Hollywood Spectator (1931)

September 26, 1931 its product, but it has no reason to be satisfied with the amount of money it spends to obtain the quality. The growls that eminated from the assembled exhibitors are but the forerunners of thunder that soon will be heard. United Artists is paying Gloria Swanson $250,000 to appear in a picture. How long do you suppose exhibitors will tolerate such insanity as that? How long will the public underwrite it? That is one instance of a player being overpaid, but there aren’t many such outstanding cases. When I started this article I thought I was going to end it with a list of typical insane things that each of the big organizations has to its credit, but as I look over my notes I decide that it would use up too much space. Anyway, what’s the use? Contracts THERE IS SOMETHING to be said for the producers when the Stanwycks, Cagneys and others run out on contracts. Columbia had spent a lot of money building Barbara Stanwyck to star proportions, and had sold her to exhibitors. It had a right to expect her to perform her part of their mutual contract, and Harry Cohn’s indignation was justified. Also justified is the agreement among producers that none of them will hire Barbara until she composes her differences with Harry. On such matters as this, the sanctity of contractual relations, it is fit and proper that the producers should stand together. But let us suppose that it was Harry Cohn who wanted to break the contract with Barbara. Suppose Barbara wanted to stay in pictures. What would Harry have done? Would he have argued that the contract was a sacred obligation that must be held inviolate, and that no matter how unadvantageous he found its terms to be to him, there was for him no way out of it with honor? Don’t make me laugh. Harry merely would have told Barbara to go chase herself, and then he would have telephoned his pals that potent message that has ruined scores of careers: “Lay off Stanwyck.” Barbara, finding it impossible to secure work in any other studio, would have been compelled to submit to any terms that Columbia wished to impose. ^ ^ The Hobart Henley incident is a case in point. Although he is a capable box-office director, Warners wanted to break its contract with him. It simply ceased paying him the salary the contract called for, and asked him what he was going to do about it. Probably much to the surprise of Warners, Henley promptly took the case to court. Warners countered with blackmail as vile as any that ever sent a man to jail. It answered the suit with the public charge that Henley was incapable. Because he stood up for the rights that producers consider to be so sacred when conditions are reversed, Warners made a dirty and cowardly attempt to ruin the director’s reputation. But Henley stood pat. He, too, held that a contract was sacred. He fought not only for his own rights, but for the rights of all others who had contracts with any of the producing organizations. Finding that its blackmail tactics availed nothing, and having nothing else to fight with, Warners bowed to the inevitable. It paid Henley the money he demanded and made a sickening exhibition of itself in eating publicly its blackmailing utterances. It was not a handsome and generous gesture on its part, an honest attempt to right a wrong. The truth was forced out of its snarling jaws. Read this letter, written to Hobart Henley and signed for Warner Brothers by Darryl Zanuck: We wish to withdraw and retract any and all statements made by us in the heat of the recent controversy between us regarding your qualifications, standing and abilities as a director. We wish to assure you that we consider you to be an extremely capable, conscientious and able motion picture director, and to assure you further that the services you have rendered to us in the past have been in all respects eminently satisfactory. A spectacle that the motion picture industry has no reason for pointing to with pride ! In going through with it, Henley performed a distinct service to all those under contract to studios. I emphatically condemn Barbara Stanwyck for the violation of her contract with Columbia, but at least she did not attempt to blackmail Harry Cohn into acceptance of her terms. The Way to Find Out WE WERE LOOKING at rushes. The head of production was on his way to his projection room when he bumped into me, and he took me with him. “There’s action for you!” he boasted, when a long scene ended and the lights came up. “You’ re always clamoring for more motion. Well, how did you like that?” The scene showed three men in an office, putting over the story entirely in dialogue, and what my friend boasted about was their activity in moving about the room while they were talking. “You simple-minded ass,” I said, not wishing to be insulting by using impolite language, “that’s not motion. If you’ll let me give some instruction to the man in the projection booth. I’ll show you what I have in mind when I do my clamoring.” I went into the booth, conferred with the projectionist, and returned to my seat. The next two scenes were run without the sound track. The first was a long dialogue scene between the male and female leads who had a tea-table between them. By constant fiddling with the tea things they imparted much physical animation to their conversation, but we could not get the faintest idea of what they were talking about. The motion did not advance the story in any way, consequently it was not filmic motion. The experiment was suggested to me by Slavko Vorkapich, associate director of Girls About Town, a Paramount picture, who told me one day that the only way to determine the amount of real motion in a picture was to run it without the sound track. ** 1 The NEXT SCENE showed two men walking along a country road. They were discussing something with much animation. Again what we saw told us nothing. Vorkapich’s suggestion is a good one. Filmic motion is motion that has story value, that will mean something if run