American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1963)

Make Way For Youth By MERVYN LEROY A pp.opos AS A companion article to Cliff Harrington’s, which begins on this page, is the following short article reproduced with permission from The journal of the Screen Producers Guild for September. 1962. Author is Mervyn LeRoy, one of the youngest “veterans’ in the Hollywood film industry who has directed some of Hollywood’s finest films, the latest of which is “Gypsy for Warner Brothers. — ED. TJolli wood as a filmmaking entity has passed the 50 mark, too young to die but old enough to be thinking about the future. The upstarts who consign the greatest entertainment apparatus in history to the scrap heap are as worn as are some of their pictures, but they’re not all wrong. Our town has begun to creak a little at at the joints and there is no doubt it needs a little oil here and there. For this lubricity our industry, like any major industry, must call upon the young. But where are they? Once they hung about our gates, clamoring for a chance to be heard, to show their wares, to exhibit the artistry and the talent they felt surging within themselves. “Let us in,” they cried. “Let us in and we’ll show you.” I haven’t heard the hammerings on the gates for a long time now and I doubt many others have, because the cries are becoming feeble. Perhaps they’re hammering on the gates of television or the stage now, but I’m afraid they’ve given us up. It’s a shame, too, be¬ cause as long as the young hopefuls had hope, we had a chance. Without them, we must surely die a little, and perhaps a lot, as all the greatest talents of Hollywood succumb to the passing of the years. If Detroit operated the way we do, we’d still be cranking our cars by hand, putting up the side curtains each winter and riding on hard rubber tires. But Detroit believes in young blood. Each year the big auto makers scour the country’s colleges for promising talent. Then these youngsters are given every opportunity to prove themselves. Practically every major industry in America does the same thing. But do we scour the colleges for writing talent or the little theatres for potential stars or great directors? Not to any extent. Mostly we just scout each other. In the old days you could make a star by taking an extra off his horse. You could make a director by crooking a finger at some young fellow who looked as though he would know stage left from stage right. You could even make a producer out of a guy who thought a good property was a piece of real estate. Needless to say, but I’ll say it, those days are far behind us. We are in an era of fierce competition with television, which has on its side the natural human reluctance to overcome inertia and thus prospers on people who find it easiest not to get up from their chairs; with foreign movie-makers who have rushed in to fill a vacuum which we ourselves created and who find it easy to exploit Continued on Page 1 12 HPhe star of the short 35mm sound film, “Off the High¬ way,” was Richard Widmark and the director, Fred Zinnemann. The key technicians also were Holly¬ wood professionals. All the rest were young men getting their first professional motion picture work under men long experienced in the industry. T his non-profit experiment was conceived to help provide young people aiming for a professional career in motion pictures with the important on-the-job training that they need. The eleven young men, all mem¬ bers of the Lniversity of Southern California’s Cinema Department, were faced with the grim fact that the university’s cinema class could only provide basic training* with little opportunity for practice by which to develop skill. A number of prominent men in the Holly¬ wood studios were sympathetic with their plight — among them, veteran screen director Fred Zinnemann who agreed to lend a hand by di¬ recting a film for them. Key tech¬ nicians, with their union’s ap¬ proval, agreed to contribute their services without pay. When the camera was ready to roll on the first scene, an impressive produc¬ tion company was assembled to work side-by-side with the cinema students. There was Emmet Emer¬ son of the Mirisch Company, and Joe Popkin of 20th Century-Fox who acted as production managers. Joe Edmondson, of Goldwyn Stu¬ dios, was sound man; Sass Bedig of Universal-International Studios acted as special effects technician; Jack Holmes of 20th Century-Fox was film editor, and Terry Sanders supervising cameraman. (USC faculty participants were: Arthur Knight, Saturday Review film critic, Assistant Dean Maynard Smith, and Morgan Cox. Student participants were: Verne Bert, Gary Kurtz, Lear Levin, Pat McGahan, Len Miller, Stuart Murphy, Spencer Nelson, Mike Neyman, Efrain Ramirez, John Rose and Joe Zucchero.) The students had the very best 92 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER, FEBRUARY, 1963