Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“I hear all the new novels are sold to the moving pictures as soon as they come out.”

“That’s true. Of course the main thing in a moving picture is a strong story.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“So many novels are all full of talk and psychology. Of course those aren’t as valuable to us. It’s impossible to make much of that interesting on the screen.”

“You want plots first,” said Richard brilliantly.

“Of course. Plots first—” He paused, shifted his gaze. His pause spread, included the others with all the authority of a warning finger. Gloria followed by Rachael was coming out of the dressing room.

Among other things it developed during dinner that Joseph Bloeckman never danced, but spent the music time watching the others with the bored tolerance of an elder among children. He was a dignified man and a proud one. Born in Munich he had begun his American career as a peanut vender with a travelling circus. At eighteen he was a side show ballyhoo; later, the manager of the side show, and, soon after, the proprietor of a second-class vaudeville house. Just when the moving picture had passed out of the stage of a curiosity and become a promising industry he was an ambitious young man of twenty-six with some money to invest, nagging financial ambitions and a good working knowledge of the popular show business. That had been nine years before. The moving picture industry had borne him up with it where it threw off dozens of men with more financial ability, more imagination, and more practical ideas … and now he sat here and contemplated the immortal Gloria for whom young Stuart Holcome had gone from New York to Pasadena—watched her, and knew that presently she would cease dancing and come back to sit on his left hand.