The autobiographical novel by and about a boy born in 1900 in North Carolina says:

Eliza had allowed his hair to grow long; she wound it around her finger every morning into fat Fauntleroy curls: the agony and humiliation it caused him was horrible, but she was unable or unwilling to understand it, and mouth-pursingly thoughtful and stubborn to all solicitation to cut it.

And a few years and many pages later:

He was now in one of the upper grades of grammar school, he was one of the Big Boys. His hair had been cut when he was nine years old, after a bitter siege against Eliza’s obstinacy. He no longer suffered because of the curls.

TV Tropes lists many female examples of the Important Haircut in recent books, movies, and other entertainment. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, that passage was just as important for many boys.

“The Fauntleroy period had set in”

The hairstyle and costume popularized by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, as illustrated by Reginald B. Birch, didn’t remain fashionable for very long.

But it remained vivid in the memory of Americans who lived through the 1880s and ’90s. Indeed, that look for boys became an icon of the Gilded Age.

For instance, Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) published The Magnificent Ambersons in 1918. This passage, looking back on life in Indianapolis three decades before, describes Georgie Minafer as a boy:

…the Fauntleroy period had set in, and Georgie’s mother had so poor an eye for appropriate things, where Georgie was concerned, that she dressed him according to the doctrine of that school in boy decoration. Not only did he wear a silk sash, and silk stockings, and a broad lace collar, with his little black velvet suit: he had long brown curls, and often came home with burrs in them.

Except upon the surface (which was not his own work, but his mother’s) Georgie bore no vivid resemblance to the fabulous little Cedric. The storied boy’s famous “Lean on me, grandfather,” would have been difficult to imagine upon the lips of Georgie. A month after his ninth birthday anniversary, when the Major gave him his pony, he had already become acquainted with the toughest boys in various distant parts of the town, and had convinced them that the toughness of a rich little boy with long curls might be considered in many respects superior to their own. . . .

Thus, on a summer afternoon, a strange boy, sitting bored upon the gate-post of the Reverend Malloch Smith, beheld George Amberson Minafer rapidly approaching on his white pony, and was impelled by bitterness to shout: “Shoot the ole jackass! Look at the girly curls! Say, bub, where’d you steal your mother’s ole sash!”

“Your sister stole it for me!” Georgie instantly replied, checking the pony. “She stole it off our clo’es-line an’ gave it to me.”

“You go get your hair cut!” said the stranger hotly. “Yah! I haven’t got any sister!”

“I know you haven’t at home,” Georgie responded. “I mean the one that’s in jail.”

When Orson Welles adapted Tarkington’s novel into a movie, his script kept that deathless dialogue exactly. It also specified that that scene took place in 1885, thus slightly before Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel appeared. Bobby Cooper played young Georgie, as shown above.

Tarkington created another portrait of childhood in Penrod and its sequels, but he set those books a generation later, and none of the boys has Fauntleroy curls.

The Little Lord’s “Love-Locks”

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy started to appear in St. Nicholas Magazine in 1885, then came out in book form in 1886. It was illustrated by Reginald B. Birch.

Cedric, the title character, was defined by a distinctive look:

Mary…was proud of his graceful, strong little body and his pretty manners, and especially proud of the bright curly hair which waved over his forehead and fell in charming love-locks on his shoulders. She was willing to work early and late to help his mamma make his small suits and keep them in order.

“’Ristycratic, is it?” she would say. “Faith, an’ I’d loike to see the choild on Fifth Avey-NOO as looks loike him an’ shteps out as handsome as himself. An’ ivvery man, woman, and choild lookin’ afther him in his bit of a black velvet skirt made out of the misthress’s ould gownd; an’ his little head up, an’ his curly hair flyin’ an' shinin’. It’s loike a young lord he looks.”

Soon the name “Fauntleroy” was applied to the outfit Birch pictured. “Short tailored jacket, knee-length trousers, rather frilly shirt, wide collar with rounded corners, or large loose bow” is how Merriam Webster defines the adjective “Fauntleroy” now.

The long “love-locks on his shoulders” were just as much part of this look for upper-class boys. Indeed, within three years after Burnett’s story appearing, Harper’s Young People published an anecdote about “Little Rex, who is six years old, and has a pretty head of ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ curls.”

Soon there was a backlash. By 1893 the University of North Carolina Magazine started a positive review of Burnett’s new story collection with a nod to “the little Chapel Hill boy who wanted to cut off Lord Fauntleroy's curls and roll him in the dirt until he made of him a real boy.”