Hollywood Saga (1939)

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION Today, theatrical producers cannot find plays; all the playwrights are in Hollywood. If they do find a play they have great difficulty in casting it; all the actors are in Hollywood. From a Broadway point of view the Gold Rush of ’49 was mere child’s play compared to the present Gold Rush which has lured such a large proportion of the theater’s talent west of the Rockies in a mad scramble for the yellow metal of Hollywood. There are even those who proclaim that if the American stage is to be kept alive it must be subsidized by Hollywood; must be regarded largely as a proving ground for plays on their way to the screen; a testing laboratory for actors in which the exact quantity of their sex appeal may be determined. It is at least probable that many of the plays currently produced might never have faced an audience had it not been for movie money which backed them. With the exception of a few sturdy souls, most of those dramatists who write for the stage today seem to keep one eye — the commercial one — fixed upon the screen; let the play fail if it must; they can still live on the proceeds if there is a possible picture in it. It can have been no small force which in twenty years has made the much derided movies an art more nationally important than the theater; which has actually subordinated the stage to the screen. Living drama has been reduced to the status of a poor relation of the flickering film. The descendant of Shakespeare and Moliere is asking alms from the descendant of the nickelodeon and the penny arcade. This can hardly have been due to the depression, nor can we even blame it on the New Deal. No group of financiers has made the screen powerful; if anything, it was more powerful, or at least more independent, when it financed its own pictures out of the takings at the door, before Wall 19