Thursday 29 June
Three trade papers report that Graham-Wilcox Productions, i.e. Graham Cutts and Herbert Wilcox, are to lease Poole Street for their next production, Flames of Passion.
The more eye-catching news was that the company had enlisted Mae Marsh to star, for a fat fee. The talent agent Sidney Jay was, it was reported, even then recrossing the Atlantic with her. Mae Marsh was a bona fide star – her most recent release, The Little ’Fraid Lady, was on release in Britain in June 1922, sold on her name. But she was best known for her roles with D. W. Griffith in the 1910s.
Poole Street, so far as can be told, had been occupied by Lark’s Gate during May and June, though it was a quiet production – others, like Cutts and Wilcox’s, tended to place stories in the press to drum up interest. When Motion Picture Studio reported the arrival of Graham-Wilcox, it included the news that ‘the studio organization will remain in the hands of the old F. P.-Lasky staff’ – the is the closest there is to evidence that Hitchcock worked on Flames of Passion.