The Wild Party was the first sound feature produced by Paramount and was expressly designed to be "It" girl Clara Bow's talkie debut. Stella Ames (Bow) is the wildest, most popular coed at Winston College for Women and finds herself in a mess of trouble after falling head over heels for her professor, James "Gil" Gilmore (Fredric March). A huge box-office success, The Wild Party solidified Arzner's reputation as a skilled director of actors, as well as an innovator of filmmaking technology. In an effort to calm Bow's nervousness in front of the microphone and to liberate the other performers from the limitations of early sound recordings, Arzner used a fishing pole to suspend a recording device above her actors, inventing an early prototype of the boom mic. Preservation print courtesy of Universal Pictures.