Hollywood Spectator (1931)

4 Hollywood Spectator play producers. General broadcasting of the information that only complete scripts would be considered would put an end to the flood of other things. ▼ ▼ At THE PRESENT time plays are written and produced in New York for no reason other than to tease a big price out of motion picture producers. The playwright knows that if he told his story in motion picture language he would not get one tenth the price for it as original screen material that he could get for it as a produced play. Why, then, should he go to the trouble of learning the motion picture language? It would be a foolish thing for him to do. But let that playwright discover that Hollywood no longer bought produced plays, that it bought only complete motion picture continuities, and soon there would be another trained screen writer competing for Hollywood gold. Out of the several hundred screen writers now in Hollywood the handful who know how to prepare a story for the screen would have nothing to fear from such a revolution as I suggest. Quite the reverse. They could just about control the story market. Before the New York playwright had time to learn the requirements of screen art, he would seek out a writer already trained and would pay him to write the story directly for the screen. That, however, would be no concern of the picture producer. All that he would be in the market for would be complete scripts and it would make no difference to him where they came from or who wrote them. ^ ▼ For THE STUDIOS there would be no more contract writers. No more treatments. No more story conferences. No more continuity writers. None of the tremendous expense that these things involve. There would be the same competition for desirable screen material. The competition would begin when a given story, play or book was put into form for shooting. At present the studios have no difficulty in agreeing not to employ some director who has offended one studio by refusing to work for what it offered. It should not be difficult to get them to agree not to buy anything except complete continuities and to refrain from bidding for material until it was in script form. And the reform could be put into effect simply and without creating any disturbance. The present scrambled and expensive system could be continued until the announcement of the producers began to yield results. Writing staffs could be diminished as the supply of available scripts increased, until finally there would be enough scripts to supply the demand and then the writing staffs would disappear entirely. On every lot there would be perhaps a half dozen script doctors, writers who could remedy little weaknesses in the purchased material. All such weaknesses would be little, for a script with big weaknesses would not be purchased until the author himself removed them. ^ ▼ In TIME THE studios would find themselves considering only complete continuities. There would be no more wondering if a motion picture could be made from a given story. The script itself would settle all such speculation. The screen would take its right place among the other arts. Its intellec tual standard would be raised to match that of the others, for it would command the best brains of the world. It would get away from its present stereotyped way of doing things. Pictures are monotonously alike now, not because all the stories are alike, but because the same few people put all of them into form for shooting. With the adoption of the plan that I suggest the inventive brains of the world would seek Hollywood as a market for their ideas. Book publishers do not buy ideas for novels as Hollywood buys ideas for pictures. They do not pay authors huge sums for suggestions and then pay other writers huge sums for making novels out of them. Hollywood pays an author more for a story in book form than it should pay for a motion picture in script form, and then it pays a sum as great to have someone write a motion picture from it. Only the grotesquely managed film industry could do such a fool thing. The principal economic consideration in connection with the purchase of raw material is its adaptability to quick and inexpensive handling when it is becoming an element of the finished product. When Paramount wants a piece of lumber of a certain size it does not purchase a sawlog. The firm that sells the lumber knows Paramount’s requirements and supplies the lumber in the dimensions that make it available for use with a minimum of handling in the studio. v v The WHOLE idea back of the plan I suggest is to get Paramount to buy its stories as intelligently as it buys its lumber — to buy them only when they are put into a form that reduces their handling to a minimum as they are being made into motion pictures. I don’t see why a screen author should not be asked to do something that a sawmill does without being asked. The institution of this reform would not disturb those authors, scenarists and continuity writers who know anything about their jobs. Just as many screen stories would have to be written and just as many continuities prepared. The only people who would suffer are those who bluff their way onto studio pay-rolls, the large majority of screen writers who know nothing about the fundamentals of screen writing, but who make their living at it because no one knows how ignorant they are. The others would keep employed constantly, but their employers no longer would be the studios. They would work for the owners of the stories or as partners of the authors. There would be an improvement in the condition of those serious writers who are of value to the screen, and about the rest no one need worry. What Price Art ? SOME SIX or seven years ago I wrote: “The screen will achieve success as a business only to the extent that it attains perfection as an art.’’ That was before I started the Spectator. Since then in the pages of the Spectator I have said the same thing in a great many different ways. I was aware every time I used the word “art” as applied to the screen I was evoking the hollow laughter of producers whose fondest delusion is that the screen is a business, not an art. They have ignored the art and treated picture mak