RADIO COMEDIANS WORKING ON MOVIE

Check and Double Check’ Being Made in Hollywood
By Dan Thomas
Hollywood, Calif., Oct. 17,1930


The busiest men in Hollywood.

That is the “title” held by Freeman F. Gosden, and Charles J. Correll - and there is nobody in this land of make-believe who will even attempt to dispute their claim.

In case you aren’t familiar with Gosden and Correll, they are known in every nook and corner of this vast ‘United States’ as “Amos n’ Andy,” without a doubt the most popular radio entertainers in American.
Expect Big Things

But what about these two gentlemen as film actors? Well, if you care to take the word of the high moguls around the RKO lot, where this famous “colored” team is now engaged in filming “Check and Double Check”, they are scheduled to be proclaimed top-notchers in this “squawkie” business that is all so new to them.

For our part, we can’t say much one way or the other since every foot of film on which their antics are recorded is guarded more closely than dad’s pet golf sticks. And “Amos n’ Andy” themselves decline to make any comments - believing it’s far better policy to let the public decide how good they are as actors.

But getting back to that business of being busy, we have here a couple of gentlemen so unfamiliar with spare time they wouldn’t know what to do with it if they had any. In fact, if they put in only a 12 or 15-hour day they think they are getting off easy. All they have to do is spend unlimited hours before the cameras every day, broadcast twice daily over the National Broadcasting chain from a special room built for them on the RKO lot and write the following day’s story for their “radio racket.”
Hard to Get a Cast

Quite a number of complications presented themselves in the making of plans to present “Check and Double Check” on the silver screen. Chief among these was the selection of a cast to surround “Amos n’ Andy,” inasmuch as they always have played all of the characters in their radio broadcasts.

However, everything went quite smoothly until the search was started for a man to play the role of “Kingfish”. For a while it looked as though this problem would be solved in the person of Alex Robb, an official of the National Broadcasting station in Chicago, who came out here to act as personal representative for “Amos n’ Andy”. He suited the role perfectly but business called him back to the “Windy City” before production could be started. A new search then was started which resulted in the finding of Russ Powell, a practically unknown actor who has managed to earn a meager living as an extra in pictures for some years.

“The most difficult part about finding a man to play “Kingfish” was getting one who could talk right,” declared Gosden, otherwise known as “Andy”. Our radio audience, has become thoroughly familiar with “Kingfish’s” voice and to give them a different one would bring a shower of objections upon our heads. Yet, obviously, I could not play “Kingfish” on the screen as I have done in front of the microphone. So we kept testing actor after actor until we found one who was right.

As yet the famous entertainers of the air are undecided as to their future motion picture activities. If “Check and Double Check” gets a big reception from the public, it’s almost a cinch that there will be a follow up. In the meantime they are a couple of radio artists having a lot of fun dabbling around in the movies as a sideline.
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