The Cine Technician (1939)

54 T H E C I N E-TEC II NIC! A N JuneJuly, i has not been any great opportunity presented to him. Obstacles have been constantly placed in his way owing to the attitude taken by dogmatic and, in some eases, "dilly-dallying" producers. But these conditions are now, through necessity, changing. There should be a motion picture university, a school run by and for motion picture people. It should be run as an experimental studio for the training of directors, cameramen, scenario writers, editors, etc. It should, in short, duplicate a studio on a small scale. Such a school could be made profitable from a purely financial standpoint, owing to the wide interest prevailing in motion picture production. And think what it would mean to the producers eventually ! It would have to be a practical school, maintained with the co-operation of the leading producers, directors, writers, etc., and with the practicability there would be a fine idealism and venturesome spirit leading to a new advance in the film craft. The Russians (whom Castlerosse would have us believe are a great people at kidding !) have such a school run from economic necessity and foresight, and its value for raising the artistic standard is undeniable. This only goes to prove that the lectures given on various subjects, by arrangement of the Association, are of great value to the industry. I look forward to the not far-off time when these will be on a larger scale, thus asserting to the producers the aim of A.C.T. to improve the standard in all branches of the industry, as well as the status of its members. But we must not forget A.C.T.'s basic policy is the maintenance and improvement of the economic status of technicians ; that ensuring jolts to British technicians and starting apprenticeship schemes mean nothing if we allow technicians to do jobs for which they realise they are nut receiving the proper remuneration. In Miss Lejeune's article, winch ice reprint by kind permission of "The Observer," A.C.T. finds backed from an independent and influential source its dissatisfaction with recent wage-cuts and its resentment at it as a piece of window-dressing after the crisis, with no real attention paid to the sometimes appalling executive ermrs in production that arc really to blame for what's wrong. Readers should take this article in conjunction with the General Council's Annual General Meeting motion on the crisis. Miss LEJEUNE says: Henry Ford, speaking of wage-cuts in a time of financial crisis, once said that this was the easiest and most slovenly way of handling the situation. "It is, in effect, throwing upon labour the incompetency of the managers of the business. To tamper with wages before all else is changed is to evade the real issue." It is a curious fact, from which we are at liberty to draw our own conclusions, that this policy oi recovery is the one chiefly adopted, at the moment, by the British film industry. As soon as they felt themselves approaching, if not a crisis, at least a severe depression, the first thought of everj responsible executive was to reduce the wages and salaries of his stall. I here is hardly a studio in England to-day that is not taking an all-round cut in salary of 10 per cent, or more. Some ol the employees are said to have taken it volun tarily ; others have undoubtedly had it thrust upon them. Although the amount saved on the weekly pay-roll would be light-heartedly thrown away in the next five minutes on the floor, nobody in authority seems to have noticed the paradox. Do the producers really imagine that thev can save their companies by these small-time economies ? A company that can be saved by the wages of the cutter, and the typist, and the cameraman, and the wardrobe girl, might surely be allowed to go bankrupt without regret. Any producer who reduces a man's wages from ("50 a week to £25 a week, confirms the evidence of his own incompetent judgment. Either the man was overpaid before, or he is underpaid now. In point of fact, underpayment of the smaller responsible jobs is one of our industry's worst evils. Ten pounds a week is not a generous wage for a cutter who has in his hands the material fate of a £100,000 picture. Five pounds a week is hardly excessive pay for a woman who handles the delicate business of a firm's publicity. Twenty pounds a week for writing a script for an expensive star is not an unreasonably dashing figure. Our film industry ha< not the first economic notion of payment for service. \\ 'hat the small wage-earners need, and what they would get in any sanely organised community, is not a cut, but a substantial increase. The Government, which seems disposed according to the answers to questions in both houses on Thursday, to offer the industry protection of a practical nature, would do well to consider this problem of the allotment of money. It has been said that the present crisis in production is largely the result of extravagance by producers. That is probably true, but the money that has demonstrably been wasted by the majority of British film companies in the last five years has not been wasted in workers' wages. It has not even been wasted on the floor. It has been wasted because nine out of ten British films go on the floor without sufficient preparation. It has been wasted by the sheer incompetence of the producers, who have not realised that the heart of every film is an adequate and adequately paid personnel. The average British studio is under-staffed and underpaid in every department, but in none more than the scenario department, wdhch is the foundation of the whole business of film-making. A company like Metro-Goldwyn or Paramount lias something like sixty employees in its scenario department. We, if we are enterprising, have six. One of our companies, in the first panic of retrenchment, decided to abolish its scenario department altogether. At the same time it was running up the salary of a highpriced star for whom a story had to be found within a reasonable time under strict contract penalties. Another scenario department was so loosely organised that an author in England was writing a second script while an entire unit was ignorantly shooting on a first script many hundreds of miles away. It is no unusual thing for a picture costing £120,000 to go on the floor with a script half-written, or for the script to be re-written on the sel before the day's shooting begins. This sort of thing is the real extravagance, and films will never be made economically while it is allowed to continue. There is no extravagance m paying a man what he is worth in wages, in investing heavily in salaries with a view to a certain return in profits. The British film executive has still to learn, and he will no1 be successful until he does learn, that the labourer, the real labourer. is worthy ol his hire.