Hollywood Spectator (1936)

Page Four March 28, 1936 costs have mounted until the million-dollar picture which startled us yesterday makes us yawn today. The film industry is feeling sorry for itself, but it is suffering no ill for which it, itself, is not responsible. It never has tried to understand its medium. It is not aware that it was the simplicity of its expression which made the motion picture the greatest entertainment force the world has ever known, its power to appeal in the simplest terms to the emotions of mankind, its ability to express itself clearly in the elemental language of pictorial sym¬ bols. Made possible only by modern technical and mech¬ anical discoveries, its pure form still remains the most primitive method of telling a story. The earliest known record's of man’s mental product are chiseled pictures on ancient cliffs, immovable pictures which tell stories of their day. In telling its stories, the screen merely makes its pictures move. *■ * * Hollywood has at its command a definite art medium and is as ignorant of its fundamentals as it is of the lan¬ guage of some remote African tribe. It grew great on the receipts from one business, and then, when given the sound camera, went into an entirely new business. It of¬ fers the public everything except its most marketable commodity, pure cinema. Photographed plays, overwhelm¬ ing productions, big names make up its fare, and' it seri¬ ously is considering tarnishing the purity of its art with smears of color. Although it controls the only market for talent, it bids up prices and pays hundreds of thousands yearly to each of a group of people who could not sell their services elsewhere if Hollywood refused to pay so much for them. The market prices of talent have been created by the film industry itself by the manner of its exploitation, and it is groaning under the burden of it. It refuses to consider an original story it could buy for a farthing and pays a pound for a play with less pictures possibilities. And it thinks exhibitors should increase admission prices because the cost of production is so high! * * * The greatest folly the industry ever committed’ was to put on airs and take itself out of the twenty-five cent entertainment class. If that were all anyone were asked to pay to see any picture, pictures of necessity would be made more sanely and both exhibitors and producers would be more prosperous. But things that have been and things that are, are not matters of first importance now. The thing that counts is, what is going to happen? How can the industry change its course? It cannot pursue its present practice of piling cost on cost, and it cannot pass its extravagances on to its customers, for its salesmen, the exhibitors, have to give things away to tempt the public to buy its product at the present prices. To see a picture I wished to review I went to a theatre and won an electric coffee percolator, and a very good one, too, but I envied the man behind me who won a washing machine. A considerable percentage of the industry’s revenue is derived from people who do not go to theatres to view the industry’s expensively made pictures. The chances of winning large sums of money or valuable objects of trade are offered as bribes to tempt patronage. It is a sorry state of affairs. Time was when simply made pictures maintained all branches of the film industry at an even level of pros¬ perity. It was not the manner in which they were made, however, which gave them their box-office value. What, then, was responsible for the film industry’s prosperity in the first place? Is it possible to restore that prosperity? It seems reasonable to assume that the kind of product which created the prosperity would be able to recreate it. It cannot be argued that a form of entertainment so sound fundamentally that it wrote the most spectacular page in the history of industrial development, could become in less than ten years a commercial commodity which the public no longer would buy. *■ . * * The motion pictures which built the industry had but one handicap : they were unable to express themselves in sound when sound would have added to their entertain¬ ment value or expedited the pace of the stories they told. Superimposed titles were used on screens to acquaint the audience with the drift of silent dialogue. It would have been better if it had been possible to make audible the words the titles contained. Continuous musical accom¬ paniments were a necessary part of screen entertainment. It could not be supplied at the source and the showing of the pictures often was harmed by the manner of its appli¬ cation at the outlet. It would have been well if producers had been able to make appropriate scores a part of their product to assure uniform showing during the entire life of a film. It was a form of entertainment which appealed directly to the imagination, which presented nothing but unreali¬ ties which audiences had to imagine were real, which evoked purely emotional response. It was unique in that while it was basically intellectual entertainment, really animated visual literature, the cooperation of the intellect was not necessary to its enjoyment. We just sat back and viewed it, interpreted the fleeting pictures in such terms as pleased our imaginations most, had mental rest and a thoroughly good time. In those days it did not matter what pictures we saw. We used them merely as material out of which our imag¬ inations manufactured entertainment to please our indi¬ vidual fancies. We did not shop for pictures. We went so many nights a week, no matter what was showing. That kept the film industry’s prosperity steady. # * * Then came sound. It gave the industry the opportunity to improve the quality of its product by making audible the spoken titles and providing synchronized scores at the source, an opportunity to make greater the already great entertainment which had made Hollywood a thriving community by its command' of a worldwide market. But Hollywood producers promptly went out of the business that made them prosperous and headed up a false trail which they have been following ever since. They shattered the restful quiet of picture houses by talking their stories instead of photographing them. They dis¬ missed imagination and made their product purely intel¬ lectual. They did not credit us with knowing when we saw steam issuing from a whistle there must be an ac¬ companying noise. They shattered our nerves with the noise itself and with every other noise they could pick up anywhere. They put into pictures everything whose ab