ORSON BEAN'S LAURELS FOR STAN, OLIVER
By Milt Freudenheim

Delighted memories of old Stan Laurel end Oliver Hardy movies are never far from the mind of actor Orson Bean.
     He even sees his yelling contests with Paul Ford in the Broadway comedy "Never Too Late" as echoing the Laurel and Hardy relationship.
     This view is not shared by Ford, however, who prides himself on being "an instinctive actor who never thinks about his work," Bean admits.
     Bean has organized a Laurel and Hardy appreciation society named "Sons of the Desert" after an early film by the pair.
     He collects prints of their 30-year-old two-reeler sound films and corresponds with Laurel.
     "I'm an enormous fan of theirs," he says. "They symbolize all of life for me—they can't get along with or without each other. The fact that in the next picture they're together is always reassuring to me. It's a classic comic relationship."
     Bean has signed for a year's work in "Never Too Late," but says he'll probably stick with it into the uncharted future in view of its popularity as Broadway's hot ticket for the middle-aged set.
     The comedy revolves around the surprise late-In-life pregnancy of Ford's stage wife, Maureen O'Sullivan. Bean plays the comically irate son-in-law.
     A thinker whose apartment Is loaded with books and paintings, Bean writes his own night club material. Lately he has turned out articles for the slick ladles magazines.
     "I'd like to switch to writing eventually," he says with the innocence of an actor starring in a Broadway hit. "I'm not all that nuts about the theater."

—New York Times (July 21, 1963)

