The Unfamous of Hollywood — Gilmor Brown — The Star-Maker of Hollywood (1934) 🇺🇸
His name has never appeared on a silver screen. He has no active connection with Hollywood or the motion picture business. He does not even live in Hollywood, nor does he visit it except upon rare business occasions — and yet he has created and discovered more new motion picture stars in the past two years than all of the agents, directors and producers together. It’s Gilmor Brown, I am speaking of; founder and directing head of the Pasadena Community Playhouse.
by Ramon Romero
From behind the footlights of his stage he has watched Karen Morley, Gloria Stuart, Robert Young, Victor Jory, Douglass Dumbrille, Stuart Erwin and Frances Dee step to Hollywood stardom. He has seen them develop from mere novices into experienced players. Quietly, without fanfare of publicity, he has sat back with the beaming pride of a mother, watching the names of his proteges grow larger and larger in the electric lights.
But never has he claimed any of the credit. His interest is in the theater, not in motion pictures; although he goes to see all of the pictures in which the graduates of his theater appear.
He makes discoveries for his own productions, producing about twenty-five plays a year; some Broadway successes, others, originals, that later find their way to New York’s Main Stem — but he knows beforehand that the movies will snatch away any discovery he might make. Artistic kidnaping he calls it.
And yet he goes right on finding new talent which the cameras sooner or later will gobble up.
If he were a manager he might be a very rich man today. Ten per cent of all the salaries that his discoveries are collecting weekly in the film studios would give him a yearly income of at least a hundred thousand dollars. But Gilmor Brown has never collected a cent under such rights. His only compensation is the success of his finds.
Source: New Movie Magazine, February 1934
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This article is part of our Unfamous of Hollywood series: Gilmor Brown, Natalie Bucknell, Bebe Daniels & Pauline Gallagher, Howard Dietz, Elmer Dyer, George Hurrell, Billy Hill, Sally Rand, Murray Spivack, George E. Stone