The Film Spectator (Mar-Dec 1928)

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Page Four THE FILM SPECTATOR July 7, 1928 cliffs and rushing over rocks in frenzied haste to get somewhere, only to spread out placidly and loiter in a pool which brings the sky to its depths and stretches tree branches above it to give us a pool's-eye view of heaven. And I'm going to sit by that damn pool, smoke my pipe, and fish. Producers Should Engage Someone to Think for Them THE film industry can be wrong more smugly and more complacently than any other industry on earth. Most of our producers are not perfect types for a creative art, but one would think that after being years in the business they would have at least a slight idea of the kind of business it is. I don't know of one major problem that has arisen in film history that the producers have disposed of promptly, wisely and finally, something that in other industries competent executives are doing every day. Producers are bungling this sound business as they have bungled everything else. The prize bit of insanity is Paramount's action in opening its Long Island studio for the making of sound pictures, on the supposition that it is going to draw its talent from the New York stage. Various trade papers have discussed solemnly the prospect of production going East again, as "the principal supply of talent for sound pictures is in New York," as one paper puts it. The film industry should hire someone to do its thinking for it. It probably could pay such person one million dollars a year and make money on the transaction A little thought would lead to the conclusion that all that the screen is borrowing from the stage is sound. It is not borrowing stage technic, nor is it selling out to, or being absorbed by, the stage. The only connection between the stage and the screen will be the fact that actors whom the stage has trained to use their voices properly, will have a slight advantage over those who have received no such training. If an actor becomes famous through his work on the stage, picture audiences would be curious to see him and would patronize a film in which he appeared, but I do not think he would draw quite as much at the box-ofiice as a man who became famous through winning a championship prize-fight. What the public always will look for in pictures will be screen artists— people thoroughly trained in how to act in front of the camera. Those with the best voices and a knowledge of how to use them will have the edge on the others who are not so fortunate, but the man with the superlative voice, but without screen training, will get nowhere. The supply of talent for talking pictures is in Hollywood, not in New York. We still will have motion pictures which will continue to use everything that they have developed. All that has happened is that they have reached out and embraced something that happens to be common to thunder, brass bands, and the stage: sound. They will take sound to themselves and fashion it to suit their requirements. Sound will alter screen technic, but it will not borrow technic from the stage. Film acting will continue to be a pantomimic art. Those stage directors who are congratulating themselves that their day in pictures has come are doomed to disappointment. A man who before sound was introduced lacked the experience to direct a motion picture, will not be able to direct one now that sound has come. It will take him just as long to learn the business now as it would have taken him before pictures began to talk. And actors whose only recommendation is that they know how to talk, will be as much at sea in talking pictures as they would be in silent ones. After Paramount has squandered a few hundred thousand dollars on a contrary assumption, it will close its Long Island studios and will return to Hollywood where picture people make pictures. Sound will cause a readjustment, but the readjustment will be kept within the film industry as it is constituted now. The film industry has a peculiar faculty for becoming stampeded, but its present brainstorm, like so many it has had in the past, will not be long in duration, and pictures will return to that degree of sanity that has characterized them in the past. I see no reason why actors and directors should worry about the situation Those who will be affected principally will be screen writers. I Telling Exhibitor Where the Hell He Is Heading SOME weeks ago a man who found himself going broke as an exhibitor of motion pictures purchased a lot of space in the Eastern film trade papers and asked in large type the question, "Where the hell am I heading?" He analyzed the exhibiting business as he found it and confessed that the situation stumped him, hence his appeal to the wide, wide world for advice and comfort. Very promptly he received much advice, but of a sort that I do not think would give him any considerable degree of comfort. Advertising departments run by people who lack resourceful minds, advised the bewildered exhibitor to buy their pictures as a cure for his ills, advice that loses some of its value by virtue of the fact that the ills were caused in the first place by the very pictures that their makers now offer as a remedy. In one issue of the Film Daily Joseph M. Schenck and E. W. Hammons occupied two-page spaces in which they proffered advice. As an expression of sympathy, the purchase of so much expensive space was a generous gesture, but I do not believe that the amount of constructive advice in either advertisement justified the expenditure that it necessitated. My friend Joe slapped the exhibitor on the back and whispered soothing words in his ear, but all the constructive advice he offered was to eliminate presentations and show only pictures. It is too bad that producers, as a body, lack a sense of humor. If they were endowed with that valuable attribute they could get an immense amount of fun out of surveying their own actions. They are the people whose blundering incapacity got the advertising exhibitor into his mess, yet they come to his rescue with oracular and patronizing pomposity that ignores completely the reason for the condition that the exhibitor complains of. The slump that is eating up the financial resources of the exhibitors throughout the country had its origin in the studios of Hollywood. Because pictures are made in an insane way exhibitors have to pay twice as much for them as they should; and because they are made very poorly the public is paying only half what it should to view them. It would take all this Spectator, and the greater part of the next, even to touch on the specific ills that make pictures expensive and rob them of quality.