The Snooze Button

This article about Douglas Fairbanks is pretty interesting. There was an entirely different universe of stars and movies in the silent era. 

That’s Fairbanks holding up Charlie Chaplin.

excerpt:

Except for his great friend Charlie Chaplin, the biggest male star of silent films, and the most loved, was Douglas Fairbanks, the idol of millions of young boys—and a number of grown-up boys, too. He was number one at the box office in 1919, before he began swashbuckling, and he stayed number one through the 1920s, his eight major productions bringing in even more money than the movies released in the same period by his wife, Mary Pickford—America’s (and the world’s) sweetheart.

Fairbanks was born in 1883, and to coincide with his 125th birthday, an ambitious book—Douglas Fairbanks, by Jeffrey Vance with Tony Maietta—has just been published. At times it approaches hagiography, but it tells you a lot about its hero, and it’s generously illustrated—crucial for a performer whose impact was so overwhelmingly physical.

Douglas Fairbanks stood for pluck, vigor, decency, the healthy mind in the healthy body, good old American ingenuity, up-by-your-bootstraps optimism, respect amounting to shyness for the weaker sex, and—most important—success. (“Whenever he doodled with pencil and pad,” wrote Pickford, “…he would write those two magic syllables over and over again, in strong printed letters.”) Failure was not an acceptable option. Why was he disappointed in the Grand Canyon? “I couldn’t jump it.”

rest of the article here