We all take pride at doing something really well. Even if it isn't a really big thing, it gives you a deep sense of satisfaction. I'm personally in awe of people like surgeons and sharp as a tack lawyers, or cops who solve murders.

But I also get a thrill seeing somebody parallel park in like three seconds using one hand and not even glancing in the rear view.

That shit just impresses the hell outta me.

But I can't imagine having the kind of confidence and poise that allows you to literally risk your life every night of the week and twice on Matinee days -- just to entertain people.

That takes a level of commitment few in this business even come close to making.

But here are two guys who do just that.

May they leave you in awe.

Enjoy Your Sunday.

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OUR HOLLYWOOD HISTORY (9/10)

Virtually any respected encyclopedia, reference book or history of the motion picture will tell you that the first movie with sound was Warner Brothers' "The Jazz Singer", released on October 6, 1927 and that Al Jolson's "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet." were the first words spoken onscreen.

Like a lot of stuff that comes out of Hollywood, this is pure bullshit.

Because another "Talkie" had appeared months earlier using a process invented and perfected by a Canadian.

Douglas Shearer was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1899. And while his sisters Norma and (the unfortunately named) Athole aspired to be singers, actresses and models, he became obsessed with electricity.

Long before he was even in high school, little "Dougie" had built an electrical lab in his basement, alongside the darkroom he'd constructed, to conduct experiments in -- "the miracles of sound and light".

At the time, residents of the upscale Westmount neighborhood were constantly complaining to the city of frequent power blackouts. City workers were at a loss to explain them. And Shearer's parents never revealed that most were caused by their son's basement experiments.

Before he was 14, Shearer ditched school to work at Northern Electric, where he was soon a leading light in their experimental division. Eventually, with the help of a teacher who faked a high school diploma for him, Douglas entered McGill University to study electrical engineering.

But his family fell on hard times and after only a year of University, Shearer was back at Northern Electric.

Around the same time, Norma and Athole moved to New York, where both found theatre work and soon began appearing in films at Biograph. Norma was quickly singled out by Universal executive, Irving Thalberg, who brought her to Hollywood. By 1924, she was making quite a name for herself and Douglas decided to visit.

Thalberg was now second in command at MGM and he and Norma were engaged. At one of their parties, Douglas fell into conversation with Jack Warner, who offered him a job, "starting at the bottom" at Warner Brothers. The next day, Shearer went to work moving props.

But he spent his long hours hanging around the set learning all he could about the way the industry used cameras and lighting and began dabbling with ways of improving it. He discussed many of these over Sunday dinners at the Thalberg house and soon found himself invited to perfect his ideas for MGM.

But while he tinkered with light grids and camera accessories, Shearer knew that the Holy Grail for all of Hollywood was Sound. And a few weeks after he'd arrived, he took a silent film, "White Shadows in the South Seas" into a recording studio and added music and effects that could be synchronized to the film by linking it to a phonograph.

Other studios had been supplying recorded music to play alongside their films for a couple of years. But no one had ever increased the reality of the experience by including the film's sound effects. Shearer achieved his single track record of both by creating sound effects while a live orchestra played the score.

Despite the film's success, Shearer knew what audiences really wanted was to hear actors speak.

In 1927, during the filming of Norma's next picture, "Slave of Fashion", he approached Thalberg with the idea of creating a talking trailer for the film. It would be a test run of his new Sound technique in all 15 Los Angeles area theatres where the film would play.

To create the trailer, he had the director film several scenes with the actors clearly mouthing their lines. Then after the film was edited, he had the cast lip-synch their dialogue as it was projected in a recording studio.

The dialogue was put on one disk and music and effects on another because no one had yet perfected a method of mixing all the sound elements together without one element drowning out the others.

But this meant that each theatre projection booth would need two additional people capable of dropping the needle on their separate records at the exact time the first frame of the trailer hit the projector.

Not confident that would happen, Shearer's plan called for a local radio station (where technicians regularly combined or "mixed" multiple recordings during live radio dramas) broadcast sound to the theatres. Radio speakers were set up behind each movie house screen with the projectionists taking their cue from the broadcast. It worked perfectly.

The "Talkie" had arrived.

In fact, the first screening was such a sensation, with audiences leaping out of their seats and cheering, that MGM had to arrange for an immediate repeat broadcast.

