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SCREENLAND
e^OVIES /// the cAl^
Radio and Screen are Developing Artists on a Co-operative Basis
By
Julia Shawell
IN THE old movie days when you had to read the answer in the hero's eyes or wait for the sub-titles, casting of pictures was a matter of visual appreciation. A producer looked once, and then if he were interested, he looked again. Now he glances at the prospective heroine and then he listens. For it is the ear more than the eye which must be satisfied in this audible celluloid era.
No longer is the fallible judgment of a man the deciding factor in an actress' feminine charm or in an actor's sex appeal. It is the little inanimate but unfailing microphone which tells the story. The same instrument which made and broke radio careers is the most important instrument in advancing the screen activities of the new recruits and of keeping the questionable places of those who got in before sound came to the film theaters. It is the microphone which is the unsympathetic, immovable bond between the radio entertainer and the flicker star. For now not only must the screen actor have talent, a figure and a face that will pass the casting directors but his voice must be one of the type that will take to recording requirements. And until a performer has heard the playback of his own voice in that exacting mechanism he cannot know whether he has a future in Hollywood or just a past in Iowa.
Because of this similarity of requirement in broadcasting and in talking pictures, the two industries will draw closer not only in a business way and in their mechanics but in their sources of talent and their interchanges of programs. We have been told that when television is an accepted commercial medium of transmission, talking news reels will be sent into the theater on wireless waves and that possibly some day while we are still going to the movies, feature productions, too, may be projected in the same amazing manner. That is a supposition for future fulfillment.
Already the radio broadcasting organizations are associated in a financial way with some of the movie producing companies. Paramount owns the powerful Columbia chain. Radio Pictures is controlled by the same organization which is also interested in the Radio Corporation of America, the National Broadcasting Company, the General Electric Company and a score of other powerful units. Individual stations are owned or operated by movie concerns and every picture producer today depends for his equipment on manufacturing companies allied with the radio interests. So that financially and technically the movies are dependent upon radio.
But as both industries develop they will become more closely allied in their programs and instead of having two great
fields of artists, independent of each other, names and figures in the two entertainment mediums will be developed on a closer co-operative basis.
The movie vamp of a few years ago never dreamed that to get a renewal of her contract she would have to show some radio sex appeal nor did the great lover of the talkl ess era think that a lisp or an accent would remove him from the sheik lineup.
Talking pictures have made emotion a matter of vocal control, laughs are all in the words and passion a trick of intonation. A player not only has to look that way, but talk it, and to get any conviction into his voice he has to feel what he is saying. Cameras and trick lights won't put illusion into a phlegmatic performance.
No silent player has caused more comment than Greta Garbo. Everybody has waited for her first words across the screen. Would she be a literal-mouthed
Winnie Lightner, screen and radio star, has a talent all her own. Here she is broadcasting one of her songs over the Columbia chain.
person who would sweep away with her first utterance all the mysterious charm she had built up around herself? Or would she be the nice-voiced kind who would belie her realistic siren creation of pantomime? "Anna Christie" answers everything and what an answer! Throbbing, pulsating sounds that arrest the listener, that suggest everything but tell nothing.
Al Jolson didn't break box-office records in "The Jazz Singer" and "Singing Fool" on his face alone. Maurice Chevalier has mastered pantomime exceptionally well but he could never have vied with John Gilbert in the old days, but there is no comparison between the box-office possibilities of these two men for the next few seasons.
Pauline Frederick had a voice that thrilled stage audiences for years. It was deep and emotional but it was too much like thick rich cream to pass through the microphone and so although her voice was more impressive across the footlights than Ruth Chatterton's, the latter proved better adapted to talkie requirements.
Vilma Banky, the most exquisite blonde in pictures, has had her career seriously affected by the talkies. There is no consistent place for her Hungarian gutterals in a field that is being populated by purists in speech. Look what the microphones did to May McAvoy. Look what they are doing for such movie unknowns as Ann Harding, Fredric March, Claudette Colbert, the Marx Brothers, Will Rogers, Lawrence Tibbett, Dennis King and all their Broadway friends and enemies.
Could Messrs. Tibbett and King have made a go of it without their songs to put them over? It is very doubtful. Would Winnie Lightner, who has a talent all her own for getting fun out of popular ditties, have ever won a chance in Hollywood under the old regime?
Every player who is under contract to any big company now and those who are making big money free-lancing have voices with 'It' or that or a something that sets them apart from the mob. This is a period that deals artistic death to the beautiful but dumb, that will keep stupid girls in the chorus and dull but gorgeous creatures away from Hollywood so that real talent will have a chance.
Talkies in their rapid development have been a mixed blessing and curse but they are bringing nearer to actuality a proper equation in the casting offices. There's many a leading lady who had her name in Broadway lights because her face and her contours made good camera material, who will be glad to make the Oshkosh and Reading circuits after she has opened her mouth.