The Cine Technician (1953-1956)

March-April, 1952 THE CINE-TECHNICIAN 35 a troop train was pouring young American soldiers into London. She was calling the name of one of them — uncertain whether she would recognise his face. He was the son she had given up when he was a little boy. Sunset Boulevard came about because Wilder, Marshman and I were acutely conscious of the fact that we lived in a town which had been swept by a social change as profound as that brought about in the old South by the Civil War. Overnight, the coming of sound had brushed gods and goddesses into obscurity. We had an idea of a young man happening into a great house where one of these ex-goddesses survived. At first we saw her as a kind of horror woman — an embodiment of vanity and selfishness. But Wilder, as a director, has an uncomfortable peculiarity: he likes to see characters as they are going to be on the screen before he finishes a script. I think we started Sunset with sixty completed pages. As we went along, our sympathies became deeply involved with the woman who had been given the brush by thirty million fans. At the end, we had to give her the only happiness we could see for her — the twilight happiness of the mad. Of course, if you are working from a play or novel, a great deal of exploratory work has been done for you. The easiest script I ever worked on — the one that took the shortest time — was The Lost Week-End. In his novel, Charles Jackson had provided us with a tragic protagonist — a man in love against his will, in love with a bottle. He had also set the pattern of the seven circles of hell through which such a man can pass in a brief time. It was a question of effectively dramatising those seven circles, of finding the picturisable opponents of that desire of Don Birnam's for drink. After this length of time I'd have to take a copy of the book and the script and compare them, to say what was Charles Jackson's and what was ours. The bottle in the chandelier was ours, I know. The delusion Don Birnam suffered — the hideous fight between the mouse and the bat — was his. Whether the scene of Don begging the prostitute for money for drink was even indicated by the novel, I can't say. I devoutly wish more people would write novels alive with truth and pity. So do all motion picture producers. Alas, they are rare indeed. The medium of the motion pictures imposes on its practitioners a more sustained obligation to hold the audience's interest than any other medium. The novelist can end his chapter, the playwright can drop his curtain. The motion picture writer is on for an hour and a half or two hours. What he writes must be playable. It must be believable, it must have variety. You can't photograph people with the same expression on their faces too often. It must have architecture — a beginning, a middle, and an end. Above all, it must move, must take advantage of the freedom cf the camera. The best play, photographed just as it was written, seems stagnant. Finally, it must have some of the freshness and unexpected quality of life, not be a rehash of old celluloid. It's up to the producer to see that these things are in the script. No wonder he sometimes finds himself a little weary at the end of the day. w First Rate Realistic Story...' Is what George Elvin says of Jack Common's new book, an account of his childhood in Newcastle. Jack Common, an A.C.T. member, has been a film writer for many years, and his brilliant book shows that British story-material can be tough, real, and of the people — if only film makers would turn to writers like Common, who have come from the popular life of Britain. THERE are those who argue that the relatively small number of British films made is due to the lack of top-grade talent. " Kiddar's Luck " (Turnstile Press, 9s. 6d. net) gives the lie to this nonsensical view. Jack Common, its author, is one of the hundreds unable to obtain a regular job in films. He is a writer film producers have no job for. Yet here he is with one of the best pieces of writing published for many a day. Vivid, authentic, tough, and many other adjectives of praise can be showered upon this autobiography of childhood adolescence in Newcastleupon-Tyne. What a contrast this book is to the pseudoindustrial story written by the superior being after a period of background slumming. Here is an unashamed working class autobiography written with all the alternating sordidness and high spirits in which so many millions brought thousands up — not were brought up — in the big industrial cities, some forty or so years ago. In some ways it is a pity Jack Common didn't get down to writing his story at the time of the " between-the-wars " vogue for such literature. But if in this sense he has regrettably missed the market, he certainly hasn't missed the bus in writing a first-rate realistic story.