Film Spectator (1927-1928)

Page Sixteen THE FILM SPECTATOR August 6, 1927 in the holes she finds in the morning in the stuff I have written the night before. Each hole represents a word I can not spell even well enough to find it in the dictionary which is in constant use beside me while I write. The people for whom titles should be punctuated correctly do not need to understand punctuation. The printed language should be presented to them on the screen as it is presented to them everywhere else, just as I take pains to see that every word in The Spectator is spelled as you find it spelled everywhere else. My quarrel with screen punctuation is not one with those who write the titles. It is with the producers who do not regard education sufficiently highly to secure the services of at least one person in every organization who can reflect it on the screen. The kind of punctuation that we see most often now offends those who know how to punctuate and confuses those who know only how to read. ♦ * * Just Why Do Directors Do Such Silly Things? LOIS MORAN, in The Whirlwind of Youth, a Paramount whirlwind of close-ups, stands in a moonlit garden. Gareth Hughes walks up to her, making no apparent effort to deaden his footsteps. He pauses for a moment behind her, and she is startled greatly when she discovers his presence. Apparently if it had not been for the noise the moon made shining on the garden she would have heard him, for a moonlit garden late at night is otherwise a rather quiet place. Later in the same picture Donald Keith is alone in a large room fiddling with his puttees. Lois and quite an acceptable young actor who I think is the fellow who used to play with Alberta Vaughan in terrible two-reelers, enter the room and close the door behind them. They do not sneak in, but Keith is surprised greatly when he discovers they are near him. Will some director be so kind as to inform me why scenes are shot that way? I know one reason is that someone started doing it twenty years ago, but is it possible that there is no other reason? Anyone with any sense would know that there would be drama in Lois watching Hughes approach her across the lonely garden, and none in the utterly absurd assumption that she did not hear his footsteps, or in any way feel his presence until he spoke. The room in which Keith is alone opens off a barroom in which several officers are playing cards and drinking. The moment the door opens Keith must hear the voices from the other room, even if he did not hear the lifting of the iron latch on the door, a totally absurd assumption, for Lois and her escort make no effort to deaden the sound. Writing for United Artists JACK JEVNE “Tempest” John Barrymore “Breakfast" . . Constance Tahnadge “McFadden’s Flats” . First National “Ladies at Play” . . First National “Clinging Vine” . . . Beatrice Joy “Eve’s Leaves” .... Beatrice Joy Writers’ Club — HOllywood 7145 But Keith hears nothing until the proper movie moment. What is gained by such childish directorial methods? You see the same thing in hundreds of pictures, and an equally *ridiculous variation of it when a knock on a door greatly startles the occupant of a room. Is there supposed to be drama in keeping Keith unaware of the approach of the other two, in face of the fact that the audience knows that he could not help hearing them? Does the scene lose any-'' thing if he should look up the moment the door opens? In both instances these scenes are but little things in the picture, but it is the multiplicity of such absurdities that ruins so many pictures. They are the gauge that measures the degree of mentality that entered into the making of the production. I do not know if Griffith invented the startle when he invented the close-up, but whoever is responsible for it has a lot to account for. The screen has been brought to such a pass by incompetent direction that we rate as great pictures those whose stories are told merely as anyone with common sense would tell them. For this specific incompetence we have as a palliative the irritating influence of general studio incompetency which would seem to be enough to drive directors crazy, but even in moments of madness they should retain enough sanity to detect insanity in their methods. When directors are made to shoot from perfect scripts, and to stick to such scripts when shooting, all the silly little things that mar pictures now will be follies of the past, for they are creations of the method of making pictures and not of literary minds which conceive the stories. However, while we are going through the long process of evolving perfect scripts, we might improve the status of the screen art by the. simple expedient of regarding each scene as it is shot as ROSEWALL SANITORIUM (Strictly a Private Institution) 1930 East Twenty-seventh Street Oakland, California W. G. R. BISCHOF, Manager Bicensed Physician in Daily Attendance A synthetic, painless, non-narcotic, “no needle” treatment for drug addiction and alcoholism. All correspondence strictly confidential and answered in plain envelope.