Elinor Glyn in Show People (1928)

Elinor Glyn makes a brief appearance in a cameo in Show People, the 1928 Hollywood-set film that describes the rise and fall of wannabe actress Peggy Pepper. In this film, Pepper is synonymous with what Heidi Kenaga identifies as the “extra girl” (88) in the “Small Parts, Small Players” dossier of Screen. A young woman from an unspecified location in middle America, she arrives in Hollywood with hopes of making it big in comedy. As Kenaga points out, tens of thousands of such young women flocked to Hollywood in the 1910s and 1920s to live their own rags-to-riches story. While many of them ended up working in the lowly position of extras, some of them undoubtedly also found work as typists and scenarists in the early Hollywood. Elinor Glyn was an already-famous screenwriter of the 1910s, and she appears briefly onscreen in the sumptuous Goldwyn studio where Peggy Pepper arrives for a new job. While not exactly an extra or background player, who only appears onscreen as part of the background or setting, Glyn shows her face for only a few brief frames in the film. However, an intertitle calls her out by name for curious viewers. Although extras, as Kenaga points out in her history of the cultural importance of women background players, are expected to recede into the background of a film like living props, Glyn stands out for special recognition. While she helps to bring authenticity to the setting of the Goldwyn studios, where the real screenwriter Elinor Glyn was an employee, her presence is also disruptive to the narrative, and serves an important thematic function as an excited Pepper recognizes the famous faces around her new workplace.  In this way, Glyn serves a more important function than simple background player, as she guarantees not only authenticity and what Alex Woloch in his book-length discussion of the minor character, The One Vs. the Many, might call the completeness of the setting, but she creates an already-famous character space against which the as-yet-unknown Peggy Pepper can be juxtaposed.

Works Cited

Kenaga, Heidi. “Promoting ‘Hollywood Extra Girl’ (1935)” Screen. vol. 52, no. 1, 2011.

Show People (1928)

Woloch, Alex. The One Vs. The Many. Princeton UP, 2004.