The Golden Chance by Michael Ceraolo

Poem #3 in the Excuse My Dust sequence .

The Golden Chance

Dad got hired to write for the movies

and asked me to come along with him,

and I did  Why, you might ask?

"Curiosity"; that, and

"I'm fond of variety, in some ways"

It didn't take long for me to get hired:

"I landed my first job because I could swim"

After that first job

I did a handful of pictures

in the next year-and-a-half,

not yet fully committed

to the still-new medium

But then it was work work work:

over a hundred short films in a few years

before I appeared in my first feature

(though I went uncredited there)

It was in the midst of this work that I,

along with many others in the industry,

made the move to California

Many different settings:
mountains, ocean, desert, etc.

were readily available,

either right at hand or a short drive away,

and best of all we could film year-round,

no longer at the mercy of the New York winter

The curiosity that got me into movies in the first place

wasn't satisfied with just acting;

I was interested in all parts of the process,

even learning about camera operation

(though I never actually filmed a picture)

The scorecard on my activity,

as best as I can remember:

wrote:  two

wrote and directed:  one

wrote and acted in:  eight

directed:  ten

directed and acted in:  forty

wrote, directed, and acted in:  thirteen

All of them shorts

I was in The Birth of a Nation

in a small role (though Reid was misspelled),

and that led to a contract offer

from Famous Players-Lasky

Though the offer was as an actor only,

I accepted it thinking I would be able

to write and direct sooner or later

They planned to use me in features

primarily if not exclusively:

Carmen was my first feature with star billing

(you wouldn't think an opera

would work well without the singing,

but this one did)

And The Golden Chance was the first feature

with my name above the title

Though I made it out to California

decades after the gold rush had ended,

I struck gold in a different way:

by marrying an actress named Dorothy Davenport

Though she was a few years younger than me,

she had been in pictures longer

and considered me a mere boy

when we first worked together

(we would work together in dozens of movies)

I knew right away she was the one

She wasn't so sure about me,

though having her mother in my corner from the start

probably helped her make up her mind about me

Her mother even urged and actor and me

to move in with her and Dorothy

so we could all save expenses and concentrate on our careers

It took a couple of years,

but Dorothy decided on me,

and we were married October 13, 1913