The Motion Picture Director (1927)

62 THE MOTION PICTURE DIRECTOR OF HOLLYITOOD F e b r u a r y A Changeling In Our Midst ONE LAl'E afternoon, I lingered with a group watching Arthur Lubin at work in a picture. He was playing a young pool room shark in a small town of the Middle West, and cr hen he uttered some lines, the voice was so coarse with the true INEuldle West nasal twang. That very same evening at The Writ¬ ers’ Club, while enjoying the tones of an old Jew in one of the plays, “The Poem of David,” as he sweetly brought to one the purple and gold of Solomon’s dav, I mused on the contrast between the two voices. When the lights were turned up and I saw the program, I gasped ! But such exclamatiotis of surprise gen¬ erally greet this changeling of the screen, who follows on the heels of one charac¬ terization to another so astonishingly dif¬ ferent that in these days of just one type, he is something to he spotted. “Serve art as a slave.” William Dean Howells says somewhere, “and the day will come when it will make you a mas¬ ter.” But Arthur speaks modestly of why he has chosen this harder way. “The speaking stage,” he says with a gravity that seems to belie his boyish look, “is an art, of course. The movies — well they maybe tomorrow, but hardly today. And then I suppose I yearn for expression rather than success, so I go on with my double life, one sort of per¬ son before the camera by day and some¬ body vastly different before a living au¬ dience by night.” But if the movie clay be worked on by many as he, won’t it shapen finally into an art? Those who have previewed “Bardelys the Magnificent” say his Louis the Thir¬ teenth is a fresh contribution. Yet how often the foppish Louis has been done! With Ann of Austria and Richlieu he forms a perennial trio always appearing on the screen. And while one audience will follow him in this Sabatini story, another will watch him at The Pasa¬ dena Community Theatre perform one of the most difficult feats ever attempted in theatredom. Eor in Eugene O’Neill’s “Great God Brown” he must degenerate from a normal boy of eighteen into a rav¬ ing maniac of forty. And it is all the more gratifying that this young idealist hails from our own Los Angeles. When his eves opened on Eighth and Flower, the movie industry was in the shed stage of its evolution. Yet as he grew up, he said he felt Los Angeles reach out a groping hand for art, due no doubt to the relic of Span¬ ish blood still here. by LuCILE ErSKIXE The East got him for awhile and at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburg, where he obtained a college degree, he took so thorough a course in everything pertaining to the theatre that Arthur can paint a scene or design a cos¬ tume and finish it up with needle and thread. A good start on Broadway fell to the lot of the well-trained novice, but the lure was still in his West, and he re¬ turned here, where he believes a new civilization is springing up, in which art will take its place as a daily necessity for ARTHUR LUBIN even the man in the street, as it was in the days of Athens. On his return, he found the movies no longer sheds, but imposing and im¬ passable fortresses. With a young come¬ dian who then kept fasts as he now keeps feasts, they used to walk from one shut door to another. One desperate day, Harold (you can guess his last name) said to Arthur, “I have an idea. I shall introduce you as my uncle, and say you are President of the Lubin Picture Corporation. That might get us past the gate-keeper.” It worked and the versatile Arthur soon “caught on.” After one of his most definite achieve¬ ments on the screen, the disloyal son in “His People,” he might have followed this success by always playing a type sim¬ ilar. But instead he turned his back on it. ^Vhen “Liliom,” St. John Irvine’s “Jane Clegg” and “Desire Under the Elms” wanted to make sure that the Los Angeles presentation would sustain the play’s international reputation. Arthur Lubin was drafted to be a sustaining pil¬ lar in each. ^Vhy does he risk alwat's winning his audience anew, instead of re-pleasing them with a type they like? To turn out the same brand of acting is often done in the “factory,” as IMichael Arlen calls Hollywood. Perhaps the solution can be found in this anecdote of Beerbohm Tree. When anyone would apply to him for a place in his company, he 'would invariablv ask: “Are you Irish or better than that, are you Jewish? If vou’re Celtic, you have a culture three thousand vears old, but if you’re Jewish, it’s five thousand.” Arthur Lubin belongs to the race that produced the Songs of David, when the rest of us were in our lairs. Such a deep cultural heritage lashes him past the easy places to the heights. Pleasing the mob would mean nothing. Satisfy¬ ing his own exacting spirit everything. “In the last analysis there are so many factors responsible for the making of better pictures, that a separate article could be written about each one — yet I consider the public the most important because after all it is the public for whom the entertainment is made and it must be satisfied or else the pictures will not show a profit. Public demand places the motion picture in the peculiar position of being unable to stop improying. It dare not stand still. The in¬ centives for improvement are too great and the penalties for not improving too severe. The high water mark of today will nnlv be the sea level of tomorrow, I know a stage hand here who garbles the English language more terribly than anyone in the world. He was holding a somewhat lengthy conversation with an extra girl recently. He said, “If I’d a knowed you woulda came I wouldn’t a went out.” The girl, with a knowing wink to a nearby companion, answered: “If I’d a knowed you wanted to went I’d a took you.” When “The Rough Riders” is fin¬ ished, Hermann Hagedorn, biographer for Theodore Roosevelt, will have de¬ voted nearly two years to a task of rever¬ ence. More than a year ago, Hagedorn. who is secretary of the Roosevelt Me¬ morial Association, dedicated himself to the work of creating on the screen for millions of Americans, the glowing ex¬ ploits and personality of Roosevelt, in the Spanish-American War.