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Shakespeare is regarded as no less an artist because he borrowed from Plutarch, and Sterne is no less a wit because he stole from Burton. In fact, you are hopelessly old-fashioned if you suppose that a work of art is only perfect if it is conceived and carried out by one individual mind. Of course, it may be. Negro and Aztec art shows that it was, and how perfect it was.
But in the cinema we are still primitives, when one man is as good as another in practice or criticism. And in your passion for technical rectitude you seem to have missed the point of my scenario series altogether, just as a critic can go on talking till he is blue in the face about filmic form or "expressive sound" and still tell you nothing whatever about the film, what happened in the film, what was its intention, what beauties it presented, what knowledge it showed, and so forth. (And parenthetically, can you tell me of any sound which is not "expressive"?)
You say that without an architect to inspire the draughtsmen and instruct the builders, a building would lack aesthetic harmony. That is true. But who is the architect of a film if he is not the scenarist, and that being so, why should he not be given his rightful importance in the filmic scheme?
I come to the rescue of this neglected species and a damaging lump of Edinburgh rock is flung at me by Cinema Quarterly. I deal with what is instead of what will be, and I am a traitor to the best in cinema. You say it is "idle to talk of the scenario as having significance," and yet, in Mack Schwab's interesting article on Chaplin, in the same issue, he writes: "His (Chaplin's) script is completely worked out, key-shot by key-shot."
Inevitably. It is sheer academicism to suppose that Chaplin, any more than Beethoven, carries everything in his head on the score that, all being visual, or all being harmonics, no scheme of notation is necessary. On the contrary, that is the significant thing, the ground-plan, the foundation, the idea rising in imagination from the page.
However, this must be intensely boring to your readers, and I must not inflict myself on them. But are you sure that in the severe cold of actual practice your many theories would stand the test? I myself have had a long apprenticeship in critical theory of films, and have stated them in papers not unworthy to be placed side by side with Cinema Quarterly, and yet I distrust a great deal of what I said, and marvel that I was so distant from reality. And I question profoundly whether the "full creative control" you demand of directors is not just a pattern laid up in Edinburgh, for students, scholars and watchers in the skies, and not for the striving mortal in the studio fighting the devils of light, sound and mischance.
Ernest Betts. 161