Movies Way Back When: Chewing the Scenery in 1916

By Betsy J. Green

This expression generally refers to an actor behaving melodramatically, but in this case, the scenery was actually chewed — by a goat! A scenario writer for the “Flying A” studio in Santa Barbara, had sketched out 114 scenes of a movie on paper and left them lying on a table on his front porch.

When he returned to continue working on his story, he discovered to his horror that his housemate’s goat was happily munching on his storyboards. He “grabbed the goat by the whiskers with one hand and made a desperate lunge for the disappearing manuscript with the other. He was only partly successful, as when he counted the salvage, there were only four scenes, and they looked as if they needed a trip to the laundry.”