The Cine Technician (1939)

171 T III". C] N E-T ECHNICIA N Dec. -Jan.. L937 H Gbristmas Call front tbe Morkbouee WHERE are the pals of yester-years? \lirv are a few of the holes and corners into which our fellows from the studios, the skill ami muscle mi which any British film production must he built, have tied for shelter from the icy 1. 1;, st. Bookmaker, South American sheep-farmer, journalist, writer of advertising programmes for a Continental broadcasting station, writer of lyrics tor a non-stop revue, "non-intervention" patrol officer, war correspondent, boarding-house proprietor, commercial traveller, door-todoor salesman, non-film clerk, and "fiddler. " (" Fiddling," in case you think he ought to have joined the Musicians' Union, is buying an article for credit at one end of Wardour Street and selling it for cash at the other). A.O.T's. employment bureau registered under 50 out twelve months ago. Over 100 six months ago. To-day near 250. In all. 35 per cent, of technicians are unemployed. Talent scrapped. Why? Because pictures aren't being made. Because making pictures isn't profitable. Because, they say, costs are too high. Whose costs? Not technicians ! Many producer-speakers have locuted on high costs; but we know exactly where technicians are skimped to tlie point ot lower salaries and longer hours than any others in the business, and much publicised cuts of 10 per cent or 15 per cent of our wages only reduce picture costabout one tenth of one per cent. Some things technicians who have worked in this industry do know and notice. They cannot fail to be aware, lor instance, of major studios in this country which were designed with such blatant incompetence or negligence that the cost of every picture runs up and above the cost that would have covered the same production in a studio designed by any one of our members. In a sensible society those responsible would have been punished. Here, however, perhaps the only consistent line ot policy is to reward the man designated responsible lor such constructions (who may in tact not have been responsible at all) by a gilt from his employees' salaries '.' Recall a conversation between one of our A.C.T. investigators who recently explored the Soviet film industry for us and those he was supposed to be questioning, but who in turn were questioning him. Q.) "What are you working on now?" A.) (from our explorer) "1 am not working." Q.) " Indeed. And why ?" \ i "With u there is what is called a slump." (,). ) " What is a slump?" A.) "Well, you sec. the people in charge of production have lost a lot of money. Their films weren't profitable. And so now they can't gel an\ mure monej Eor production. " Q.) "Well, win don't you change tins,, people, and try new ones?" A.) "Oh, we couldn't do that. You see, the produc lion apparatus, the studios and all the rest of it belong to them. " Q.) "What do you mean belong to them ?" Very simple. lint too plain and obvious for some people. No wonder the millionaires who own the nev papers make them yowl and yelp when, in a certain country, if a business is not going well, they get rid of the people running it and try a new lot. Someone might notice that it wasn't such a bad idea at that. Here we do notice, that when the film business is running badly, and our h ai on the street, the only people who se< m to be fixtures (and eating just as well) are the people who run it badly. And when the Government thinks of doinc, anything lor the business, it is the men who smashed it that it asks lor advice on what to do. A man is sick and the doctor asks the microbes what medicine they'd like to flourish on. It is a fact that the film industry needs protection. The mere arithmetic of the number of theatres in U.S.A. and in Britain is the demonstration of this. The language barrier, which handicaps U.S. product in competition with home-produced in many European countries, is totally absent in Britain, where even Runyon is comprehensible and the Southern home variety sounds affected to the Northern home ear. Other tilings being equal, the home market in the U.S. can return a greater initial cost than the home market in Britain, and a U.S. film can therefore use its whole income from Britain in battling murder on the British market against a competitor of equal standard striving to recover its cost out of income. A British film on the British market is like a man trying to cut a dash in the same style as his same-salaried bachelor fellow employee, while all the time he himself has a wife and ten children to keep. Hence protection is necessary. But to protect the film industry, as it stands, is to proteel not an industry, but those that batten on it. Where is the British film production industry? Put your spy-glass to your eye. Tell me. Around all the horizon will you see one single organisation striving to make a success of production'! Striving, that, is to build up a successful business of making pictures, finding out how to. learning their job, and constructing. There's barely a producer in the game who isn't in for some other motive. Either because he's forced by law to make a minimum of pictures as a condition of b< allowed to do business and take his profit at renting or some other phase <>f the racket. Or else as a speculator. to make his nieiie\ oul ol manipulating investments. Making pictures my ej e ! Who cares about pid u Not a hundred years ago a British firm made a picture which (a) didn't Use money, (b) won the award of the Hollyv\ I Motion Picture \eadeiny ot whatnots (c) won Mussolini's Gold Medal, (d) won a lyric speech from Goebbels (after the names ol the couple of .lews connected with it had been taken off tin credit tit1 On the very same day on which a newspaper connected with the producers took the occasion to declare: "British pictures are at last at the top. The men and methods that placed them there will keep them there." the employmenl of the lasi survivor of the men who made that picture terminated with that production company.