Featuring live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin on August 6.

A star, somewhat surprisingly, is born in Vidor’s showbiz satire. Our heroine is one Peggy Pepper (Marion Davies), an overly-confident naif, who arrives in Hollywood by way of Georgia with hopes of a career in the pictures. Her big break arrives after a chance encounter in the commissary with a member of a comedy troupe, and audiences soon delight as she hurls cream pies and has a full bottle of seltzer blasted across her face. Peggy yearns for more serious fare, but refashioning her image as a dramatic actor—now Patricia Pepoire—comes at a cost. Replete with cameos by late-silent-era luminaries (Chaplin and Vidor himself among them), Show People is Vidor at his most metacinematic, and a hilarious look inside the machinery of celebrity.