HAL ROACH LAUGH FACTORY PUT ON AUCTIONEER'S BLOCK
By Christian Clausen

Hal Roach sat in the breezeway at the studio named after him—the weight of 40 years and a million laughs behind him—and talked in spurs about all that had come to pass.
      Occasionally, as he described particular funny episode, he would smile vaguely, but it was clear that he would infinitely prefer to cry. He looked like a melancholy Alfred Hitchcock.
      He described the days of youth and glory—his eyes staring into the middle distances—of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, of Harold Lloyd, Will Rogers Bebe Daniels, Theda Bara, Lupe Valez. Those were the days when Hal Roach Studios were known as the laugh factory.
      Roach, a native of Elmira, N.Y., started motion picture work as a dollar-a-day man at the old Universal Studios, rose rapidly from extra to assistant director and then director. In 1911, with savings of little more than $100, he started his own company. The parks of Los Angeles served as his studio, the cast was hastily assembled and the story generally was written on the way to the location.
      In 1917, Roach was successful enough to buy six acres of land in Culver City and established what was to become the oldest continuously-operated movie and television production studio on the West Coast.
      In August the Hal Roach Studios, the birthplace of comedy in the United Slates, the laugh factory, the consumer of countless creamed custard pies, will go under the auctioneer's gavel.
      Haunted by TV, and a seemingly steady drop in motion picture theater attendance, other major studios have managed to survive by retrenching or by lopping off huge segments of themselves.
      Roach told how the studio met the threat of television by rapidly converting from a motion picture basis to a large producer of TV films.
      "Why," he said with pride and indignation, "at one time we had 11 TV shows being made here. We were turning out twice as much film as all the other major studios combined."
      Then in bewilderment and shock he described the complicated financial maneuvering that led to bankruptcy proceedings, the impending auction and the ultimate disaster—the complete obliteration by next October of all the buildings on the 14-acre lot.
      "They say they want the earth bare by October," he snorted. "I don't know what they're going to put up here. Why even they don't know."
      Behind him busy, efficient workmen, carrying radio sets in their pockets for rapid communication, swarmed like ants through the yawning sound stages and even through the stately white-pillared colonial main building which fronts the main street and which stands out incongruously in its setting of flat-roofed one story commercial buildings.
      The workmen, on the staff of well known West Coast Auctioneer Milton J. Wershow, were collecting the debris of almost half a century, dusting and polishing in preparation for the four-day public auction.
      One of the men preparing the studio for the auction is Byron "Bones" Vreeland who started with Roach in 1923 delivering mail on a bike and is now studio manager.
      A worker dropped by to tell Vreeland with some incredulity that he had just unearthed a large safe filled with machine guns.
      "They're in operating condition, too," he said with a slight note of hysteria in his voice. Placidly, Vreeland accepted the news. "We never threw anything away," he said pridefully. "Why we got stuff here that goes back to the early '20s.''
      The vast stages, closets, attics and hiding places on the lot are crammed with props, cameras and sound equipment and memorabilia of almost half a century.
      "We had to make most of the stuff ourselves," Vreeland said. "If the director asked me for a bottle that smokes, or, a cane that squirts water, where could I go to buy it? I had to have it made right here, and then after it was used, we saved it.''
      A walk through the lot recalls memories of time faintly flicking silent movies to a visitor lucky enough to have lived in the era of the Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang movies.
      There is the now green and murky pool in which Laurel and Hardy alternatingly took pratfalls, the breakaway bottles and furniture, the old ocean liner, the Our Gang cafe, the ancient touring cars and fire trucks used in impossible chase scenes.
      Vreeland spotted the door to a huge closet that held the toys used in the Our Gang comedies. It teas a tangled, musty snarl of horns, guns, dolls, drums, hobby-horses—the closet of any small boy, multiplied 100 times.
      Auctioneer Wershow has separated the objects into 10,000 lots but he has no way of knowing how many separate items are involved. He will conduct the auction from a portable stand, rolling from one place to another in front of his audience.
      One of the few performers who bridges the gap between the old days and the present is actor Chill Wills.
      "Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were two of the funniest men in the world," he said. "And they were always on—always working out another gag.
      "I remember one day I was working in a picture and I got a telegram from my children, wishing me happy birthday. About 40 minutes after I got the wire, I got a birthday cake from Laurel and Hardy with candles and everything.
      "Well, cousin I'm here to tell you that you never saw, a bigger mess when I stuck that knife into the cake. It just exploded custard cream all over the lot, right up to the ceiling,
      "Those rascals went to all the trouble to build a birthday cake around a big inflated balloon. When I punched the knife in there, powee!"
      Wills, who is a large tumultuous man with an engaging cowboy accent, agrees with Vreeland's contention that practical jokes played on fellow performers on the lot were ideas polished off-stage for possible use in the next film.
      "Most of them were sight gags," he said. "They relied for their effect on the audience being able to see them, A man had to be terribly careful working on that lot. You never knew when somebody would sneak up behind you and put a lighted candle under your chair, or set fire to the newspaper you were reading.
      "I claim that the hotfoot was probably originated here at this studio. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd like to think it was, anyway."
      Phony telegrams and telephone calls abounded on the lot, Wills recalls. He remembers the time he got an urgent telegram from his agent, asking him to immediately get in touch by telephone.
      "Not a single phone on that lot was in working order," Wills said. "They turned them all off, so I had to go down the street. I should have known by then, of course, that my agent knew nothing about the wire."
      Every once in a while, somebody would get a telegram with the chilling instructions, "Disregard last telegram," signed by an agent or friend. Of course, there was no "last telegram," but it always took a long time to establish this as fact."
      Wills recalls how, motion pictures were slapped together in the old days, revised on the spot with plot worked out as the action went along.
      "Why," he said, "Laurel and Hardy used to work out their routines and turn out the funniest pictures you ever saw. And they'd only run 15 or 18 minutes. Remember those? They used to be called "selected short subjects," and they were a lot funnier than the big expensive pictures being made today.
      "I wish we'd get back to selected short subjects. but motion picture exhibitors now won't buy a film unless it runs for an hour and a half.
      "I was watching an old Laurel and Hardy movie on TV the other night with my kids." Wills said.
      "It just broke them up, they were screaming with laughter. But I know if I tried to do one of those routines, my son would think I was out of my head."
      Roach was known for his willingness to disregard costs in favor of getting comedy into his pictures. Many times, after a film was completed an idea would occur to the director or one of the comedians that might have brightened up the film had it been used. But it would cost $500 to go into the completed film and install the idea.
      "Roach used to say a good laugh was worth $500 any time," Wills said.
      Wills looked reflectve1y around the huge sound stage, fingers of sunlight poking into its dark corners, the auctioneer's workmen busily labeling and tagging the props neatly laid out on the table.
      From one corner loomed a richly rococo nude, glowing in glorious technicolor as the sun struck the canvas.
      "Who painted that" was the awed question.
      "A Frenchman who was never heard from again," was the answer.
      A workman went by, his pocket radio peevishly summoning him to "Report to stage two."
      The metallic squawk of the radio seemed to hang on the words in the air.
      "You know," Wills said, "I reckon if you could package all the laughs that came out of this place and let them go all at once, it'd be a lot bigger than the biggest hydrogen bomb. I just reckon it would."

—Chronical Telegram (July 27, 1963)