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By Root 2482 0

they began billing not just the featured players, but also directors and even sometimes cameramen. The first actress to have her name changed for purposes of enhanced aura (sex appeal wouldn’t come into general use until the 1940s) is thought to have been one Theodosia Goodman from Cincinnati. Seeking a persona better suited to her dark, exotic looks, someone at the William Fox Company in 1914 played around with the words Arab and death (goodness knows why those two) and came up with Theda Bara. Soon all the studios were at it. Among the stars who found immortality with someone else’s name, we can count the following. (Their original names are on the right.)

Rudolph Valentino Rodolpho d’Antonguolla

Joan Crawford Lucille Le Sueur

Al Jolson Asa Yoleson

Bert Lahr Isidore Lahrheim

Paul Muni Muni Weisenfreund

Gilbert Roland Luis Antonio Damoso De Alonzo

Lauren Bacall Betty Jean Perske

Tony Curtis Bernard Schwarz

Jack Benny Benny Kubelsky

Barbara Stanwyck Ruby Stevens

Veronica Lake Constance Ockleman

Susan Hayward Edyth Marrener

Fredric March Frederick Bickel

Don Ameche Dominic Amici

Red Buttons Aaron Chwatt

Ed Wynn Isaiah Edwin Leopold

Melvyn Douglas Melvyn Hesselberg

Kirk Douglas Issur Danielovitch Demsky

Lee J Cobb Leo Jacoby

June Haver June Stovenour

Rita Hayworth Margarita Carmen Cansino

Ginger Rogers Virginia McMath

Mickey Rooney Joe Yule, jun.

Jane Wyman Sarah Jane Faulks

John Garfield Julius Garfinkle

June Allyson Ella Geisman

Danny Kaye David Daniel Kaminsky

Sterling Hayden Sterling W. Relyea

Rock Hudson Roy Scherer

Cyd Charisse Tula Ellice Finklea

Troy Donahue Merle Johnson

Anne Bancroft Anna Maria Italiano

Jerry Lewis Joseph Levitch

Dean Martin Dino Crocetti

Tab Hunter Andrew Arthur Kelm

Virginia May Virginia Jones

W. C. Fields W. C. Dukinfield

Clifton Webb Webb Parmelee Hollenbeck

Dorothy Lamour Dorothy Kaumeyer

Heddy Lamour Hedwig Kiesler

Walter Matthau Walter Mattaschanskayasky

Boris Karloff William Pratt

And, no, I don’t know why Boris Karloff was thought to be an improvement on Bill Pratt.

In 1926, two new terms entered the language: Movietone from the Fox studios and Vitaphone from Warner Brothers, and sound movies were on their way. Both employed music and sound effects, but not speech. The talkies (often also called the speakies in the early days) would have to wait till the following year and the release of The Jazz Singer, though even it was only partly speaking. The first all-talking film, a gangster feature called The Lights of New York, came in 1928, though such was the quality of sound reproduction that it came equipped with subtitles as well. With sound, movies became not only more popular but immensely more complicated to make.

As the industry evolved through the 1920s and ‘30s, still more words were created to describe the types of films Hollywood was making – cliffhangers, weepies, sobbies, tear-jerkers, spine-chillers, westerns, serials – and to denote the types of roles on offer. A character who wept a lot was a tear bucket. An actress in a melodrama was a finger-wringer. A villain was of course a baddie. Many movie terms, particularly portmanteau words like cinemaestro and cinemactress and fractured spellings like laff and pix, originated or were widely popularized by the bible of the movie business, the newspaper Variety. Many were short-lived. Oats opera for a western, clicko for a success, bookritic, eight ball for a failure and many such others died in infancy. Scores of others have prospered in the wider world, notably whodunit, tie-in, socko, rave (for a review), flopperoo, palooka (a word of unknown derivation), belly laugh, newscaster, to scram and pushover.

Behind the scenes, the development of increasingly sophisticated equipment brought a rash of new terms: scrims, flags, gobos, skypans, inky dinks, century stands, flying rigs, match boxes, lupes and other arcane apparatus. A gobo is a type of black screen (no one seems to know why it is so called), a skypan is a big light, an inky dink a small one, and a match box one smaller still. A