Picture-Play Magazine (Jul - Dec 1929)

Ah, 1 hose Were the Uays! Another manifested the curious belief that he could do his best work by putting himself in the mood of the picture through donning an appropriate costume. Consequently he wore chaps when directing a Western, evening clothes when making a society picture, and doublet and hose if it happened to be a costume affair. I am informed that he once made a Northwest Mounted Police picture, and turned up on the set for the first day's work in red pants, but I lack corroboration of this. Knowing the gent, however, I scarcely doubt it. Another director — and not a bad one, either — worked up an odd idea which he believed added to the dramatic value of his pictures. He installed a Chinese gong beside the cameras and was wont to beat upon it during the scenes, starting with a soft, rhythmic cadence and working up to a wild, barbaric pitch as he desired the dramatic intensity to grow. I never had opportunity to consult the private opinions of the actors on this scheme. And still another had the quaint system of firing pistols just behind the camera, as cues for his actors to enter and exit, the theory being that it would startle the players into acting their best. The fact that most Thespians thus prompted entered scenes with the familiar expression of the "Stag At Bay" seemed not to worry this creator of drama in the least. But, brother — it ain't that way no more. Within the short space of a year the position of the director has collapsed, and is continuing to collapse, so swiftly that it seems hard to believe, now, that their former autocratic sway ever could have existed. Directors — particularly the more prominent ones — still have their jobs, they are still nominally making pictures, and they still draw salaries which extend into four figures weekly. But they do not constitute the axis on which the film industry revolves — if, indeed, they ever did — and Hollywood is coming to realize it with a clarity which bodes exceeding ill for the megaphone megalomaniacs. The amazing and feverish growth of the sound and talking picture has resulted in a housecleaning of Hollywood that not even the most occult of seers could have predicted. Actors, directors, and writers — even producers backed by vast capital — have found themselves thrust again at the bottom of the ladder and faced with the task of fighting once more to the top, or suffering oblivion. Nowadays whatever dictatorship there is on the set is held by the sound technician, the camera man, and the man who writes the dialogue. No more can the director throw away the script on which scenario writers had been toiling for weeks, and shoot the story as his own divine fancy dictates. The story is finished before he gets it. The dialogue is presented to the actor to learn before the picture starts. The director can't change The director always won his point in a community where lung power was long confused with erudition. recreation of the craft which appeared to provide the most amusement. He cannot shout. If he does, it is quite likely that some unfeeling technical worker, who has never enjoyed the privilege of bellowing at actors, will angrily tap him on the head with a camera tripod, and the scene will be retaken while the man before whom studios once trembled sleeps calmly beneath his canvas chair. The director, during these mad, chaotic days, cannot even lord it over his camera man. Trick angles and futuristic shots, originally introduced by the army of brilliant, invading Europeans and quickly seized upon by the less imaginative, but highly imitative natives, are virtually impossible, for the sound devices are all-important on the set, and it is their position which must be considered and passed on by the experts who operate them. It recently was my privilege — I call it a privilege in the same sense one would view a rare and difficult operation in trepanning, or the first leap in a new and untested parachute device — to witness two or three reels of a talking production, first without sound and then without pictures. The first version of the production can be described only as amazing. The pictures meant nothing. They were simply long, incomprehensible and disconnected close-ups of actors, looking at each other and moving their lips. One could have gathered no more idea of what the picture might have been about than one could have flown to the moon on a Hallowe'en witch's broom. The talking version without the pictures, on the other hand, was almost as complete as though the flickering celluloid had been cast upon the screen. The dialogue told the story almost intact. The first provided the same sensation as watching a play with bandages over the ears, the second listening to that, for if he does he presently will find himself in the midst of a muddle from which there is no extrication. And inasmuch as he is unable to change the dialogue, it follows as a certainty that he cannot alter the action as it is described in the script to any great extent, because if he does, it will not compare with the spoken lines. But, unkindest cut of all, the director cannot indulge in the time-honored the same play blind Nowadays if a director shouts, a technical expert is likely to slug him over the head with a camera tripod. ^ folded. And almost without exception the former would be bewildering, and the second at least comprehensible. All of this means that the injection of sound and vocal assistance has. in one stroke, removed from the screen its one supreme attribute, that of action and pictorial quality, which its rival cousins, the Continued on page 109