The Motion Picture Director (Sep 1925 - Feb 1926)

14 November _T “N MOTION PU 1 LRI director also developed real artistic ideals — an improvement in mass taste which has never before been even approached in the development of any other art-expression within a similar period of time. The screen public has graduated from the kindergarten stage of Sunday-supplement, alleged humor. The custard pie industry is now restricting itself to the manufacture of edible dainties rather than comic missiles and even bathing beauties must be able to act a little in addition to the sculptural charm of their lower limbs ! Some slapstick has, of course, survived and we shall always have it, but to a more and more limited extent. Harold Lloyd’s drawing power is due not only to his own charming personality, but also because his pictures have shown a realization of the changed desires of motion picture audiences. The Lloyd comedies have gags, of course; but always the gag furthers the story. In fact, only those incidents which fulfill this requirement, as well as being intrinsically funny, can stay in the picture. And underneath the whole structure is a foundation of legitimate plot and character development as consistent as in any of the so-called dramatic films. In fact, our practise in preparing the scenarios for Lloyd’s pictures, during the period before actual shooting, reveals this truism. Our first task is to write a dramatic foundation structure, that we divide the scenario into “factions,” or integral sequences, and then proceed to the insertion of gags into them. First we “gag up” the initial faction and then while I am directing Harold in this sequence, the gag men in the office are preparing the incidents and treatment for the second faction. Always, of course, under Lloyd’s guidance and my own supervision — and so on, until we have shot the several factions which compose the story. THE FRESHMAN illustrates, perhaps better than any other Lloyd picture outside of Girl Shy , our method of injecting drama into comedy. Interspersed in this rollicking story of collegiate life are several incidents of poignant pathos and real romance. There is a really beautiful sweetness in the first meeting of Harold and Jobyna on the train and a wistfulness in the scene where her maternal instinct leads her to rescue him from the ordeal of sewing on his buttons. There is real drama in the building up of the photograph episode, where Harold first puts his own picture below that of the Harold Lloyd hands Sam Taylor his fifth MEGAPHONE, SYMBOLIZING HIS FIFTH YEAR AS Lloyd’s director. most popular man in college whom he has set up for himself as his ideal. Later, he puts his picture alongside of his hero and, finally, above it. It is not a spirit of boastfulness, but the expression of a youth’s realization of a cherished ambition and a universal youngster’s trick of bolstering up his own courage by telling himself he is achieving what he has set out to accomplish. And Harold’s complete break-down and sobbing in the lap of the girl he loves, when he realizes that he has all along been the student joke rather than the college idol, is to my mind as dramatic an episode as anything I have ever seen on the screen. The incident of the photographs enters again, to symbolize the drama, by the introduction of a flash shot of his empty room — a gust of wind blows Harold’s picture off the wall and into the waste basket ! Do you remember the sweet romance in Girl Sliy, where Harold saves the box which once held the dog biscuit for Jobyna’s pet and where she, in turn, keeps the crackerjack container which they enjoyed together? The episode had a comedy twist, it is true ; but we all of us felt that the romance of it was just as strong and just as sweet as the trite dramatic form of the boy treasuring his girl’s handkerchief or her pressing a flower which her lover had given to her. Then there was the scene in the publisher’s office, where Harold brings his treatise on how to make love, with all the seriousness and studiousness of an erudite professor, when he realizes that his book of experiences is but the recounting of a series of episodes in which — to use the vernacular— “he has been kidded to death.” The use of two of Harold Lloyd’s pictures to point out specific instances of general theories is not done, I assure you, in any spirit of boastfulness, but because these very points have been mentioned repeatedly in countless criticisms of these two pictures and because, having worked out the incidents named, they come to my mind as illustrations of the policies we have followed in making all of these pictures. The chief factor which has made it possible for us to inject drama into comedy has been the great talent of Harold Lloyd and the fact that it is only pictures of this type which can really exploit his versatility as an all-round actor. This fact explains Lloyd’s supremacy and, at the same time, his responsibility for changing the entire course of comedy making. THE improvements in comedy, based on the improvement in audiencedesires — and the consequent wish of the audience for more comedy in all pictures — leads, in turn, to an explanation of the practice of introducing comedy into dramas. All of us, who are making pictures of any type, know of the recent coming of the (Continued on Page 50)