Screen Guilds Magazine (August 1935)

The Author of The Piece A WRITER is innately a sensitive and timid soul; his fine swollen ego forever struggles aginst a devastating conviction of inferiority. He is shy and retiring, and a miserable and inarticu¬ late orator as a rule. His courage and humors, his passions and nobility mani¬ fest themselves most strikingly through the filter of a typewriter ribbon. And when perchance great success falls upon him, he is more surprised than even those dear members of his family who always regarded him as an imbecile. This perhaps accounts for the average Writer's curious unawareness of his position today in motion pictures. Stars, who as a rule think only of stars, realize it; the producing companies (so anxious to declare a dividend on their deflated stock) realize it; even directors, whose czaristic authority it threatens, realize it: only the Writer remains woefully blind to the sceptre that is be¬ ing thrust into his hand and the crown that is destined for his lucky pate. T HERE is, of course, that Star-Di¬ rector-Producer triumvirate — that Trinity of Egoism, Power and Dollars, which consciously and unconsciously conspires to keep the Writer outside the Gates of Paradise. There is Censorship which, as it stands today, practically censors all honesty, wit and brilliance out of script-writing. This naturally reflects upon the lowest supervisor, making him seem to possess relatively rare literary and dramatic talent. There is the film salesman too with his archaic credo about motion picture audiences having the mentality of suckling in¬ fants; about screen-spoken words of more than one syllable cutting tragical¬ ly into the box-office grosses, etc., etc. There are these and other dust-storms blown up to blind the Writer from a clear vision of himself. The blame for this unawareness of himself is not al¬ together his. Put the fact remains, nevertheless, that he stands today upon the threshold of a bright-new and ponti¬ fical magnificence. To comprehend this remarkable evo¬ lution, one must fling back to those dead and almost forgotten days of silent pic¬ tures, (1929), and conjure to mind the position, and more essentially the func¬ tion, of the Screen Writer. writers wrote novels, plays and maga¬ zine stories, and from time to time sold their motion picture rights to film com¬ panies. Now and then a few of these Eminent Authors were brought to Hol¬ lywood by Sam Goldwyn, who must have stumbled across Shakespeare's im¬ mortal line: “The play's the thing"— and believed it! The Eminent Author, however, rushed quickly back to “civ¬ ilization" in disgust and despair, leav¬ ing the general mutilation of his progeny to some “Hollywood" writer, who was told what to do and how to do it by the director who reigned supreme and un¬ leashed in an Elysium of dramaturgic barbarity. This was, strange as it may sound, as it should have been! Stories were bought, but pictures were not written. The job of “Screen-Writing" was es¬ sentially the trick of transmitting ideas and emotions into pantomime. When the invention of pantomime failed,, a title was popped in to breach the void, and the two were basted together with the thread of what was known as “Con¬ tinuity’ T HE result was a “Script" which was then handed over to the director to use as a sort of guide or blue-print for the real “ creation " of the picture. Being God, he really didn’t need this guide at all. He paid no attention to the continuity, because camera-angles were his special business; he paid no heed to the titles, because new titles would have to be written to suit what he elected to shoot; in fact, he practical¬ ly abandoned the script altogether, and “shot as he went" or, as he himself put it more literally, shot it off the cuff ! Writing, as writing, had little or nothing to do with picture-making other than what occurred or what was left over from: the original material. Then, suddenly, came talking-pic¬ tures. All the producers prophesied they were but a passing fancy; none of them believed that picture-making had, overnight, undergone a complete meta¬ morphosis. F ROM that very instant Screen-Writ¬ ing took on a wholly different as¬ pect. It became the same as any other kind of writing. It became—in fact writing. It wiped out the distinction By Ernest Pascal between the “legitimate” writer and the “Hollywood” writer. The “Hollywood” writer, who was possessed of real creative ability, became one with the ‘ ‘ legitimate ’ ’ writer; his less fortunate brother faded swiftly into obscurity along with the actor who couldn’t speak lines. Talk did not merely add something to the art of motion pictures. It changed motion pictures from a possibly separate art-form into the art of the drama as it has existed for the last two thousand years—actors portraying characters de¬ vised ‘by Writers and sublimated by the nobility and creativeness of the Writer s mind. S PEECH is, and always has been, the medium of human expression. Were pantomime more eloquent, more tender or subtle, the human race would long ago have ceased to use its tongue and would, by now, have developed a tech¬ nique of manual and facial idioms far beyond the ingenuity of the most cam- era-minded director. It stood to reason then that camera-angles, symbols and all the other devices of the director would bcome obsolete; and that the director’s job would, in time, become the job of putting on the screen, not a pantomime version of what the Writer wrote, but an exact text in word and action of what the Writer created. We have not quite reached this Utopian pass. The director still clings for dear life to his old job of “boss’ . The Writer still is unrecognized m the way that the dramatist is recognized m the theatre—as the Author of the Piece, as a partner with the producer, and, above all, as being entitled to share in the profits of his brain child, (even though the embryo is subsidized, as all factors of production are now subsi¬ dized, by Wall street). A LITTLE more time must pass. Writers must become aware of their place in pictures. They must grow up to pictures, and stand ready to assume the responsibility they rightly have to pictures. Then pictures will improve, and the Writer will come into his own. The Screen Guilds’ Magazine