The trailer experiment went on for a week, with theatre managers claiming people were paying just to see the trailer and coming back every night.

But success turned to failure when "Slave of Fashion" was released. The finished film was still silent and audiences, led to expect much more, booed it off the screen.

Shearer was certain, however, that combining theatre showings with radio broadcasts could be accomplished for entire films. But MGM head Louis B. Mayer disagreed. If audiences could hear a movie in the comfort of their own homes, he reasoned that they wouldn't venture out to spend money to see it in a theatre.

A few months later, Warner Brothers released "The Jazz Singer", which, despite its "Hear Jolson Speak" hoopla, was a silent film with a musical track and only brief vocal interludes.

Shearer knew Hollywood had to think of something better. And he quickly did just that.

All over the city, studios were trying to perfect disc recording processes. But since film was fragile and constantly breaking, using such a system meant sound and picture were often completely out of sync.

Shearer felt the answer lay in magnetic tape and concocted a method whereby a second camera recorded sound while a primary camera recorded images. The process was tried for the first time with MGM's "All Talking, All Dancing, All Singing" feature "The Broadway Melody" in 1929. The film was a huge success and won that year's Academy Award for Best Picture.

Still feeling there was much to be done to make Sound truly feel real to an audience, Shearer expanded his division to perfect sound effects and eliminate camera noise and other studio imperfections. MGM's studios were quickly rebuilt to be sound proof.

Shearer also devised boom microphones, so actors didn't have to stand in one place to be heard. He also revised the way lights were hung and sets built to eliminate any chance still bulky and primitive sound equipment could cast shadows or would otherwise restrict directors when choosing their shots.

Every single one of his alterations to the way films were shot was replicated by the other studios.

By 1930, there were enough sound films being made for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to award its first Oscar for "Excellence in Sound". Douglas Shearer won for "The Big House", and shared the stage with Norma, who won Best Actress for "The Divorcee", the only time a brother and sister have won the coveted trophy.

But Shearer wasn't content to rest on his laurels. He knew that the main stumbling block to Sound was the theatres themselves, where the era's speakers could not hope to fill their auditoriums. Indeed, sound was so bad in many that Charlie Chaplin continued to release only silent films that regularly topped the industry in box office returns.

Shearer and his team went to work inventing a device that came to be known as "The Shearer Horn". It separated music and dialogue, making both louder and clearer and became the industry standard. His invention remained in use up until the 1970's when theatres converted to stereophonic sound.

For MGM's 1936 film "San Francisco", he invented the first sound "mixer", combining 8 separate tracks of effects, music and dialogue to wow audiences during the movie's climactic earthquake sequence.

And he devised other improvements for film production as well, in 1941 inventing a fine grained film that gave screens in large theatres a never before seen level of clarity.

Then -- Shearer suddenly disappeared from Hollywood.

Never one to attend industry parties or even studio lunches or dinners, he now couldn't even be found in his office or laboratory. MGM ignored all requests regarding his whereabouts.

Then in 1945, he abruptly returned, declining to say where he'd been or what he'd been up to.

Finally, in 1947, he gave an interview to Variety acknowledging that he had spent the war years, at the specific request of President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, perfecting radar. Later, although offered a civilian award for his military service, he declined, insisting he hadn't done it for any glory.

He hadn't done it for money either. During his four years of secret military service, the only paycheck Shearer cashed was the one he got weekly from MGM.

Through the late 1940's and 1950's, Shearer returned to sound recording, winning Oscars for "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo", "Green Dolphin Street" and "The Great Caruso".

By 1952, he had won 12 Oscars for his achievements in Sound, Special Effects and Technical Achievement, more than anyone else in film history.

But he would add two more to his total before he was through.

In 1958, he went to work developing a wide screen system that would eliminate the imperfect Cinemascope three camera system widely in use. Shearer came up with a 65mm film that could deliver wide screen using only one camera. It was dubbed "Panavision" and was first used on MGM's massive hit and multiple award winning, "Ben-Hur".

For his work, Shearer was awarded another Oscar and garnered his 14th in 1964 for perfecting the process of background projection.

In 1968, Douglas Shearer finally retired and the man no one ever saw lose his temper was asked if he felt slighted for not being acknowledged as the creator of the "Talking Picture". Shearer simply replied, "I knew what the studio and I had achieved and that was all that really mattered".

