The Cine Technician (1939)

30 TH R < I X F-TEC HNICIAN April-Maj . 1937 Wanted— A Staff College By C. A. LEJEUNE (Reprinted by kind permission from The Observer, January 24th, 1937) We welcome Miss Lejeune's article, which advocates a development persistently urged by A.C.T. Our only comment is to stress the necessity of controlling the inflow into the industry (as is done in printing and other trades with apprentiees/iip schemes) which the operation of such a scheme would provide. — Editor. THE British film industry needs a Staff College. That is one fact that has emerged plainly from the rumours, the panics, and the alarums of the last weeks. The film is possibly the only major organisation in this country that has no recognised training school for all branches of its employees. The big stores, the police force, the military services, the post office, the agricultural industries, all have their training centres. Theatre and music have their authorised academies. Even the B.B.C. has lately fallen into line. The film industry, apart from a few specialised experiments, like the technical training course at the Polytechnic, has no centralised training-ground for young talent. Occasionally young men, luckier or more pertinacious than the rest, manage to break their way into the studios and pick up some scraps of knowledge for themselves on the floor. But these incursions are rare. For one man with talent, who gets past the gatekeeper, there are a hundred who hanker after the cinema for a time in vain, and, finally, take a job in their friend's garage or their uncle's cotton business. In the meantime the British studios, which ought to watch with care every penny of their expenditure, are paying £10,000 a picture to American stars, £500 a week to American scenario-writers, and £100 to American or German camera-men, simply because there is not a big enough supply of first-rate English stars, writers and cameramen to supply their needs. A central college, heavily subsidised by the film industry, which would make us independent of Hollywood in the next generation, should prove in the end to be a rich investment. Why should not our major producers — Mr. Korda, Mr. Ostrer, Mr. Maxwell, Mr. Wilcox, Mr. Schach, Mr. Dean and Mr. Balcon — allocate a certain sum of money each week for the upkeep of some such place ? It could be housed in one of the many superfluous studios, relics of over-building in this country, and serviced from the technical staffs of the contributory organisations. "Short ends" of film, left over from the products of the big studios, could be supplied to the students for practice work. Dramatic pupils could be tried out in studio productions. Stories to be used by the major studios could be set as subjects for scenario-writing. And periodically all students would be taken to Den ham, or Elstree, or Ealing, for a thorough training in all departments of film-making and for practical work, under supervision, on the floor. It the British film industry is ever to be anything more than a cut-throat business, some such plan will have to be ultimately adopted. It is .ill very well to argue that here, in London, we are near the source of all art and talent ; ih.it the studios can take their pick of West End actors and popular writers ; that, on the doorstep of Mr. Wells and Mr. Gielgud and Sir Thomas Beecham and the Old Vic, we have merely to reach out and grab for culture. The film business, to be successful, must be learnt from the inside and from the beginning, slowly and painfully. No man who spends his nights in a London theatre and his days in an Elstree studio can do full justice to either job. The world of Hollywood is a little, enclosed world, where the actors are film actors, and the writers film writers, and the musicians film musicians, and even a Hugh Walpole learns a new alphabet for his stories. Only in Hollywood, thousands of miles from the capital city, a non-existent town in a world of fantasy, are such intensive conditions possible. They have never existed in America's Long Island studios, within reach of New York. They will never exist in the studios of Bucks and Middlesex and Herts, within reach of Shaftesbury Avenue and St. Martin's Lane. Starting without Hollywood's advantage of isolation, we have got to create our own intensive training centre for the cinema. It can only be done through some authorised college, where films, in all their different aspects, are made a whole-time cuiriculum. It must be run, or it is useless, with the full practical co-operation of the film industry : there must be no fancy stuff about it, no amateurism, no semi-official institutionalism or pedantry. With a working college planned by the trade, helped by the trade, and used by the trade, British producers would find themselves ultimately insured against most of their troubles. It would cost money, but split between five or six companies, all mutually benefiting, the financial risk would be a small one. Half the cost of any recent British film failure would get the thing going nicely. And if in the course of one year it produced one potential Donat, one future Jessie Matthews, one budding Hitchcock, and one cameraman like Fred Young, it would have fully justified the expenditure. If in addition to this it produced one first-rate scenario writer, it would have done something hitherto unknown in the story of the British industry. I appeal to Mr. Korda, Mr. Schach, Mr. Maxwell, and the rest to make good their claims that they are ready, in every way, to help the British film to prosperity. No trade can be prosperous if it is not continuously led with a supply of fully-trained workmen. And the British film industry is the only one I know in which the man who wants to learn to work is denied the opportunity to try. A Pat on the Back "To-Day 's Cinema" paid a nice compliment to A.C.T. members in reporting the recent lecture by (apt. Round, which will be published in our next issue. "Onlooker" wrote : — "Pretty big gathering oi technicians al .1 meeting ot the A.C.T. on Thursday night. . . . Trade techni1 1,111s an a pretty energetic lot. They come straighl down from their studios late at night after a hard day's work to attend a lecture which might throw a little light on progress, for the betterment of future British dims. The A.C.T. are doing good work in arranging these affairs."