Picture-Play Magazine (1933)

And as to the notion of secrecy and furtiveness, how can an actor be furtive on the set? Dorothy Parker's much quoted goldfish in the bowl could sooner get away with a surreptitious romance than an actor on the set with a single stealthy movement. A hundred spotlights turned on him, how is he to sneak into the camera something that will get past the director's eye, trained to detect every detail? More, something that will get past the director's trained eye unnoticed and yet be perfectly obvious to the untrained eye of the public? He has to do some tall sneaking. But even suppose he does ; aren't there yet the rushes ? And isn't there the cutting room? Says Charles Ruggles, "In all in} years before the camera I've never heard of any one attempting a bit of business that wasn't fully sanctioned by the director and known to every one concerned." Clinching the matter and even adding an ironic twist, Edward Everett Horton avers: "Many of the tricks for which I have been labeled 'thief curiously enough haven't been suggested by me at all, but by some one else — even by the very person from whom I was supposed to have stolen the scene. I'm thinking in particular of an. incident in 'Reaching For The Moon.' "Douglas Fairbanks is in his apartment, ready to receive Bebe Daniels. I am instructing him in the way a gentleman re Stealing implies secrecy, furtiveness, and evil motivation, yet legend says that Genevieve Tobin stole "One Hour With You" from Chevalier. Do you think that Helen Hayes pilfered the credit for "Arrowsmith" from Ronald Colman? Hollywood insists that she did. ceives a lady who comes unchaperoned to his apartment. To show how unsuited to the occasion his own peculiarly abrupt manner is, I burlesque it. "When the picture was released, several critics pointed to that sequence as an example of scene stealing in the well-known Horton manner. Yet it had been Mr. Fairbanks himself who proposed the imitating, and who took time out to show me the most effective way of burlesquing him." If that is the way things are, it will be readily seen that there can be no talk of theft. Or, capitulating to the demands for vividness and the present vogue for gangster terms, that the stealing in scene stealing evidently must be taken in a very special sense. Zasu Pitts sums up the matter nicely. "I know they talk about scene stealing, but that's just a saying like — oh, like cradle snatching, when the boy you're out with is old enough to have to shave every day. It's something people have made up to give that angle of the picture game an interesting flavor. The way every little detail is supervised and watched, nobody can steal a scene without the consent and knowledge of the whole studio — and that isn't stealing, is it?" Looking at the matter in this light, one might go Miss Pitts one better and even liken scene stealing to heart stealing. There, too, the thief and his victim cooperate. Messrs. Fairbanks and Horton cooperated. Sporting, reckless Doug personally showed eager Eddie how to filch from him. Not all Hollywood dares quite so bravely. Many actors, realizing that they are fighting for their very existence, 23 express the spirit of rivalry much less gallantly. Miss Pitts tells the story of a star who insisted at all times on the best camera angle. "lie always wanted to be in the center of things, regardless of whether he belonged there or not. So what did the director do? He put up two cameras, one to pacify the star, and the other to shoot the scene. When the picture was previewed, the star gazed at a side of himself that he had never seen before, and was he sore? Oh my, yes." That was one time when that which had to be said was not said with flowers a la Garbo. Disagreements arising from the question of scene stealing don't always wait until preview time to break out in the open. A rumpus will often start much sooner. Maurice Chevalier's "One Hour With You" set out under the direction of George Cukor. After a few weeks of shooting, Mr. Cukor was relieved of the megaphone. The reason for the change was not made public, but the report trickled through that there had been too much scene stealing going on. Ernst Lubitsch, up to that point merely supervising, took over the direction himself. The picture was finished without further complicaContinued on page 59