Douglas Shearer died in 1971, receiving a final honor never before (or since) bestowed on a Hollywood technician. His obituary filled the front page of the New York Times.

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OUR HOLLYWOOD HISTORY (8/10)

There is an oft repeated tale that those who run afoul of the Rich and Powerful in Hollywood are "Blacklisted" or become "Gossip Fodder" or are otherwise driven from the community. The sad truth is that these stories are not always fiction and the practice began with a stunningly talented actress named Marie Prevost.

She was born Mary Bickford Dunn in Sarnia, Ontario on November 8, 1898. At the age of six, her father, a train conductor, was killed in a railroad accident and her mother took she and her sister to live with relatives in Alameda, CA. Not long after, mom married an LA banker and Mary changed her name to Marie to match his French surname of Prevost.

A bubbly girl with a wise-cracking sense of humor, Marie graduated from high school at the age of 14 and went to work as a legal secretary. She had no show biz ambitions whatsoever. But that would all change after a chance encounter in 1917.

The firm for which she worked represented Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios and one day Marie was asked to deliver Sennett a contract that needed signing. As she waited outside Sennett's office building, a man ran up to in a panic. "Quick, paste on a smile and run over to that table and sit down!"

Unaware the man was a director who'd mistaken her for an extra, Marie did what she was told. The chair collapsed and Marie did a perfect pratfall, then burst out laughing. Without a word of thanks, the director grabbed his cameraman and cast and hurried off to the next set up.

Marie took the incident in stride, collected Sennett's contract and went back to her office.

Next morning, her boss was waiting when she arrived. He was solemn and concerned, telling her Sennett had demanded she be sent back to Keystone immediately. Marie was sure she'd done something that would get her fired. But instead, Sennett was waiting with a contract to make one of his "Bathing Beauties". He'd seen her scene and wasn't taking "No" for an answer. Since he was offering almost double what she was earning as a legal secretary, Marie didn't hesitate.

As a Sennett "Bathing Beauty" Marie was expected to do little more than stand around in a swimsuit and look pretty. But now and then Sennett had the girls play small parts in his comedies.

One day, while shooting on the Venice Pier, Sennett learned Marie could actually swim and worked up a gag where he'd knock her into the water. That didn't seem all that funny to Marie, so when the camera rolled, she knocked Sennett into the water instead. Surfacing to find his cast and crew helpless with laughter, Sennett doubled her salary on the spot and made her one of his Studio's comic foils.

Over the next two years, the size of Marie's roles increased as did her audience popularity. Other studios began offering her contracts. But she felt she could learn more about comedy working at Keystone and turned them all down. In his autobiography, Sennett referred to her as, "The most talented actress I ever discovered".

But in 1920, Universal made an offer Marie couldn't refuse and she left Keystone. Her first film for the new studio, "Kissed" was a massive success and established her as a star. She had so many admirers, Universal had to hire a full time secretary just to answer her fan mail.

She made two more films for the company in 1921 that made so much money they literally saved the struggling studio from bankruptcy.

Keeping a close eye on Marie's career was Warner Brothers studio head Jack Warner, who made a pre-emptive bid when her Universal contract came up for renewal. In addition to a huge increase in salary, Warner promised her script approval, co-star approval and the right to turn down any studio that might ask that she be loaned to them for a picture. No actress had ever been offered so much control over their own career.

And that's when things started to go wrong…

Ever on the prowl for ways to promote his studio and his stars, Warner noticed a budding romance between Prevost and actor Kenneth Harlan. Without consulting them, Warner went to the newspapers to announce that they would be wed on the set of their next picture, "The Beautiful and the Damned".

The only problem was -- Marie was already married.

A few years earlier, she'd become involved with a wealthy LA socialite named Sonny Gerke and they had eloped because Gerke was afraid to tell his mother she was no longer the most important woman in his life. Sonny and Marie didn't even live together and every night he went home to Mommy.

One afternoon, Mom was out shopping and saw Marie being dragged out of a bank by a bunch of policemen. She was so shocked she failed to see the camera crew filming the incident. All the same, she went home and told Sonny in no uncertain terms that Marie was no longer welcome in their home.

Instead of telling his mother that Marie was an actress, Sonny phoned his wife and informed her the marriage was over and she was not to contact him again. By the time she went to work for Warner Brothers, Marie didn't even know where Sonny was.

