One old farmer went and saw this same movie for weeks and weeks. One day theater manager came down and said," Say old timer. Every day we show same film with girls, train and lake and every day you keep coming back." "Well sonny, one of these days I'm hoping train will be late!"

Many of early film actors were quite content to stay anonymous, reasoning that new flickers were a novelty and would damage their reputation on legitimate stage. They were often expected to work all day long. Their duties included hammering nails, painting set, picking up trash, and lifting heavy equipment. There were no trailers or perks or glamour or big houses. A casting director might meet a newspaper boy on street and hire him as an lead actor for five dollars a day. Ladies of evening were often given jobs simply because they provided their own wardrobes. Not knowing their real names, movie going public would give their favorite actor's appropriate nicknames such as "the waif" or "the cowboy". The growing curiosity surrounding identities lead to birth of movie fan magazines such as Photoplay in 1909. But fearing that their players would demand huge salaries producers still refused to release their names.

Once when he was a little boy in England, Leslie Hope (He later renamed himself Bob after a race car driver he idolized) wanted to pick an apple off a tree. Symbolic of his career, he didn't want just any apple but highest one possible. He lost his balance, fell and permanently changed shape of his nose.

His big break in Hollywood was getting part Jack Benny turned down in Paramount film "The Big Broadcast Of 1938". The director Mitchell Leisen could not stand star of film, ornery WC Fields, who would run off movie set and come back too soused to do required scenes, flub his lines and scream for his lawyer. Liesen found Hope much more cooperative, although he was a nervous ham in front of camera. Desperate to be a more traditional leading man like Fred Macmurray, Hope begged Paramount to pay for a nose job but they refused. It was in this film he got to sing "Thanks For The Memories" which along with his ski nose became Hope's trademarks.

For his radio show when Hope found out that Jack Benny hired two writers for $1,000 a week, he in turn hired ten writers for $100 a week each and hated paying. At times he would gather staff at bottom of a stairwell and toss their paychecks down as paper airplanes. Other times Hope would interrupt his scribes intimacy with their wives by calling their houses very late at night to go over new material. For their part, writers created Hope movie character, egomaniacal, womanizing and cowardly, all but last trait were true.

Hope's relationship with Bing Crosby was love-hate. In one of their early road movies Paramount Studios filmed two endings in which each of boys ended up with Dorothy Lamour, to see which result audiences preferred. They overwhelmingly chose Bing which annoyed Hope, who got his costar back by constantly reminding him that he wore a toupee. In one scene both had to lie on same bed together (innocently, they were resting) and Bing refused to take his hat off. No amount of coaxing from Paramount executives could get Crosby to change his mind, he did not want to hear Bob's toupee barbs. Hope later said greatest acting performance he ever gave was smiling when Bing won his academy award for Going My Way (1944).