Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1921)

NEW FACES FOR OLD By SAMUEL GOLDWYN President of the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation © Underwood & Underwood Samuel Goldwyn HAVING been a constant enthusiast for motion pictures since the first day when printed celluloid cast its shadow on the screen I am in a position to state that what are needed most today in the photoplay are New Faces. There are great actors and actresses in the pictures. But because of the number of pictures in which they appear and because of the general tendency of casting directors to choose characters whose features are just "regular," it has become apparent that a new generation of motion picture artists is desired. Man survives only because of his restlessness, his boredom with the old, his desire for far away things which have never before been achieved. The motion picture is one of the significant results of his weariness with a world which had no motion pictures. The Chinese, who claim to have invented everything long before the Western World began to experiment with the elementals, have no record of motion pictures. The scientific laws through which they were conceived were known, it is true, as early as 65 A. D., but all in all, the motion picture can claim to be an authentically original expression of this age. It is not old; it is new. It is not mummified, it is alive. And the great question before those men to whom destiny has tendered the responsibility of this contemporary of radium and Relativity is how to keep it alive. This responsibility presents problems which are at once immediate and a hundred years away. The latter problem is largely technical, and I shall not go into it. A hundred laboratories are working constantly to perfect the mechanical devices which make possible the motion picture; and there are no doubt numberless individuals, working in obscurity, who will realize, here and there, new principles and machines which will bring the medium of the screen to new levels. Nothing can live permanently which has nothing permanent to live for. People talk of progress in Life as if it were a hope, instead of a PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE realizes the importance of the issue Mr. Goldwyn crystallizes in this article, and considers it a privilege to co-operate with him in his sincere effort to bring new faces to the screen just as he has brought eminent authors. Rupert Hughes has written a remarkable article on a similar theme for the next issue of Photoplay, to be followed with one by Mary Roberts Rinehart. At the conclusion of this series of three articles there will be presented a practical method of finding new faces in which the readers of this magazine will be asked to assist. necessity. I do not pretend to think that everything was done which might have been done for the progress of the motion picture in the earliest days. But the thing was new and bewildering to everyone. It had, however, capacities within itself which overran the limitations of producers, theater-owners, and audiences of the time. For some years there was a sort of truce while the art-industry stopped and caught its breath and while various personalities engaged the attention of the public to the exclusion of more fundamental values of story and plot. Stars began to shine luminously in that shadow world — and then to pale, with a few splendid exceptions — Charlie Chaplin, and Mary Pickford, for example; and the eminent directorproducer, David Wark Griffith. There were, of course, others, also. A change was inevitable, and it came when the public showed a desire for something different. I pride myself to a certain extent that I was one of the first to realize this change and attempt to direct its course — when, with Rex Beach, I founded the Eminent Authors, with a premise that the author was to co-operate in the screening of his themes and not to contemptuously "sell it to the movies." This idea has now largely been accepted and writers of recognized talent, and even genius, brought to the understanding that motion pictures have a technique of their own and require original stories and direct treatment. Rupert Hughes, for instance, writes a tale for the screen; writes his own continuity, participates on the lot in its production; takes a hand in the cutting, and writes his own titles. There are others — Gouverneur Morris, Mary Roberts Rinehart. We have the new screen Author. But have we any equivalent on the screen? Have we "the new screen actor— and actress? " To a large extent, we have not — and that is what the screen needs most at the present moment — New Faces! There has been a tendency to develop types — the hero, the heroine, the villain, the ingenue, the juvenile — and then to limit players to a certain style of expression. Broad classifications are, of course, necessary, but they should be those of life, not the artificial restrictions of the studio. Just as many producers have tended to follow a set groove in the development of their stories, so they have come to turn actors out of the same mould, all nicely labeled and ready to do a certain bit of work precisely as it has been done one hundred times before. If a player happens to make a hit in a mother role, or as an Italian fruit peddler, or a smirking Chinaman, producers immediately look around for more parts of a similar nature for him to develop, instead of giving him an opportunity in other parts. We all agree that the hope 46