Screen Guilds Magazine (November 1935)

Have You Forgotten Your Life Class? IT ONCE saw written into a motion -“-picture script, “the photography in the following sequence should be harsh and bad in imitation of news reel pho¬ tography.^ Our hero was photographed for a newsreel, and the newsreel was shown in the picture. All right, the photography in news¬ reels is seldom beautiful. Often it’s harsh and unflattering. Newsreel cam¬ eramen work outdoors. They can’t halt a parade, a fire, an assassination, or a beauty contest, while dimmers are tact¬ fully arranged to glorify the star’s cheekbones. Newsreel soundmen have no defense against coughs, crickets, or traffic. When Mamma Babinowitz wins the sweepstake grand prize, her newsreel speech is filled with hesitations and eye¬ rolling. She is apt to pleat her bunga¬ low apron or wipe her sweating palms on it. In the bootlegged newsreel of the Hauptmann trial, the sound track was harrassed by a barrage of coughing. Whispers sounded like the pounding of the surf, and the shifting of people sit¬ ting on uncomfortable chairs was picked up like the noise a herd of elephants would make crashing through the jungle. The newsreel, while sometimes pretty, is not art. A screen courtroom scene should never include the irrelevant noise and movement which swamps the drama and steals the scene from the man on trial for his life. Mrs. Eabino¬ witz, with her complete lack of tech¬ nique, would not and should not be the casting director’s choice to play the part of a sweepstakes winner. The news¬ reel is a record. We’re not making records. All of us, actors, writers, di¬ rectors, art directors, are selecting, in¬ terpreting, underscoring salient points and vignetting out distractions. That’s the theory, anyway. In writing dialog, we throw over¬ board the half-finished sentences, the meaningless chatter which forms so large a part of everyday speech. In acting a scene, screen players eliminate the pattings of the hair, the fiddling with wrist watch or com¬ pact, the prodding of a butt dying in an ash-tray with the end of a match dead already which take place in an actual tete-a-tete across a night club table An art director and a set dresser, readying Mrs. Goadby’s drawing room for the screen, eliminate the copy of last week’s Post, left on the windowsill, the stack of mail on the desk, and the spectacles on the coffee table. But if we’re to select, simply, under¬ score and elide, we ought to know the full record, the literal, unretouched, unedited original. Great pianists and great singers run lots of scales. Cezanne learned the look, feel, weight, texture, and color of oranges, fruit knives and table cloths before he painted the still life which was a simplification, an ar¬ rangement, a planned and deliberate design. I THINK too many of us either skipped or skimped our years in life class. And that applies to the lot of us, actors, directors, writers, art di¬ rectors. There’s a great deal of infor¬ mation for an actor in the scared face of a man in a newsreel crowd just be¬ fore the auto racer hurtles over the wall into his lap. Some of our charac¬ ter women who specialize in old ladies, might have watched Granny’s progress around the room with benefit to their work. They have taken as their model not a life old lady but another stage old lady. A fine example of a player who has never forgotten his life class studies is Spencer Tracy. James Cagney studied his hard boys on the East Side. His technique simplifies, interprets, creates from his acquaintance with reality. Listen to Frank McHugh speak the line, “Oh . . . should ’a been black, huh?” in “The Irish In Us;” watch J. M. Kerrigan in “The Informer;” remem¬ ber back to “Border Town” and Bette Davis going crazy, if you think hard work in life class isn’t an essential foundation for technique. By Mary C. McCall, Jr, ... A contributing editor who feels that pictures lose a lot by not studying life . When I worked as a copy-writer in an advertising agency, I found myself learning to write a new language—a language far removed from every day speech. It had rhythm all right, but not the rhythm of talk, the rhythm of “copy.” Its primary purpose seemed to be not to inform, but to produce a mild hypnosis, during which sales re¬ sistance was lulled into coma. I think we screen writers are developing a language—a patois quite different from ordinary talk—something called “dia¬ log.” When we embark on a light comedy, our mind’s ear is tuned to the last brisk comedy dialog we heard, not to amusing talk. I’m convinced that the one piece of equipment with which a natural-born writer is endowed from his conceptioin is a good ear. That ear is a gift. It’s no credit to him, but it’s of enormous use. It must be innate, like absolute pitch. It can’t be acquired, but it can be developed, exercised, used. Too many of us are letting our ears atrophy. We’re using them to listen to other writer’s dialog, when we ought to be riding in buses, sitting in restaurants, standing in lobbies and markets, eaves¬ dropping in beauty parlors and steam rooms listening to talk. Some of Booth Tarkington’s finest talk is being spoken on the screen just now in “Alice Adams.” It took years of good listening to make that writing possible. Eing Lardner had an infal¬ lible ear. Arthur Kober’s “Thunder Over the Bronx” is written in talk, not In dialog. A GEEAT deal of screen acting, screen writing, and many screen sets are as florid, lifeless and phoney as a meringue glace. We’re not selecting and editing from, reality, emphasizing its important features and discarding its irrelevancies to create drama. Too often actors are parading tricks learned from other actors while they speak “dialog” written by someone whose ear has grown deaf from disuse. And the (Continued on Page 24) 11 • N ovember, 1935