Monday, June 23, 2014

THE BOY FRIEND Script, Shooting Schedule







THE BOY FRIEND was a silent Hal Roach two-reel comedy with Max Davidson, Myron Byron, and "Wild Bill" Elliot. The script and shooting schedule for this film turned up on ebay.











Direct from the HAL ROACH Studios, this is an ORIGINAL 7 Page Script, along with a TWO Page Daily Shooting Schedule.  It has the Original paper clip still attached.    It measures 9" x 14".  It is OVER 70 YEARS OLD!!!  
 It is a RARE vintage ORIGINAL item direct from the Hal Roach Studios, Hollywood California.
This script is for the 1928 Comedy film short,
The Boy Friend
Max, a bank clerk, gives his pretty daughter some money to buy shoes. At the shop she meets a handsome college student, who has holes in his socks. When she leaves the shop in anger, after finding a hole in her stockings too, she forgets her newly bought scanties. The college student - with only one shoe - follows her and gives her them. Max sees them from afar, noticing the bare foot. When she invites her new friend home, her parents decide to behave crazy to scare him away - going so far to claim being Mr and Mrs Caesar, before realizing that the young man is his boss' son. But by then he has already fled home, chased by two people clad in old Roman clothes claiming not to be Mr and Mrs Caesar, and a confused daughter...

Director:

Writer:

(story)

Cast


          ...
Papa Davidson
          ...
Gordon Elliott (as Gordon Elliott)
          ...
Marion Davidson
          ...
The Cop
          ...
Mama Davidson
                                      

It's in GREAT shape for it's age!!!
Finding anything ORIGINAL from the Hal Roach Studios is extremely RARE so don't let this one pass you by! A Fantastic find for the TRUE Hal Roach collector!
MORE INFORMATION ON BILL ELLIOTT:  Born Gordon Nance in 1904 on a farm in Pattonsburg, Missouri -- a small town about 60 miles northeast of Kansas City -- the future "Wild Bill Elliott" grew up around horses. His father was a commissioner at the Kansas City Stockyards. and at age 16 Elliott won a first-place ribbon in that city's annual "American Royal Horse and Livestock Show." After a move to California, he appeared in a few productions at the Pasadena PLayhouse, where he was spotted by a talent scout. He made his first movie in 1925. A steady stream of movies followed, first silents and then talkies, in which he played too great a variety of roles to be "typed." In many of these movies he was billed as "Gordon Elliott." In 1938, however, Columbia cast him as the lead in its 15-chapter serial, The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (1938), and Elliott's identification with westerns began. He even began to adopt the names "Bill" or "Wild Bill." He also became famous for using the line, "I'm a peaceable man ... " (which was inevitably followed by an outburst of violence). Elliott reached his peak of popularity at Columbia when he was teamed with Tex Ritter for a series of films. In 1943 he left Columbia for Republic, where his westerns had somewhat larger budgets. This was followed by a move to Monogram (later Allied Artists) in 1951. He was now back in low-budget B-westerns, the last one appearing in 1954. There followed six other B pictures in which he played a Los Angeles police detective. He filmed "pilots" for two potential TV series, "Marshal of Trail City" and "Parson of the West," but neither of them sold. His film career over, Elliott settled in Las Vegas where he hosted a weekly TV show in which he interviewed guests and showed some of his old movies. He also became a pitchman for a cigarette company. In 1961 his 34-year marriage to Helen Josephine Meyer ended and he took Dolly Moore as his second wife. He died of lung cancer in 1965 and is buried in Las Vegas at Palm Memorial Park.
MORE INFO ON MARION BYRON:  At Warner Brothers, tiny, five feet tall Marion Byron was nicknamed (and occasionally billed as) "Peanuts". She was a cute and vivacious soubrette who featured in early, long forgotten musicals, with titles like The Show of Shows (1929), Broadway Babies (1929) and Playing Around (1930). Marion began her performing career as a teenage showgirl in Los Angeles and got her first break in films as leading lady to Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). In a biographical form, she was required to submit at First National, she answered the question of how she got her first screen opportunity with: "By mistake".

In the early 30's, Marion's regular screen assignments included the usual assortment of feisty maids, college girls, friends of the heroine, flappers and chorines, which were reserved for those deemed 'second leads'. Though stardom eluded her, she was briefly popular in lightweight comedies, notable examples being the
Michael Curtiz-directed The Matrimonial Bed (1930) and Mervyn LeRoy's quirky Jewish farce The Heart of New York (1932) (which sported comic duo Smith & Dale as eccentric matchmakers 'Schnapps and Strudel'). Already by 1933, Marion's roles had diminished to uncredited bits and walk-ons. Her last film was as a nurse in Five of a Kind (1938), the story of the Dionne Quintuplets, scripted by her husband, the screenwriter Lou Breslow.
 

 MORE INFO ON HAL ROACH: Hal Roach was born in Elmira, New York in 1892. After working as, among other things, a gold prospector, he wound up in Hollywood and began picking up jobs as an extra in comedies, where he met comedian Harold Lloyd. He began producing, directing and writing a series of short film comedies starring Lloyd around 1915. These were quite successful, and Roach started his own production company and eventually bought his own studio. By the early 1920s he had eclipsed Mack Sennett as the King of Comedy and created many of the most memorable comic series of all time, even by today's standards. These include the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Charley Chase and The Little Rascals. By the late 1930s Roach's formula for success was jeopardized by audience demands for bigger, feature-length productions, and he was forced to try his hand at making full-length screwball comedies, musicals and dramas, although he still kept turning out two-reel comedies. By the 1950s he was producing mainly for television. In 1983 his company developed the first successful digital colorization process. Roach then became a producer for many TV series on the Disney Channel, and his company still produces most of their films and videos.




THE BOY FRIEND:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0130517/

Marion Byron:
http://benny-drinnon.blogspot.com/2013/03/marion-byron.html

http://www.silentsaregolden.com/photos2/marionbyron.html


Max Davidson:
http://www.slapsticon.org/mugshots/davidsonbio.htm


Wild Bill Elliott:
http://www.b-westerns.com/elliott.htm



Special thanks to John Brezina Toth for mentioning this script.          


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1 comment:

  1. The byplay between Peanuts Byron and Bill Elliot is wonderful in this film, especially when he catches up to her in the street and they converse, while he casually twirls around her "scanties", drawing an amused crowd which includes policeman Edgar Kennedy.

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