Documentary News Letter (1940)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER APRIL 1940 17 lollywood is the Place. Charles Landery. Dent. BOOK REVIEWS [Tie Cinema Today. D. A. Spencer and H. D. iValey. Sir Humphrey Milford and Oxford Uni tersity Press. 4s. 6d. ■HIS IS A short, technical survey of film-making, ?^ )rimarily intended for the general reader. It has ^ m interesting introductory history of film apP"^ )aratus and gives a broad account of film-stock ■^ »a ind processing, cameras, sound-recording, colour 6«3 jrocesses, stereoscopy, and sub-standard prob''^i ems. Although concerned almost entirely with ''^''^ ipparatus and method, it crams a good deal of '■'PS ;ommon sense into two final chapters on the •fJE? ilm's position today and as a social force. If ««! hese two chapters were to precede the technical lescription, the book would have a better ^la jalance. As it is, useful diagrams and some !xcellent illustrations make "The Cinema Today" t ta I well-produced book at its price. sM iiil siM«05. 6d. "=^'° THIS MIGHT have been just another book about ^' Hollywood. It has the usual anecdotes and funny itories about the big shots (including a new one )f the 2,000 dollar a week executive who owed his )osition to his outstanding skill on horseback). ' There are the usual dark hints about the sex life * )f the local population. There is the inevitable ^;' lescription of an Aimee Semple McPherson *^'^'^evival meeting. The book's merit lies in the fact that it does ''^^ecord that in Hollywood there are great num Ders of ordinary people who work damned hard when they are permitted to work at all — for a ;otally inadequate reward. Mr Landery shows us he statistical workings of Central Casting with ts 12,000 registered extras of whom only 350 ire continuously employed. Behind the mathe natical equation is the human being, and Mr ndery allows us to meet the human being and ■0 learn a little about how an extra scrapes along. Steve Dunning, 30 years old, married and one laughter, is a studio electrician or juicer. "Look' le says, "you can't blame me for getting hot jnder the collar. I work like a nigger. I sweat. \nd for what? A dollar twenty-one an hour. And what's more i don't get steady work and there never will be a future to it. Then there is Bert, the stunt man. "Our Union Chas fixed the minimum pay at $35 per eight-hour day with overtime if worked, no matter how ".imple the stunt". Most of the stunts don't seem too simple. We would have liked this book a whole lot more if it had stuck to the human stories about the real people in Hollywood. But what there is of them is good. Filming for Amateurs. Paul Burnford, A.R.P.S., jwith a preface by Paul Rotha. Pitman. \2s. 6d. THIS IS A good book. It is not a long book (the text only runs to about 30,000 words), but Mr Burnford writes crisply, and gives the maximum Of information in the minimum of space. The book will be most useful to the amateur who knows what a shooting script is, realises that he leeds one if he is to make a film rather than a haphazard collection of shots, but is not very\ PEOPLE AND PLANS familiar with the tricks of the trade by which he can get the eff"ects he desires. For such a man, it would hardly be possible to pick a passage of a hundred v^orks that did not give useful information. The book contains 58 well-printed reproductions of actual shots which are accompanied by captions giving the reasons for the arrangement and technical proceeding adopted. The lessons to be learned from these plates will be as fruitful as those found in the text. Finally a word of praise to the publishers, who have produced an excellent piece of typography. It is a pity, however, that there are one or two small errors, such as f. 28 for (presumably) f 2.8, a mis-spelling of Rene Clair's name, and, oddly enough, of the author on both cover and jacket. America at the Movies. Margaret Thorp. Yale University Press. $2.75. THIS is A well-documented, balanced and very nicely written study of exploitation methods and public relations policies in the American film business. The subject is of first-line importance for any understanding of the film industry and the social influence of the cinema in this country. American films arrive here trailing clouds of glory from a coast to coast build-up which inevitably influence British critical and public reaction. Some day, too, perhaps the British industry may set about emulating the magnificently self-assured enthusiasm of the American industry. We are already familiar with tie-ups with hairdressers, biscuit manufacturers and newspapers ; and on occasions exhibitors manage to get the help of local territorials, civic dignitaries and churches in selling a film. On the obverse side are Sonja Henje's films popularising ice-skating and films like Warner Brothers" Zola creating a demand for new editions and reprints of classics, pushing up book sales and library borrowings by hundreds of thousands. It would seem that there is no film that a determined publicity department cannot sell and that there is nothing that films cannot sell, whether it be anti-fascism or family life, lipsticks, Shakespeare or sofas "like the one in Bette Davis's drawing-room in Dark Viclory." But there are limits. There's the Hay Office, the National Legion of Decency and a hundred smaller organised minorities whose power we over here hardly realise. And there are the men and women who go to the movies who, in spite of the barrage of campaigns, stunts, slogans and insinuations laid down by publicity departments, exhibitors and fan-journalists and in spite of the defences erected for them by public and private political and moral censors, can and do still make their voices heard. Illuminating in this connection are extracts from the Hays Office Reports for 1938 and 1939 quoted by Margaret Thorp on which she makes this comment : "Significant as the change is from glorying in 'escapist entertainment' to glorying in 'pictures that dramatise present-day social conditions' this second report of Mr Hays is not a battle cry, but an official recognition of a force which had at last grown too strong to be ignored." William Farr has joined the Editorial Board of D.N.L. He was assistant director of the Film Institute and edited Sight and Sound. For the past two years he has been distribution officer of the Petroleum Films Bureau. A li stair Cooke, one time B.B.C. film critic and well known for his broadcasts to England from America, has joined the staff of the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. A new documentary production unit. Realfilm Productions Inc., has been set up in America. John Ferno, co-director of The Four Hundred Million with Joris Ivens, is in charge of production. Miss Margery Locket, lately in charge of the G.B. Instructional Films Bureau, has joined the Films Department of the Ministry of Information. We welcome Mr P. H. Siriex to London. He is film liaison officer between the Ministry of Information and the Commissariat General a Service d'Information of Paris. His headquarters are the Service d'Information de Londres, Queensberry Way, S.W.7. The work of the Service d'Information de Londres is reviewed on page 13. The French documentary director, J. B. Brunius, has been granted leave from the French Army to come to England. He is working at the G.P.O. Film Unit, and hopes to direct films in England for France. He will also be handling French versions of English films. He was responsible for '''Violons d' Ingres" shown at the French Pavilion of the New York World's Fair and at the March performance of the Film Institute Film Society. WORLD FILM NEWS A Limited Number of Bound Volumes for Sale Volume 1 £2 0 0 Volume 2 £1 10 0 Voluine 3 £10 0 Single Copies Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 3/6 2/6 II {Issues No. 2 of Volume 1 atul No. 6 of Volume 2 are no longer available.)