Film Spectator (1927-1928)

THE FILM SPECTATOR August 6, 1927 great box office strength. But Joe passed on the stories himself. He said the first he read in brief synopsis form -was “old fashioned”. This, mind you, before a treatment was suggested. He could not grasp the possibilities of any of the stories, and could not present one intelligent reason for not liking them. I asked him to let me go over the stories with a trained literary man who knew something 'about pictures, but my request was not granted. Shortly after my aspirations were squelched Schenck gave the world his conception of real screen entertainment, Topsy and Eva, unquestionably the worst motion picture ever made. I am not claiming that my stories weren’t rotten. Perhaps they were. But if they were, a man who knows anything about screen stories would have been able to give at least one sensible reason why they were. I am confident that Sol Wurtzel is so fixed in his conviction that he knows all about screen literary material that nothing on earth could change his mind. I believe the same is true of Lasky and Mayer. But the truth is that none of them knows the first thing about screen stories. If they did they wouldn’t have heard from Wall Street. • « « All Must Come to Perfect Scripts NLY by the ignorance of producers and their super■ 1 visors of the essentials of screen literature could the present situation have been brought about. They have taken this literary art out of the hands of literary people and messed it up until Wall Street roared "and frightened them. Even then they did not reveal by anything they did that they knew what it was all about. They were as helpless in locating the trouble as they were in creating it. As I write this the conferences are still in progress and I do not know what will come of them, but before this Spectator goes to press there may be developments which I will discuss in later paragraphs. That the industry will benefit spiritually from an exchange of ideas and the contact of producers with their employees may be presumed, but I believe that the views of all parties to the conferences are too divergent, and their selfish interests naturally too antagonistic, to get on the same track and lead logically to a solution. Producers are too arrogant to yield what they consider to be their divine rights; the importance of directors has been exaggerated until they have lost their sense of perspective; supervisors are fighting for their existence in an industry that they only can harm instead of help; actors believe that the whole industry rests on their shoulders, and writers have starved so long that they can give utterance only to emaciated conclusions. Yet all these divergent forces are drawn to a common point in the hope that Wall Street can be appeased thereby. The most important people in the meetings are those that all the others will agree are the least important — the writers. There is not one activity of the industry that does not have its inception in the thought of an author. To the extent that the industry has wandered away from this truth has 'it become lost in the fog of inefficiency, extravagance and waste. The more quickly it gets back to it the sooner vill all its ills be cured. Some of the greatest writers in the world have come to Hollywood to sell their brains to motion pictures, only to be appalled by the crass ignorance 'and uncouth arrogance they encountered. Pictures lost them, but could regain them if producers had brains Page Seven enough to realize their value. Nothing that can come out of the Biltmore conferences, nothing that producers can do to put the industry on a sound basis, can do any lasting good unless it be the single determination to have perfect scripts. As I remarked in the last Spectator, perfect scripts automatically cure every evil that the industry now suffers. When Louis B. Mayer was busy at the conferances. Twelve Miles Out, one of his pictures, went on view. There was not a’ shot of Betty Compson in it, although she received a salary of five thousand dollars a week for working in it. Does Mayer have to go down to the Biltmore and call the entire industry into consultation to discover how such a criminal waste of money is possible? Does he lack sufficient mentality to grasp the fact that if enough time had been spent on the script from which Twelve Miles Out was shot, the process of making it perfect would havei; revealed that the scenes in which Betty appeared had no ^Ii^ce in the story; that they would have been eliminated beforl^^hooting began, thereby saving the many thousands of dolla}'^ that the crazy script was instrumental in wasting? tI^ mere fact that the conferences were called makes me B^^ve that no lasting good will come of them. The thought that they were necessary betrays a blindness too deep to be penetrated by anything that could be brought out at them. The object of them was to devise a plan to reduce the cost of production. Only perfect scripts will do that. They will do everything from attracting more money to the box office to reducing the force of men necessary to the operation of the studio planing mills. Lumber won’t be used in sets that have been eliminated from scripts. * * * Easy to Write Perfect Script ONLY a moment’s consideration of the importance of perfect scripts should convince even the stupidest producer that he need consider nothing else. We start with several facts that are granted: pictures themselves are on the down grade; they cost too much; overhead is high; studios are overmanned. The first fact may be divided into poor stories, weak continuity, unconvincing acting, faulty editing and inane titles. As we have throughout the world plenty of authors who can write good stories it seems logical to charge poor ones on the screen to the studio’s inability to b^lect its literary material, or to bring intelligence to bear oit^ts treatment after it is selected. The natural tendency of a ^)erfect script policy will be the development of authors wlib'^will be attracted to Hollywood and who soon will master the technic of writing directly for the screen. With t^e assistance of trained continuity writers they will submit their stories in correct form for shooting, as the novelist submits his manuscript in correct form for publication. It will be as easy for the screen writer to do this as it is for the novelist, or as it is for an engineer to design a bridge, or an architect to draw plans for a building. But your screen author will have to know camera angles, protests the director. He will learn them. But he will have to understand lighting. He will learn it. He will learn all that he needs to learn. It is ridiculous to contend that there is anything about the making of a motion picture that a supervisor or director can grasp, but which is beyond the mental reach of a brain big enough to conceive a story. Litera