The Motion Picture Director (Sep 1925 - Feb 1926)

20 ©i rector November Splendidly acted as is their portrayal of the customs of the period, THERE IS AN INEVITABLE STAGINESS ABOUT THIS SCENE BETWEEN NOVARRO AND Bushman in the M-G-M production of “Ben Hur.” the story is an interesting one they are not interested at the present in costume stories and that the public is tired of them. Will you look into this business for me?” I have looked into “this business’ for him, and, as expressed in the foregoing have found that the market for costume stories, as such, simply doesn’t exist; that there must be some powerful motivation back of such a story, some theme with world-wide appeal, before a period play will even be considered. I am not advancing this as a new discovery by any means. It is a matter of common knowledge, at least in the producing world. Costume pictures don’t seem to pay out. And yet there are so many people outside of immediate contact with motion picture activity who consider that the screen is peculiarly adapted to the depiction of stories of this type. All of which is essentially true, up to a certain point. The screen is ideally suited to the depiction of the romance of bye-gone ages and through its illusive qualities that romance may be made to live again. And there is the rub. IT is one thing to be held spell-bound by the graphic art of the novelist, to be swayed by the charm of his description and by the brilliance of his style and diction. One’s imagination keeping pace with the imagination of the author readily evolves from the word pictures on the printed page, mental pictures which visualize the char acters, the settings and the action of the story. Such a story as Herr Ehler submits with his letter, a story to which he has given the title Oberon and which he states is founded on the folk-tale of Wieland, if told with all the skill of a great novelist would grip the imagination of the reader and would hold it in breathless interest to the very end. And from the word pictures woven by the author into the warp and woof of his story the reader’s imagination evolves mental pictures in which the characters of the story come to life and move amid the settings so graphically described. But here is the interesting feature. Every reader creates his own mental picture, a picture inspired and dictated by something that has gone before, — by the capacity of his mind to reconstruct. Sometimes these pictures are sharply etched, sometimes, and I believe this to be more frequently the case, they are nebulous and sketchy, bare outlines which, while entirely sufficient to make the story seem real to the reader, would vanish as a puff of smoke were the reader to attempt to put down on paper the picture he sees in his mind. The details just aren’t there. But while they last these pictures seem real. For instance, how often have you read a book which particularly appealed to you and a year or so later have picked up that book and in thumbing through the illustrations have searched in vain for some particular illustration you were positive was there. Why that picture was so clearly etched in your memory that you could have sworn that it had actually appeared in black and white in the pages of the book. And yet when you look for it, it isn’t there, and you come to the realization that it has only been a figment of your own imagination! Undoubtedly we have all had such experiences. All of which is parentheteic to the thought that we read a fascinating story of the dim remote ages and thoroughly enjoy it, we recreate in our mind’s eye the characters and settings of the story, but when it comes to actually reconstructing characters, scenes and action of such a story illusion disappears and reality enters. And cold reality too often brings disillusionment. This to my mind is one of the dominant factors mitigating against the so-called costume play of any period. While the same story told with the art of the novelist is fascinating in the extreme and we find delicious enjoyment in reading the flights of fancy of Sir Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. G. Wells, when it come to translating that story to the screen illusion is lost and the reality which invests the depicting of the story on the screen is so utterly different from preconceived ideas that we are generally disappointed. There must be something deeper, some greater appeal to the interest of the spectator to offset the unreality that characterizes such productions. There must be some emotional appeal to which he makes instinctive response. Ben Hur presents such an appeal. This phase of the situation has been interestingly summed up in the suggestion offered by a New York advertising man ■who took a flyer in motion picture advertising and then returned to his beloved New York and the more prosaic exploitation of the necessities of life, by referring to screen entertainment as being “predigested.” The product of imagination, screen stories leave so little to the imagination when translated to the screen, that they in truth do become predigested. SHORTLY after receiving Herr Ehler’s manuscript and its accompanying letter I was talking with a printer who has devoted his life to the study and application of expressing thoughts in terms of type faces. With the enthusiasm of an artist for his art he entered into an animated discussion of the merits and interpretive values of various type faces. “Type is the vehicle for thought,” he said, “Make your printed page easy to read. Set your message in the type face with which your readers are most familiar and they will read it quickly and easily. Set is in unfamiliar type and easy reading is retarded through the necessity for ‘translating’ the type and puzzling out familiar words in unfamiliar dress.”