Vintage: Before They Were Famous

Some famous people have been working a lot longer than you might think. Here are some vintage late 1920s marketing materials about famous personalities normally associated with a much later era.

Here, for example, is a portrait of Harrison Ford from 1928, some five decades before he donned the fedora and leather whip of Indiana Jones. And he was an established leading man even then, his earliest films dating all the way back to 1915. The sound era temporarily stunted his career, as did his subsequent death. But when George Lucas came a-calling for a little part in a low budget space opera, Ford got a rare second chance and became an instant sensation with a whole new generation.

The cult icon John Waters started his directorial career in 1926, and here he is a year later, already with eight films under his belt. His early work in silent movies and subsequent work as an assistant director throughout the 1930s prepared him for his more notorious indulgences in bad taste in the 1970s and 1980s. He won an Oscar in 1935 for the short-lived Best Assistant Director category, but he doesn't like to talk about it much.

One of the reasons Al Gore was such a popular Vice President may have been the wealth of Vice Presidential experience he brought with him. Sometimes people know what they want to do early on and stick with it.