The Film Spectator (Mar-Dec 1928)

April 28, 1928 THE FILM SPECTATOR Page Five Lewis, Cyril Chadwick and Edmund Breese chatting at a time of the day when actors who can not speak English were busy on motion picture sets. The sound era will change all that. The big actors of the future will be the Dave Torrences with their trained, cultured voices and their sound knowledge of the art of acting. If I were Jesse Lasky, Louis B. Mayer, Winfield Sheehan or Jack Warner, I would be rounding up good actors with voices and placing them under contract. The producer who could get a corner on such artists would play the devil with his competitors. There will be no doubling in this voice business. The lines that the audience hears will be spoken by the actor whom the audience sees. Doubling is impossible. Theoretically it is possible, but it is too difficult and too expensive to be practical. Warner's experimented with it exhaustively and came to the conclusion that it could not be done. This means that even our Janet Gaynors and our Jack Gilberts will have to show themselves possessed of pleasing voices if they are to retain their popularity. The day when screen personality is the only essential to screen popularity will have passed when sound devices are used generally. And no longer will we have title writers pavring over speeches that the actors speak. What they say when the scenes are shot is what the audience will hear. This means that there will be a violent revolution also in the virriting end of the business. Real writers will come to the front. The clever men and women who write our titles now will be in demand as writers of dialogue — but the dialogue will have to be in their own stories, for the new art will not tolerate the manhandling of author's creations, the curse from which the screen has suifered thus far in its history. At first, of course, supervisors with no literary training will write into scripts their conception of speeches, but when the world laughs at them they'll quit making asses of themselves and leave the writing of speeches to those who can write them. As I see the drift toward sound, it will bring to the fore the real brains already in pictures, and borrow more heavily than ever from the stage. I am aware that I am liable to the charge of letting my enthusiasm run away with me, but remember, please, that I have seen developments that you probably have not seen. I have heard Conrad Nagel make love to Dolores Costello, and have heard what she said to him, their voices coming to me just strong enough to be heard above an obligato of negro voices singing spirituals down in Virginia; and I watched them make love, for they sat in a beautiful garden that the camera caught when the Vitaphone caught their voices and the singing. the industry displays in the discussions that ensue. There are two fixed opinions: that color on the screen causes retinal fatigue, and that the color process is too expensive to be practical. Both these opinions are contrary to facts. Before he made Black Pirate Douglas Fairbanks hired scientists to make exhaustive tests that resulted in proof of the fact that a natural-color pictiire was easier on the eyes of its viewers than the black and white pictures we get now. So much for the first count in the indictment of color. As to cost: if any producer will look into the matter he will find that he can effect a great saving in production expense by shooting his pictures in color. At the present time one of the greatest items of expense is providing a picture with production value — big mob scenes, spectacles and elaborate sets. Audiences have grown so accustomed to these features that the best a producer can hope for when he spends two hundred thousand dollars on a picture is to get one that looks as if it cost that much. If he shot his picture in Technicolor he could spend one hundred thousand dollars and get a production that looked as if it cost three hundred thousand. In a black and white picture all the production value must be provided by dollars, and the most expensive set never reveals on the screen how much money was spent on it. When shot in Technicolor, an inexpensive set looks like a million dollars. It was by accident that I discovered these facts for myself. I happened to wander on to a set at the Tec-Art studio where Technicolor was shooting one of its "Great Moments in History" series, the little artistic gems that are being received so warmly by the public. The scene being shot was laid in an oak-paneled room. The walls were constructed of composition board which had been stained an oak-brown. I could not believe that any kind of photography would cover up the artificiality of the set as I saw it. I said as much to Dr. Kalmus, president of Technicolor, and next day he phoned me to come over and see the rushes. On the screen I saw a room whose walls were of oak of rich, warm, alive brown. For a black and white picture ten times as much money would have been spent on a set, and nowhere near the same amount of production value would have been obtained. I was interested, and visited the studio again. This time ship scenes were being shot. Again I wondered at the apparent inadequacy of the set, and again I was enlightened when I visited the projection room next day. I saw quite enough to make me decide that if I were going to make a motion picture that would make the world think my bank-roll was twice as big as it was, I would shoot it in Technicolor. So much for the cost of color. Exploding Myths About Making Colored Pictures WE will have the perfect motion picture only when we have combined action, sound, and color. It always has seemed strange to me that the industry has been so backward in realizing the possibilities of color. For the past two years the Technicolor process has been brought to a point so near perfection that the industry can not advance, as an excuse for not adopting color, the fact that it is not practical. As I have been a consistent champion of color ever since I started The Spectator, I introduce it freely as a topic of conversation when calling on my producer friends, and I am amazed at the ignorance that Charlie Chaplin Has An Erroneous Idea CHARLIE Chaplin is going to do Napoleon on the screen, and the other day I urged him to do it in color. "A red thing waving across the screen diverts the attention of the audience," he argued. A short time ago I read an interview in which Cecil de Mille was quoted as saying that color was all right for big spectacles, but never would be practical for intimate scenes. How far is screen art going to get when people as prominent in it as these two hold fixed opinions on something of which they are so profoundly uninformed ? Probably Charlie would sit with you in a balcony looking down upon the gorgeous