The story of Jim Blake, an "unscruplous promoter", played by Frank Keenan. The opening paragraph of the synopsis reads: "The fast vanishing class of man called the promoter is the gilded gingerbread of American business life. It is a class whose glittering pretensions cannot make it the cake of capital although its cheap gilt denies its relation to the plain bread of honest labor." Blake's financial manipulations ruin the father of his beloved daughter's fiance. When she reluctantly accepts her father's guilt, they become estranged. A heartbroken Blake spends his first Christmas alone partying with his friends, and when his daughter and her husband arrive on a surprise visit, they find he has died from his excesses.
Kate Corbaley [1878-1938] became a screenwriter to support herself after her husband left her and moved to China. She wrote around twenty silent films between 1916 and 1926. In 1917 her screenplay "Real Folks" won a Photoplay Magazine contest and was produced by Triangle Films. She became the "principal" of the Palmer Photoplay Corporation, an agency which also ran a correspondence school for aspiring screenwriters. In 1927, she joined the script department of MGM, tasked with choosing potential film projects. Studio head Louis B. Mayer trusted her judgment and refused to have plot summaries read to him by anyone else.
Rare. Good .
Keywords: FILM; SILENT FILM; MOVIES; HOLLYWOOD; SCREENWRITER; KATE CORBALEY; DIRECT DETAILED SYNOPSIS OF GATES OF BRASS.