Warner was still outraged and threatened to fire both Marie and Harlan. But his lawyers talked him out of that since the wedding announcement had been his own stupid mistake.

But Jack Warner didn't like looking stupid and even though "The Beautiful and the Damned" broke box-office records and Marie soon got her divorce and married Harlan, the studio boss began the long, deliberate process of making Marie Prevost pay for his mistake.

She quickly discovered that she no longer had script and co-star approval, nor any choice in where she was loaned out. And if she complained Warner was happy to make her sit at home until her contract expired.

But Marie loved doing comedy, so Warner first loaned her to William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Studio to make a film called "Red Lights" he thought had bomb written all over it. The picture became such a hit, however, that Warner's had to hire two secretaries to make a dent in Marie's fan mail.

By that time, Jack Warner had already sent her to Louis Mayer's First National to film another sure-fire disaster entitled "The Wanters". It too was a smash.

Pressured by his brothers to get their own contracted actress making money for them, Warner demanded that his top director, Ernst Lubitsch "put her in something that won't cause such a fuss".

But Lubitsch was acutely aware of Marie's comic talents, so to placate Warner and still direct a successful film, he gave her a supporting role to Adolphe Menjou, Florence Vidor and Monte Blue in "The Marriage Circle".

Under Lubitsch's direction Marie shone in every frame in which she appeared. And the director made a point of telling the world at the film's Premiere, infuriating Warner when he said, "It is unforgivable she is not billed as the number one star. She stole every scene!". The first night audience howled its agreement.

Menjou and Vidor were scandalized but Monte Blue agreed, stating he couldn't wait to work with Marie again.

Instead of swallowing his pride and realizing he was wrong and Marie was a potential goldmine for his studio, Warner redoubled his efforts to ruin her. He put Monte Blue on his shit list as well, burying him in such crummy movies that the man ended his career as a circus clown.

By now, others in the film community were realizing that Warner's vendetta was getting the better of him. Sam Goldwyn sent over a terrible script called "Tarnish" and requesting the loan of Marie's services. Warner jumped at the opportunity. But once signed, Goldwyn revealed the real script, penned by his top writer Frances Marion. Warner was livid. And Marie had another huge hit.

Meanwhile, Lubitsch set up his next two features, "Three Women" and "Kiss Me Again" both written specifically for Marie. When Warner refused to cast her, Lubitsch pointed to a clause in his own contract granting him the use of any Warner contract player he wanted and Marie headlined two more successful films.

Still, in 1926, Warner refused to renew her contract, then quietly put the word out that any actor or director who worked with her could forget about ever working for Warner Brothers.

By now, the stress of the constant conflict was taking its toll on Marie. During the last two Lubitsch pictures, Jack Warner had been on set for all her scenes demanding additional takes. And while Lubitsch always used her best performances, the long hours caused her to start drinking heavily.

Her marriage began to crumble with Harlan additionally blaming her for the downturn in his own career. To top everything off, her mother was killed in a car accident.

It looked like Warner would finally push Marie out of the business.

Other Hollywood friends tried to help as best they could. Cecil B. DeMille shepherded Marie into the Sound Era with his first talkie, "The Godless Girl", and Frank Capra gave her a juicy supporting role in one of his first comedies "Ladies of Leisure".

But more often than not, Marie's opportunities evaporated as others turned her aside in order to avoid Warner's wrath.

By 1936 she was existing on handouts, living alone in a small apartment with her pet terrier. And on January 23, 1937, she became a grotesque symbol of what happens when you cross a studio boss, when her emaciated body was found many days dead and partially eaten by her dog.

As a further indignity, it was revealed that Marie Prevost had died of starvation.

Shamed by what had been allowed to happen to one of their own, many in the Hollywood community banded together to create the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital to provide medical care for those in the industry who had fallen on hard times.

But after that she was largely forgotten until her death was immortalized in Kenneth Anger's "Hollywood Babylon". That lurid chapter inspired Nick Lowe to write a song about her in 1978. But to date, none of her Warner Brothers films have been made available on either video or DVD.  Even after death, Jack Warner's vendetta continues.

Here's Marie Prevost in Frank Kapra's "Ladies of Leisure", her comic skills sparkling at 10:25 as Barbara Stanwyck's roommate and almost making you forget the much bigger star who might have been.

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