Hollywood Spectator (1937-39)

Page Four October I, 1938 made by writers, directors and actor who are discontented. To qualify as competent to pass judgment on the Guilds' contentions regarding the manner in which the motion picture industry should be conducted, the producers should demonstrate their ability to make the kind of pictures that will attract the audiences without a million-dollar coaxing campaign. * * * WE TAKE A LOOK AT JITTERBUGGING . . . HEN they begin to jitter to music, when jitterbugs infest all parts of the country and the film industry is about to sprinkle some pictures with them, it appeared to me that the situation had become so desperate that I should do something about it. Previously I had dismissed jitterbugging with a line in Mental Meanderings, but that was before I encountered Tom Gallery and was invited by him to attend his jitterbug contest at the Hollywood Legion Stadium last Sunday evening. I accepted the invitation after I had spent the day in wearing down Mrs. Spectator’s resistance to the point of finally persuading her to go with me. We had a whale of a time, even though I was not as successful in my efForts to get Mrs. Spectator to leave before it was over as I was in getting her to go. The first thing which impressed me was that at last I had discovered something even noisier than the average talkie. The orchestra’s playing and the crowd’s cheering vied with one another for top deafening honors, and ended about even. An interesting feature of the goings-on was the manner in which the male bugs turned their partners upsidedown and waved their legs in the air; but I noticed that the most applause was given the couples who kept their four feet on the floor. Apparently girls' legs no longer are your best entertainment. Jitterbugging, I concluded, is merely a social manifestation, athletically insane and too violent to last. But while it lasts I would advise you to take a look at it. But don’t try it. We did. When we got home we turned on the radio and jittered, but after almost a minute of it we decided it was not for two people who have been married for thirty years. * * * RAINE TILTS HIS LANCE . . . EAR Wei ford: In your current issue you comment on the use of color in pictures, treating with whimsical amusement the fact that producers have the “hallucination” that color photography adds box-office value to a picture. You say, in support of your view, that an elementary rule of all the arts is that there must not be in any art creation an element which isolates itself and draws attention to itself at the expense of the creation as a whole. This may be true; but for you to hold that color in a motion picture violates this rule betrays faulty reasoning. A motion picture is a depiction of nature — and nature is color; therefore, by the ability to add color we approximate that which we are imitating much more truly than by the use of black and white. Color does add, materially, to audience interest in a picture. Your defective logic arises, I think, in the fact that you assume color still to be a novelty whose newness diverts the audience attention from the story. You should know that that is no longer true. The same faulty reasoning which causes you to condemn dialogue in motion pictures, can be answered similarly — that dialogue adds to the naturalness of people moving, living, walking. Motion pictures are not, as you assume, a separate art; they are an imitation of real life; and the closer we get to real life the more successful the imitation is. Norman Looks At Pictures . . . O BE entirely logical you would have to condemn color on the stage and dialogue behind the footlights— for what are motion pictures, but a medium for presenting life to audiences precisely as stage plays attempt to do? The difference, ultimately, lies only in this — that motion pictures are enabled to present starring casts simultaneously all over the world. Up to the invention of a means of projecting dialogue, and now color, they were but a pale substitute for life and for stage productions. Now they take their place ahead of stage productions as more nearly, more factually, representative of life. The introduction of the third dimension will be another important step forward. Will you condemn that, too, because it diverts audience interest? In the same vein, you say that if the audience is conscious of color as an isolated contribution to a picture, it attracts attention at the expense of the story; if the audience is not conscious of it, if the story is strong enough to hold the attention of the audience, as it must be, to be a box-office success, the money spent in color is wasted. If this latter, and to me, ridiculous, assumption were true, then what a lot of money has been wasted by all the great artists of history, whose stories in color embellish the world’s great art galleries. Why didn’t the poor deluded souls tell their stories in black and white, instead of confusing and distracting their viewers from the story by going to the unnecessary expense of using color?. Yours for a common-sense and up-to-date viewpoint . . . and with kind personal regards, of course. — Norman Reilly Raine. Now It Is Our Turn . . . EFORE the screen’s surrender to the microphone became complete, Hollywood had begun to look for its writers among those who had achieved success in expressing themselves in the language of literature. As motion picture production had become merely a matter of photographing stories or plays, it was logical for producers to employ authors and playwrights to provide them with story material. Many brilliant writers, therefore, came to Hollywood. Many of them have done brilliant work for the screen. The great improvement talkies have made in the last two or three years is a tribute to the excellent workmanship of those who wrote the