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On the Side Lines with the Director
T^HE DIRECTORS are blamed for a lot of things, these days. You can ooze in to any bunch of screen people sitting around a table talking it over after the rehearsal, and according to them, the director is directly responsible for every flaw in the picture. According to them, he takes all the fat parts away from everybody, and he has absolutely no conception as to the continuity of the picture, and he chops up a play until even its own author wouldn't know it.
The popular conception of the screen director is about as varied as the appearance of the popular band director. One likes to think of him as gyrating madly about a studio, bawling through a megaphone and ordering timid little screen girls about like an overseer in a cotton patch.
Once in a while you run across a director who does none of these things. Sidney Olcott, Famous Players' director, has a
Mr. Olcott, in his famous impersonation of the Irish fisherman.
Sidney Olcott uses up all his vacations in revising scripts, ready for
direction.
reputation for doing some pretty good directing; but he does not bawl, he does not dash about, he seldom uses a megaphone, and he keeps on perfectly good terms with everybody with whom he works.
Even in the days when courtesy was an unknown quantity in a screen studio, and the qualifications of the director would seem to consist of an abstracted frown and a portentous bellow, accompanied by a rude manner, Mr. Olcott believed in courtesy. He was a firm advocate of the principle that much better results can be attained by poise and serenity in a rehearsal than in the process of frightening half the cast into tears and angering the remainder to the point of murder.
Nothing like that in one of Mr. Olcott's plays.
First he studies ou+ every detail of the play given him for direction. He goes over it with a searchlight, selecting the most telling points for emphasis. Night after night, when rehearsal is over, Mr. Olcott is bending over his study table, sorting, arranging and otherwise assembling the scenes for the next day. There was once when Miss Pickford sauntered into the studio, when rehearsals for "Madame Butterfly" were on, wearing a kimono that looked all right to everybody else. But not to Director Olcott. He had spent many weeks in Japan, and he knew just what belonged to whom. That kimono was wrong, and he spent some time in low-voiced and earnest conversation with Miss Pickford before the scene went on. When it did, she wore the right type of kimono.
When he was directing Donald Brian in "The Smugglers," somebody brought him a cheap string of pearls from the Famous Players "morgue," where all the properties are kept.