A Long Road To Hollywood

"Ole" Olsen and "Chic" Johnson had to start somewhere, and for these two madcap merry-makers, vaudeville in its decline was the ladder up, as shown in this 1935 stopover at a Rivoli Theatre of indeterminate location. Five shows a day on weekends must have been a killing pace, and you wonder if any of those 35 Glamorous Girls might still be with us. The stories they could tell. You'll note the magnitude of this attraction having rocketed admission prices to an astronomical thirty-five and fifty-five cent level. Good thing they brought in these boys, for that screen show looks like pretty weak tea (Hot Tip? --- don't know it). Olsen and Johnson went on to movie triumph themselves at Universal, though our chances of seeing Hellzapoppin (rights problems, I'm told), Crazy House (cameos include Rathbone and Bruce as Holmes and Watson!), and the rest on DVD are pretty remote (but who'd have thought Fox would release two volumes of Will Rogers?).