Hollywood Spectator (1931)

14 Hollywood Spectator want logic. In this picture I saw Peggy Shannon for the first time. Paramount is striving industriously to make a star of her. It has a tough job ahead. The young woman is attractive and intelligent, but she lacks the added something that makes one of star calibre. I hope I am wrong. ▼ ▼ T ▼ ^ If I WERE making a collection of the year’s funniest things it would include the announcement of Lou Sarecky that hereafter the pictures to be supervised by him will consist of two-thirds action and one-third dialogue. This system of making pictures with a yard stick would be all right for an organization that had so much money that it didn’t give a hang whether it made any more, but as Radio has been borrowing to keep going, I would advise it to impress upon Lou that his plan won’t work. The exact amount of dialogue that a given picture should have is the exact amount it should have. It might be one-third, one-eighth or nine-seventeenths. Now, if Lou had said that hereafter he was going to select only such stories as would need not more than one-third of their footage to be devoted to dialogue, he would have been saying a mouthful. But that is not what he did say, assuming he was quoted correctly. When his characters have talked their way through one-third of his picture, they are going to be mum for the rest of the footage. And that is funny. T ▼ ^ ▼ PRODUCERS who are wondering just how music should be handled in their productions might learn something from one of Hal Roach’s Zasu Pitts-Thelma Todd short subjects that I viewed recently in a beach house. I forget its name. It opens with a selection by a group of men whose singing acts as a background for the main titles and whom we see as the picture opens when the song becomes part of the story. At various intervals throughout the film more music is introduced as sensibly, never acting as a brake on the action. I don’t run across many Roach comedies, but if all of them are presented with as great production value, as much restraint in the comedy situations and so rich in humor, I hope I see more of them. Hal Roach himself directed this one and made an excellent job of it. I can’t agree with him, however, that Zasu and Thelma should be addressed on the screen by their real names. It reminds us that we are looking at actresses, something that we should forget when we look at a motion picture. ▼ T WlTFI the SINGLE exception of the inclusion of the Spectator in its list of screen papers, I can imagine nothing about the film business that is not embraced in the Motion Picture Almanac, an extraordinary volume recently brought out by the Quigley publications. It must have been a stupendous task to assemble all the information that is arranged so handily between the covers. It is a book that should prove of the utmost value to the entire industry, one that should be on the desk of every executive, on the shelves of every studio and public library, and in the hands of the film editors of all the publications that ever even mention motion pictures. It is a volume that one can not review beyond stating that it contains every known fact about pictures, their organizations, their finances, their personnel and all their supplementary businesses. Truly a commendable work, courageously conceived and ad mirably executed. It is so up to date that it doesn’t list Horace Liveright among Pathe’s assets. T ▼ ^ ^ The FlLMARTE theatre in Hollywood continues to be of real service to pictures generally by giving us an opportunity to keep abreast of foreign production. Some of its offerings do not conform to our ideas of screen entertainment, but all of them can teach us something. Hollywood would do well to watch for anything that Rene Clair turns out. He is one producer-director who has a real message. Hollywood has produced few pictures that matched the brilliance of Sous les T oits de Paris. And more recently he has done Le Million, a scintillating comedy which reveals that its director has a rare sense of humor and an extraordinary appreciation of screen values. Again we have some of the baffling camera work that distinguished the previous picture. Le Million really is a Mack Sennett two-reeler improved and stretched to feature length without any sacrifice of its joyous quality. It shows us that Clair knows what screen art is. ▼ ▼ ^ ^ PRODUCERS can do no wrong. Ask them what is the matter with the box-office and they will tell you that it is being affected by the general business depression, that conditions, not pictures, are responsible for the unsatisfactory financial position of the industry. Many times I have maintained in the Spectator that the business depression has had very little to do with the poor box-office returns. The depression in Germany is much worse than the one that afflicts the United States. No one will dispute that. If the picture business and general business are related so closely that when one suffers the other must, boxoffice conditions in Germany would be more grave than those which exist in this country. Some weeks ago the Motion Picture Herald printed a cable from Berlin which ended with this sentence: “Normal production and distribution facilities have existed during the entire hectic period, and up to now attendance has been satisfactory.” ▼ V ▼ ▼ “Richard Schayer wrote the original story, which Walter de Leon is adapting.” This winds up an item in Jimmy Starr’s column about a Universal picture. It makes one wonder when the screen is going to grow up. Schayer is head of Universal’s story department. He passes upon stories out of which he thinks good pictures could be made, but when he writes one himself, someone else must “adapt” it to screen requirements. This is no criticism of Schayer. It is aimed at the silly system that prevails in the industry. Why couldn’t the story be written for the screen in the first place? Surely the head of a screen story department should be allowed to write a screen story that no one would have to paw over before it could be put on the screen. When Hollywood really grows up the only stories it will consider will be those that are written exactly as they are going to be shot. y y ▼ ▼ Every Saturday morning I do some of my Spectator writing. Always at ten forty-five I pause in my work and listen for fifteen minutes to the voice of Don Ricardo which comes to me over KHJ. He has the perfect microphone voice and could be made an outstanding success in musical pictures