Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

40 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE Volume XII, No. 2 Readings in Photoplay Appreciation Introducing ^^The Screen Writer^^ A new monthly magazine of special interest to all teachers and students of English, including dramatics, speech, literature, and composition, as well as advisers of photoplay clubs, made its appearance in June. 1945. This is The Screen Writer, published by the Screen Writers Guild, with Dalton Trumbo (scenarist of Our Vines Have Tender Grapes) as editor. The Guild includes all the Hollywood scriptwriters, great and small. The organization has 1275 members of whom 360 were employed in the eight major studios as of June 15, 1945. Of these, only 171 were on term contracts. Some 275 of the Hollywood writei’s have been in the armed services. Hollywood’s writers are a hard-working lot, and a majority of them earn less than $200 a week. Of 649 active members in 1944-45, only 54, or 8 percent, received $1000 a week or more; only 269, or about 40 percent, received between $200 and $900 a week. Although the salaries of the few elite writers give the impression that all Hollywood writers earn fabulous salaries, the fact is that the median salary for writers is $150 a week. The Guild is today an articulate group, keenly aware of Hollywood’s shortcomings and potentialities. Compelled to please the world rather than themselves, they often fasten their hands upon their hearts. We reprint here excerpts from the first two issues of The Screen Writer. If these interest you, you may wish to enter a subscription to the new maga zine. The price is $2.50 a year; the address, 1655 N. Cherokee Ave., Hollywood 28. In the first issue, Theodore Strauss, former New York Times movie critic, now a Hollywood scenarist, discusses his former fellow-reviewers in New York. He says: Because most writers feel that the reviewers are neither informed nor consistent in their standards of appraisal, they have perforce come to look for support and guidance from the box office alone. As a result, an ever-widening schism has opened between the reviewers and the one body of film craftsmen in Hollywood which at present is most intent on raising the level of films to a maturity commensurate with the greatest responsibilities any art has ever faced. At present the New York critical fraternity might reasonably be divided into the low, middle, and highbrow elements, with the tabloids and Hearst press at the bottom of the scale, the reviewers of the major dailies in the center, and the gentlemen of the New Republic, The Nation, Time, and The New Yorker in the latter category. Among them they reach a metropolitan and outlying audience exceeding ten million readers and to an undetermined degree influence reviewing elsewhere about the country. And like the vast range of their reading public’s tastes, the reviewers run the gamut from the sob-sister effusions of the tabloids, hardly less starstruck than the fan magazines, to the pontifical and frequently absurd musings of the longhairs. The reviewer commanding by farthe largest single audience in America is the News’s Kate Cameron. . . Miss Camer-on’s reviews are not far above the level of advice-to-the-lovelorn columns. Like Miss Cameron, the reviewers of the Mirror and .Journal-American, both Hearst papers, keep their essays on a level with the lowest common denominator of Hollywood films. Of necessity they follow the patterns of Mr. Hearst’s ideas on journalism. For the most part their reviews are little more than brief synopses. . . Reviewing at these levels is hardly reviewing at all, but at least as deadly to healthy film criticism are the soliloquies of Messrs. James Agee and Manny Farber. While the tabloid and Hearst reviewers over-simplify, these two gentlemen consistently over-complicate. . . Mr. Farber of the New Republic has at least one advantage over his colleague — he has moments of lucidity. * sjs * Mr. Agee, reviewer for The Nation and more tempered as anonymous pundit for Time, has acquired note as the first critic to combine the Aristotelian precepts with Euclidian geometry to arrive at a method of judgment. In a recent and, we hope, continuing exchange with The New Yorker, Mr. Agee has defended his right to review shows without seeing them. As for Mr. Walcott Gibbs, the New Yorker’s reluctant film reviewer whom we meanly include among the longhairs, he hardly aspires to review films at all. He merely tolerates them with as much forbearance as he can muster. * * ^ Of all the reviewers functioning in New York today, Bosley Crowther of the Times is probably the most balanced, the most consistent, the most penetrating. Although he writes in the didactic, unexciting tones of a New England schoolmaster, he approaches his task of evaluating films with seriousness and conscience. It is curious that although England, France, the Soviet Union and preNazi Gel many produced a considerable body of critical essays on films at all levels, America — the country where movies were invented — has yet produced no similar literature to an