Souls for Sale

A young woman flees her marriage on the train to a small town and ends up in a desert film camp, where she stumbles into the movie business and becomes an extra, then a star. novelist and filmmaker Rupert Hughes wrote, produced, and directed the picture from his own novel, and the result is one of the great inside-Hollywood silents, full of real behind-the-scenes footage of a working studio. The film-within-a-film sequences show cameras cranking, sets being built, and stunts being rigged, and a string of famous directors of the day, including Erich von Stroheim and Fred Niblo, appear as themselves. Eleanor Boardman, in one of her first leads, carries the picture as Remember Steddon, a runaway who learns that fame costs something. Barbara La Marr, the "girl who was too beautiful," plays her rival. The film was a Goldwyn release and is one of the quieter rediscoveries of the 1923 public domain class. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.