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Indict the Films
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"The films are not good enough. With all the money and other kind of wealth expended on them they should be infinitely better. The best thing they do is the supernatural — they are the link between poor inadequate human nature and magic." — E. V. Lucas.
"I have my own ideas why I would not sell 'The Scarlet Pimpernel' to the movies. My partner has the idea that film presentation would smash the play. The plot is so complicated and the atmosphere so essential." — Baroness Orczy.
"I just haven't any ideas on the films. I find most of them extraordinarily nonsensical— and still go to see them sometimes."— Ford Madox Ford.
Courtesy of Albert and Charln Bom Ford Madox Ford
The Fifth of a Series of Talks About Motion Pictures With Famous English and Continental Writers
TT is a wise fiction father who knows his own •*" movie child.
And the more I see of Great Writers and hear them talk about the terrible things that happen to their brain children, in the cruel screen world, the more I wonder why they trust their sacred things to the care' of roving bands of gypsies — as they seem. to consider the cinema in general. They are like those mothers who desert their babies in dark hallways and then turn up to claim them and wail over them when they have been adopted by wealthy persons who shower a fortune on them.
One of the bitterest defamers of the movies that I know, and their ill-treatment of the novelist is one whose book did not go at all well, netting him not more than $4,000. A motion pic; ture company paid' him $20,000 for the picture rights. A clever scenarist made a silk purse out of a sow s ear, literally, for the story on the screen was infinitely better than that in the book from which it had been taken — and was different, of course. Hence the wail of the novelist.
In the great majority of cases, the novelist makes more from his picture rights than he does
(Continued
TJORD MADOX FORD is the author of that remarkable book, "No More Parades, which was adjudged the finest novel of the year by several of the leading book reviews.
He lives in Paris in a quaint studio on Rue Notre Dame des Champs, just behind the house in which Balzac once lived and wrote. By good fortune, my pension happened to be almost opposite his studio, so it was an easy matter to drop in. He took me up a rickety stair to a cubby-hole where he said he did most of his writing.
"No," he smiled, when I asked him, I just haven't any ideas on the films. I find most of them extraordinarily nonsensical.
"But you do go to see them?' I persisted on top of his condemnation.
"Yes. I suppose everyone must go to see them sometimes. Oh, yes, I did go to three bull-fights and two films in one week down in the south of France last summer.
Bull-fights and films! There s a new one. Ford Madox Ford puts them on a par, only he places bull-fights first.
We talked all around the films after that, for he did not want to be caught associating with on fiage 77)
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