Two movies were filmed in Fort Worth in 1927 with local talent. Here’s the backstory.

“Lights! Camera! Applesauce!”

The year was 1927, and Fort Worth was ready for its close-up: Two movies using only local talent as screenwriters and cast members were filmed as publicity stunts for the Worth and Palace theaters.

The Star-Telegram sponsored the Worth movie; the Press sponsored the Palace movie.

Press writer Jack Gordon, 25, was in charge of publicizing his newspaper’s all-Fort-Worth movie.

From January through April, Gordon promoted first the contests and auditions to select the movie’s script, heroine and supporting cast and finally the filming of the movie.

The winning script was “Sauce and Applesauce,” submitted by Lorene Van Voast of Hillcrest Avenue.

Then the Press held a beauty contest to select the movie’s heroine. Almost 400 women submitted photos. The winner was Mary Elizabeth Isleib, 17, of Alston Avenue.

The supporting cast included a local amateur actor, a judge and a city policeman.

Director of the movie was Hunter Gardner, director of Fort Worth’s Little Theater.

The script called for a farmhouse. The home of W. M. Eagle — with its “big, windswept porches” — in Riverside was selected.

Before filming began, director Gardner gave leading lady Mary “a long lesson” (90 minutes) “in the principles of movie acting.”

Filming began on March 23 at the Eagle farm. The Press invited the public to watch.

Gordon was given the lofty title of “assistant director.”

“Sauce and Applesauce” — as well as the Star-Telegram movie “Beauty and Brains” — was a silent movie, with caption cards inserted to convey dialog and sounds.

By today’s standards the plot of “Sauce” was simple.

In the opening scene, filmed at the farmhouse, Mary, the young wife of a middle-aged farmer, is washing clothes in a tub. Her life is drudgery. Her husband Alf is a miser.

Mary wears a “long, old-fashioned gingham dress borrowed from her mother.”

In a later scene, Mary asks her husband for a new dress. He refuses.

Still later Mary is driving her buggy to town. She is carrying $500 in cash to deposit in a bank.

Suddenly she has had enough.

Gordon wrote of Mary: “Sick of the tight-fisted methods of her worse half, she decides to blow the ‘wad’ for clothes, and let the worst come.”

Then Mary is shown getting decked out in a downtown department store. A Cinderella-type transformation takes place as Mary becomes the “knockout” she really is and “steps out in the latest bob, the snappiest togs.”

But Mary suddenly realizes that one does not travel in an old-fashioned buggy while wearing the latest bob and the snappiest togs. So, she has someone telephone her husband to ask him to fetch her in the “flivver.” When hubby Alf gets the call, he fears that something “calamitous” has befallen his wife in the big sinful city.

The camera then follows Alf’s “hysterical dash from the farm” in a neighbor’s roadster.

What does the title of the movie mean? Gordon did not explain. “Sauce” could refer to Mary’s chutzpah in defying her miserly husband. And “applesauce” was 1920s slang synonymous with “malarkey.”

And Gordon only teased the movie’s ending, writing of husband Alf when he reaches the transformed Mary sporting “the latest bob, the snappiest togs”:

“And when he sees Mary Elizabeth! And when he realizes what’s happened to his five hundred — !”

“Folks,” Gordon wrote, “it’s going to be a snappy flicker!”

That snappy flicker premiered at the Palace Theater on April 30, 1927.

Mike Nichols blogs about Fort Worth history at www.hometownbyhandlebar.com.