Page 5 - conlon1960_hart

BILL HART
It was a funny old place, with a telephone pole running up
through the center of the stage, but we loved it dearly. In
all, we made twenty-seven feature pictures there, during
which time Bill Hart became one of the greatest figures in
motion picture history.
"Bill was on a Liberty Loan tour when I completed my
contract with the Arbuckle company. I was supposed to
leave for an army camp on November fifteenth. My contract
expired on the ninth, Bill wired me to join him as publicity
director on the tenth, and the Armistice was declared on the
eleventh. So, I just missed the train.
"When I first joined the Bill Hart company, I was much
impressed with his policy of surrounding himself with the
best available players.
"Among the girls were Anna Q. Nilsson, Jane and Eva
Novak, Katherine MacDonald, Mary Thurman, Phyllis Haver
(of the Sennett bathing beauty school), Seena Owen and Vola
Vale; among the men was a newcomer named Lon Chaney.
"Bill always cast the 'heavy' with the finest actor he could
find, such as Tom Santschi. Bill knew his own powers as an
actor and he wasn't afraid of a scene being stolen from him.
He could take care of himself. This is why he cast Lon Chaney
in 'Riddle Gawn.' At first, Lon couldn't believe it when he
played his first scene with Bill, and Hart told him to go ahead
and take the scene if he could. Once Chaney got it through
his head that Bill wasn't kidding, there was a battle worth
seeing. Later Lon told me, when he was making 'The Hunch-
back of Notre Dame,' that it was Bill's encouragement that
hastened his own stardom.
"We had kangaroo courts on every location. It was on
this picture that both Lon and Bill were chapped so hard they
were hardly able to sit down for days. If you were the de-
fendant, you were always guilty in the kangaroo court, and
I recall that we chapped Bill for loaning his leading lady five
dollars with which she got in the crap game and took money
away from honest cowboys.
"Bill usually rode his famous little pinto pony, Fritz, in
his pictures, particularly after 'The Narrow Trail,' the first

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