June Mathis — The Machine-Gun of the Movies (1924) 🇺🇸

June Mathis is the machine-gun of the movies.

As editorial director of Goldwyn productions, Miss Mathis must oversee the preparation of all continuities besides completing her own script for Ben-Hur, must supervise casting, settings, costuming, actual filming, titling, editing of all pictures. Every day she sees the rushes of each director’s shooting to stamp with approval or criticism each foot of film. Her position, with its responsibilities, requires infinite tact.

A truly remarkable woman, June Mathis. Brilliant, magnetic, forceful, ruthlessly keen, a born fighter. She spars like a man but is herself essentially feminine.

“When I was a child my father and his men friends made a pal of me,” she explains her almost uncanny ability to bridge the gap between the attitudes of the two sexes, seeing generalities with the vision of a man and details with the mind of a woman. “I learned early to get my own way tactfully, not by parading wounded feelings.”

Her girlhood on the stage made her canny; she learned to fight, ruthlessly but quietly, for the things her growing clarity of vision told her she must have. Seasons with James K. Hackett and Pauline Frederick, with the Shuberts and with Julian Eltinge, for two years the lead in Brewsters’ Millions — this schooling taught her much about acting and the psychology of public appeal. Her decisions are instantaneous.

“Hunches, or instinct rather, based upon experience and knowledge,” she explains. “The moment I saw Valentino [Rudolph Valentino] in a play I knew he was Julio in ‘The Four Horsemen.’ I went to bat for him and won.”

Recently she emerged victorious in another battle — George Walsh to play Ben-Hur. The wisdom of that choice is yet under the fire of criticism; but as her judgment has seldom erred, possibly in this point too she is uncannily right.

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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, April 1924