Hollywood Spectator (1931)

November, 1931 19 More Mutterings From The East Coast By R. E. Sherwood IN his ample column in the New York Worlcl-Telegram , Heywood Broun said: “I saw Street Scene at the Rivoli Theatre. There is no longer any doubt in my mind that what we actors like to call the ‘legitimate theatre’ is at the moment on the run. At least, it must abandon certain fortified positions to the new art-form ... I think the picture version of Street Scene is better than the play.” While agreeing with Mr. Broun’s high opinion of Samuel Goldwyn’s, King Vidor’s and Elmer Rice’s fine picture, I beg to inform him that his fears for the legitimate theatre are groundless. As long as the motion picture industry continues to depend on Elmer Rice and other playwrights for its material, the legitimate theatre is sitting pretty. Far from being ruined by the movies, it is being subsidized by them. I don’t believe that the authors or the Broadway producers of such plays as Holiday, Five Star Final, Street Scene, The Guardsman, A Free Soul, Daddy Long Legs, Bad Girl, The Front Page or even Waterloo Bridge are horrified to learn that these works are better and more successful on the screen than they were on the stage. Every one of them has put needed money in theatrical pockets, and has also increased the demand for more works from the same source. If Hollywood is delivering Broadway a series of knock-out punches with one hand, with the other hand it is supplying it with the elixir of life. ▼ ▼ There would be sufficient grounds for alarm on the part of Mr. Broun and other drama-defenders if the film folk were to stop dealing with admirable but second-hand material like Street Scene and dedicate themselves to material of their own creation. I have said it before, and I expect to say it frequently again, that the moving picture can never hold its head up as an individual art-form as long as it requires repeated blood transfusions from other art-forms. The outrageous prices paid for the film rights to plays or novels provide pathetic evidence of the moving picture’s incomprehensible inability to create its own ideas. ▼ ▼ These remarks may seem a bit odd coming from one who has sold four plays to the movies, and who is glad of it, and who hopes to sell many more as the years roll by. But before I was ever a playwright I was a picture critic, and in my original capacity I have been compelled to deplore the very practice by which in my later capacity I have profited. Back in the dimly remembered silent era, Adolph Zukor with a grand gesture offered a prize of $10,000 to be presented annually to the author of the best story presented on the screen during the preceding twelvemonth. The committee selected to make this award was composed of authors who ranged all the way in importance from Mary Roberts Rinehart to myself. We met to decide the disposition of the ten grand, and there was of course terrific disagreement. Most of the committee felt that the prize should go to some novelist or play wright, whose work had been adapted, rather than to some mere screen writer. There were just two of us who hotly protested. We said that the prize-winner should be one who had created directly for the screen, who had composed a moving picture. Our first choice was Charlie Chaplin, for A Woman of Paris. Our second choice was Elton Thomas, the faintly mythical author of The Thief of Baghdad. However, the two of us were shouted and voted down. The $10,000 check went to Rafael Sabatini for Scaramouche . You might be interested to know that the other member of the minority on this committee was Elmer Rice. And you might also be interested to know that the Adolph Zukor Annual $10,000 Prize has never been heard of since. Too Highbrow? ▼ ▼ Continuing his comments on Street Scene, Heywood Broun made this startling but true statement: “My only real complaint against the talkies is that they are too high-brow. It is a great pity that scenario writers and directors have cringed so much before the attacks of the literary fellows. And I think we would all be better off if it were not for the influence of importations from Germany and Russia. These films may be excellent, but not when diluted and transplanted. When a certain self-consciousness about art enters in, story-telling is apt to lose its edge. And the chief function of a talking picture, just as that of a play, is to spin its tale as rapidly, as concisely and as clearly as possible . . . And I think that the cause for straightforward story-telling will be furthered all along the line as soon as there is frank recognition of the fact that the picture-going public of America is bourgeois.” Mr. Broun concludes with an injunction to all picture people: “Don’t let the intellectuals, proletarian or aristo cratic, scare you! Be yourselves!” ▼ ▼ This is good advice, but I doubt that it will be taken. Hollywood is the most self-conscious community on earth. It suffers from a corporate inferiority complex which makes it at once diffident and blatantly self-assertive. Anyone, highbrow or lowbrow, who is smart enough to see beyond Hollywood’s loud talk and into its timid soul can put himself over on Hollywood and make a fortune out of it. Hollywood is always ready to believe that every impressive stranger is the new Messiah, and to do exactly what he says. Hollywood is the supreme sucker. There will be many more pictures to cheer for when those who make them have learned to be themselves and not merely film versions of their peers. Erratum ▼ ▼ Please forgive me for one more allusion to Waterloo Bridge, but I must correct a mistake made by Mr. Beaton in his review of the picture. In setting forth the plot, he said : “The first thing they do is to search for potatoes dropped by an old woman, a human