Hollywood Spectator (1938)

Page Four May 7, 1938 ing her father for a dime and affecting us only as an interruption to our conversation. It was the glamour which the screen spreads over everything it does that made the scene in the picture stand out; it was the art of the screen which entertained us. And the screen has no ill which the art cannot cure. The ills from which Hollywood now is suffering are due to its thinking in terms of money instead of in terms of its art. * * * STAR'S SPAN OF POPULARITY . . . ONE of Hollywood’s choicest hallucinations is that the life of a star’s popularity is necessarily short. As an income tax argument it may be all right, and I hope it proves effective when advanced, but in real¬ ity it is luck, not age, which determines the duration of a star’s career. A player and stardom can go on until death do them part if the producer for whom he is working knows the business of picture making. It is the mission of a producer to give stars roles which will preserve their popularity, which will make the public continue to like them, and, that done, the child of today can progress to grandmother roles in the future without any falling off in the number of her admirers. Audiences will grow up with her. Children who love Shirley Temple as a child, when they become grandparents, will love her as a grandparent, provided her producers guard in¬ telligently the quality in her which makes her lov¬ able. * * * PLAYERS AND THE OPTION CLAUSE . . . OTION picture players, Edwin Schallert tells us in Los Angeles Times, are favoring contracts for terms of years and without the option clauses which permit producers to terminate them at specified pe¬ riods, but deny the same right to the players. The option contract always has been a vicious one. Pro¬ ducers seek to justify it with the argument that they are responsible for the degree of popularity a player developes and therefore are entitled to the greater boxoffice returns for which he is responsible, an argument which does not alter the fact that the option clause is nothing but a device to obtain the services of a player at less than his market value. If such were not the case, the clause would have no meaning. As I wrote recently, producers ruin more careers than they make, but the option clause enables them to escape being the victims of their own folly — permits them, by not taking up an option, to make the player the sole loser. Seems to me that here is something to which the guilds should pay some attention. * * * AS EDUCATOR SEES IT . . . PPLAUSE like this is what heartens an editor. In course of a letter I have received from Harold M. Turney, chairman of the Department of Drama, Los Angeles Junior College, there is this paragraph: “Congratulations again on the very excellent work you are doing in your magazine. It comes to me weekly as a new joy and an inspiration to further my activities, holding you up as an ideal toward which I should strive. Your boundless energy, your limitless enthusiasm, and amazing critical knack of hitting the nail on the head ten times out of ten times are a constant surprise to me." * * * NOT HIGHEST, BUT LOWEST . . . ILL HAYS boasts that one thing to the credit of the film industry is the “maintenance of the high¬ est possible advertising standard.’’ Before Test Pilot was previewed, before anyone could know how good it would turn out to be, Metro’s New York exploita¬ tion department prepared an advertisement which quoted Leo as saying, “The greatest picture I have ever made is Test Pilot. Clark Gable better than in San Francisco, Myrna Loy better than in After the Thin Man , Spencer Tracy better than in Captains Courageous.” By maintaining the lowest possible advertising standards, the exploitation departments of the big producing organizations waste a greater percentage of the money they spend than any other department of the absurdly extravagant industry. No one believes picture advertising, therefore there are no returns on the vast sum it costs each year. * * * VISUAL ENTERTAINMENT PREFERRED . . . HE screen is the world’s greatest entertainment medium. In this country alone in 1937 there were added to the number of existing film theatres, over ten times the total number of theatres in which the spoken drama is being presented. Long before the talking motion picture made its advent, decimation in the ranks of legitimate theatres had begun, thereby demonstrating that the public preferred to get its dra¬ matic entertainment through its eyes rather than through its ears. Seeing is the least involved thing we do, the only thing which involves neither physical nor mental action on our part. As a nation we are rated as great sport lovers, a reputation we have earn¬ ed, not perhaps as much by virtue of our love of sport as such as because of our liking for entertain¬ ment we can sit and see without thinking, a form we can respond to with our emotions without any help from our intellects. That is the kind of entertain¬ ment the silent picture provided. Enter a Meek Little Man . . . ET us assume the screen had started off with the kind of pictures we are getting now, the rattlelybang kind which makes a hobby of gathering noises to hurl at us, which shouts dialogue at us, which makes us sit tense to catch every word spoken in the comparatively few pictures in which lines are read in conversational tones; in which airplanes, railroad trains, machine shops, gangster battles are registered as much by the noise they make as by what our eyes behold. Let us assume that some meek little man — I prefer a meek little person for our Great Deliverer — has wandered for years from one noisy picture house to another, always in search of the Perfect Pic¬ ture. He encounters one with a machine-shop se¬ quence in it, the noise of the machines being so ter