Hollywood Spectator (1931)

July 18, 1931 15 Producers and Dumb Audiences By Dalton Trumbo So far AS I am able to discern, the greatest curse of show people is their contempt for audience intelligence. Aided by those indefatigable fellows, the psychologists and statisticians, they have reached the conclusion that the public is dumb. They freely quote audience mental ages as varying from eight to twelve years. And they scream with anguish when acts and pictures designed to delight such adolescent minds fail to produce at the box-office. It would be a poor showman indeed who would address his audience in terms such as, “The management realizes that the ensuing performance is very highbrow. It is because you stand in need of cultural elevation that we produce it.” Yet an organization that would shun such announcements does not hesitate to produce entertainment which fairly shouts, “You are a bunch of dumb bunnies, and although God knows the stuff we are showing you is lousy enough, it is the only thing you are mentally able to appreciate.” ▼ ▼ Just where the rumor of audience dumbness originated, or how it luxuriated to its present marvelous state, is beyond the range of a modest observer. With rare and therefore outstanding exceptions, great art has been popular art. Particularly in our present day is the judgment of critical minds sustained by popular choice. The financial and artistic successes of a Shaw, a Merejkowski, an Elie Faure, a Hauptman, an Undset, and in our Babbitish America of such persons as Dreiser, Cabell, Lewis, Frost, Millay, Hemingway, Nathan, Mencken — such successes demonstrate that more than anything else the public demands intelligence and originality. The financial and social standing of artists from Greece to the present day proves the fallacy of a current belief that nothing genuinely fine is appreciated. After they have entered their productive years artists usually have a delightful and easy existence — providing, of course, that they are really artists. If the public is so dumb that it requires only pap and oatmeal for intellectual fare, how is it that Seventh Heaven, All Quiet, The Millionaire, Skippy and a dozen others have received such tremendous box-office approval? Among the finest artistic offerings of the screen in recent years, they are also its outstanding successes. And the public did not witness them because of critical praise. The public is fairly immune to critical opinion. It paid its money to the boxoffice at advanced prices because the pictures were fine, intelligent, and in some way or other approaching art. Art for art’s sake is a decadent and horrible affair; but art for public entertainment — and all great art by its very nature is just that — will follow its ageless practice and make money. Statistics— A Protest ▼ ▼ The pages of this magazine are possibly inappropriate for the piffling protest I am about to utter. If there were any other method by which I could relieve my feelings, I most certainly would employ it. But there are times in the life of every man — does that sound like a Theatre Guild play in the second act?— when he discovers that he must unburden himself, not to his mother or wife or sweetheart, but to the world in general. That is why a scribbler is such a lucky fellow. He can air his tastes and distastes, and be quite callous to the general nausea they arouse. I am troubled profoundly by statistics. Wherever I go I am confronted with graphs, charts and facts. To be unable to give the diameter of a human hair or to call out the number of apes in Tennessee has come to be a major sin, symptomatic of incompetence and general inanity. People I knew and loved have become walking encyclopediae. They inform me that a kiss — God forbid such indiscretion !— shortens my life two and one-half minutes, that there are 684,958 eels in the Gulf of Mexico, that for every man who knows the meaning of a three club bid there are nine and seven-eighths men who will draw to an inside straight and be disappointed if they don’t make. ▼ ▼ If I state with the reasonable conviction of an ignorant man that humans do not grow horns, I am confronted by the triumphant Mr. Ripley with a Mongolian who has not only nurtured a tusk fourteen inches long, but who has also used it to gore three critics and a gentleman. People whom I always thought quite ordinary amuse themselves of an evening by asking each other atrocious questions, and I have paid so little attention to the accumulation of facts that I face social ostracism. If I retire in desperation to the sanctity of my room, the newspapers leap at me with a daily series of questions, ghastly in content and idiotic in value, with the information that if I can’t answer correctly at least seven I may as well take gas. With all this a constantly increasing positiveness has taken possession of my compatriots and colleagues. The weirdest theories are quoted with solemn faith. On Hollywood Boulevard people mysteriously count the letters in their names, divide the sum by the day of the week, add the date of their birthday, and thereby discover whether or not they will get by the gateman in the morning. And they do it as seriously as an English scientist declaring that the universe is constantly creating itself, or an American scientist maintaining that it is in the midst of fatal degeneration. ▼ ▼ In this whirlpool of factual prolixity I am a lost and tortured soul. I retire at night blushing to think of what the psychologists at the Harvard Business School may have discovered about me during the course of the day, and I arise in the morning prepared not at all to be surprised if the graduate school of John Hopkins has isolated the human soul during my slumbers, nudged it familiarly, made it leap about like a ballet dancer and diagrammed its reflexes. All of this, I grant, can not be termed statistics. But statistics is at the bottom of the whole matter. It is the germ from which the cult of facts is sprung, and when facts run rampant, imagination is likely to shrivel and die. Witness in Hollywood the success of the statisticians and compare it with the work being turned out as box-office sugar. The statistics are perfect, but the pictures — ah, my friends. . . .