i began in the lottery-number picture...footlight parade. -lois lindsay, dancer
footlight parade 1933
gold diggers of 1933
i shot all of buz's pictures at warners, and two or three of his at other studios. the ones that stand out in my mind are the "shadow waltz" (and) the fountain number... there was nothing that could compare to the "waterfall" number of its type, it was supreme. the "shadow waltz" was supreme in its line. -madison lacy, stills photographer
gold diggers of 1933
...if you got chosen, you were lucky. it was tremendous because other people were starving and walking the streets.... -lois lindsay
thousands would answer the call for a handful of pictures -melba marshall, dancer
i think the highest i ever made was $65 (a week). -lois lindsay
gold diggers of 1935
he would have us, for instance, in a picture like the piano number where we really had nothing to do. we sat at those pianos for days and days and days, we did nothing except that and just look pretty. but he would have us there for maybe two months on salary... all these months, and many times we would knit, play poker, tell jokes all day long during rehearals, then when it came to shooting time, we really worked the long hours. -lois lindsay
fashions of 1934
buz had his ten or twelve girls that he called his favorites, his "close-up" girls... They were by far the best-looking girls in the bunch, and in the big numbers they would always be in the foreground, and then the worse-looking they were, the farther back they were. -madison lacy
he would keep his dancers, the ones who were also his "close-up" girls, those he would keep on for the longest time because they were the skeleton team. we would work out the routines. -lois lindsay
gold diggers of 1937
we were the guinea pigs on those flag things... we were the front girls on those pedestal things. but i was afraid of heights and so was elly. but we were strapped up there with a board on our backs... -lois lindsay
and you'd be up there for hours. you'd get so tired because the pedestal was like this, just big enough to stand on. -melba marshall
one of the things that buz had that nobody else had, was that on two stages at warner brothers they put camera rails up, hung from the rafters...and they had an elevator that would go up and down, and would also run along those rails. the camera was mounted on this platform and then they would motor-drive it, and they could move it all around the stage...in circles, raise it, lower it and everything else. he was the originator of that. -madison lacy
gold diggers of 1935
i've always wanted to ask people of this era who go to see these movies if they realize that none of us ever had any navels. do you understand that the whole group of berkeley girls never had navels, because they always covered them up? ...even in that "lullaby of broadway" number, where we wore those things with our bellies exposed, they covered our navels. -lois lindsay
gold diggers of 1933
i never considered it hard work, did you? i always had a ball - melba marshall
i had a ball, the only thing i remember is that the hours were hard....
they spent money like water...
and you did these things over and over again until 3:00 in the morning, and that was the way every number went. -lois lindsay
and, boy, were you tired! -melba marshall
excerpts from interviews conducted in 1976, from the book "people will talk" by john kobal
