The Extra Girl

Sue Graham is a small-town girl who wants to be a movie star. A picture of a much prettier girl gets sent to the studio instead of hers and wins her a contract; when she arrives in Hollywood the mistake comes out and she ends up working in the props department instead. Her parents follow her to California and put their money into the hands of a thoroughly untrustworthy man. It was Mabel Normand’s last feature and her last film with the producer Mack Sennett. The lion sequence is the famous one: she leads the animal along on a rope believing it is tame, then spends the rest of it being chased around the lot and fending the lion off with a feather duster. During filming the lion did get loose and went for her, she fainted, and the trainer, aiming a pitchfork at the animal, hit her instead.