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THIS is a story of a paradox personified; of a man named Woodward Strong Van Dyke who is one of Metro's most prized directors and doesn't care; who made the greatest location pictures ever filmed ("Trader Horn," "Eskimo," "White Shadows of the South Seas") and hates locations and travel of all kinds; who, with a Class B budget and a Class B schedule turns out — somehow — productions that are invariably Class A. This is the story of a man who loses his script and who doesn't discover it's lost until he has been shooting for two weeks, who can stand before a charging Rhino unmoved until it is time to pull the trigger, and who nearly faints from sheer fright when an elevator carries him as high as the third floor of an office building.
When I talked with John Ford for the first article of this series, I found a pleasant-faced rather mild Irishman whose work to him was art, religion, profession, hobby — almost life itself. Wherefore "The Informer" was what it was. In Frank Lloyd, producer as well as director, I found the antithesis of this attitude. He was a business man turning out a product for sale. The worth of any picture he counted in values of box-office draw and bank-balance profit.
But for Woody Van Dyke there is no classification. He has no thought of ever making a picture of which the critics might shout, "This is a painting given movement, this is life on
The third in a series of brilliant articles about the men responsible for the success or failure of a picture. This month — W . S. Van Dyke
By HOWARD SHARPE
celluloid, this is ART!" And if the hour and a half of entertainment he directs lays a wooden egg in America's theaters, then that is too bad, feels Van, but after all it's the studio's fault — not his. They gave him the story to do, and lie did it, and if no one likes it then it must of necessity be a bad story. He takes no responsibility.
It was easy enough to tell you how John Ford and Frank Lloyd direct their motion pictures, because they knew; Van Dyke doesn't. He can recount to you a thousand things he
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