Hollywood Spectator (1931)

Perhaps This Might Help the Box-Office By The Editor STUDY THE box-office records of pictures recently released. Then scan the list of pictures in production. The result: Every lot is making pictures that will be absolute flops. Ina Claire’s Rebound, one of the finest talkies yet made, is proving a dismal failure at the box-office, yet Pathe is proceeding to spend an enormous sum on a picture of the same sort in which Ann Harding will star. It can not hope to be better than Rebound, but it will have to do much better to justify its making. How is it possible? When Constance Bennett comes back in the fall Pathe will put her in a picture that will be a flop, not on account of any lack of merit that it may possess, but because the public no longer wants the kind of pictures in which she appears. It does not require a super-brain to reach these conclusions. Anyone who understands what made the film industry rich in the heyday of its prosperity, can not fail to grasp the reason for its present financial predicament nor fail to realize what must be done to make it prosperous again. To lend credence to the predictions I make now I must refer again to the fact that nearly three years ago I predicted precisely what is happening now. If I had been influenced by box-office conditions as they existed then, I would have reached different conclusions; but they interest me now because they establish as a fact what I advanced then as a theory and give me greater confidence in making further predictions, as well as making me surer of the efficacy of the remedy that I feel should be applied. ▼ ▼ It WOULD BE ridiculously easy for Hollywood to turn out pictures that immediately would restore box-office prosperity. Even our present producers could do it if they would do a little thinking. What made the film industry such an outstanding success? That is the first thought. It became tremendous as an industry because it was denied a voice and had to remain a purely pictorial art. It told its stories in silence which permitted their accompaniment by music appropriate to their mood and action. The best motion pictures earned a tremendous return on the money invested in them. The screen was given a voice. If producers had possessed any qualifications whatever for the positions they held, they would have approached the new device cautiously. First they would have retained everything that made silent pictures popular, the basic elements that constituted the foundation upon which the screen’s importance as a form of entertainment was reared during the three decades of silence. These elements were first, silence, and then visual flow, an uninterrupted flow of filmic motion that kept the story moving across the screen in an unbroken line. The producers, if they had been able to think, would have recognized that the essential elements of the creations they wished to sell to the public had to be recorded by the camera — that the camera had to be retained as the story-telling medium. Then with caution producers would have handled the sound camera in a manner that would not have disturbed the essential elements. ^ ▼ But WHAT did the producers do? They went crazy. They threw overboard every element that had contributed to their success, destroyed the visual flow and ignored the camera as the story-telling medium. They began to photograph another art, that of the stage, which has nothing in common with that of the screen. They raised dialogue, the most unimportant element of a talking picture, to the position of chief importance. In short, they did everything possible to murder their business, and they made a beautiful job of it, the only perfect accomplishment they have to their credit. Even now they are continuing the murdering process because they lack the intelligence to understand what they should do to revive the industry. And I doubt if they can understand it when they are told. Those who prepare continuities should be cautioned to tell their stories with the camera, to avoid every spoken word as if it were poison — which it is — -and to resort to audible dialogue only when there was no way of escaping its employment. Here the producers will chirp up that that is what they tell their writers now. Perhaps they do, but when they get their first continuities they turn them over to dialogue writers to cut out action and substitute talking. Any interruption of the flow of story interest — any break in the straight line the visual flow must follow — should be regarded as a major crime. ▼▼ That IS ABOUT all there is to suggest. It is all that is necessary to bring prosperity back to the film industry. If production chiefs and their dumb associates would have these points in mind when they viewed rushes, if they realized that telling a story in dialogue completely stops the filmic motion and that anything that is not being told by the camera is being told in a language foreign to that of the screen — if they could understand these things and approved only those rushes * * WELFORD BEATON, EDITOR VOL. 12, NO. 4 ROBERT E. SHERWOOD, ASSOCIATE HOLLYWOOD SPECTATOR, published every other Saturday by The Film Spectator, Inc. Welford Beaton, president; Howard Hill, secretary and manager; at Los Angeles (Hollywood Station) in California. Address 6362 Hollywood Blvd. Telephone GL 6506. Entered as second class matter July 1, 1931, at the post office at Los Angeles, California, under the act of March 3, 1879. Subscription price, $3.50 per year; foreign, $4.50; single copy, 15 cents.