Screenland (Oct 1923-Mar 1924)

Another scene from The Hunchback of Notre Dame which escaped the scissors. must put the thing together and make sure that it works. Every big producing company has two relays of cutters— one at the studios in Hollywood, and another at the executive offices in New York. The second relay is' always more powerful than the first, because it has the last crack at the pictures. Indeed, when a film is shipped from California to New York, it is apt to undergo changes so radical that those responsible for making it can recognize it only by the backgrounds used in the art titles. Recently, I had an intimate glimpse of this strange phase of the great cinematographic art. I was invited by Universal to inspect the working print of their mammoth production of Victor Hugo's story, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I had heard vague, disquieting rumors about this picture. Word had drifted east from the sleepy boulevards of Hollywood to the effect that The Hunchback was due for a flop. A cool million, or thereabouts, had been expended on it — and the results were not apparently worthy of the investment. Cutting "Hunchback of Notre Dame'' „owever, being a tnovie critic, I was only too glad to see the picture in advance. Imagine my surprise on finding that The Hunchback of Notre Dame possessed qualities of extraordinary merit. Just imagine it ! After the film was over, I was asked an opinion. I answered that, so far as I knew, it was a grand picture — but that the continuity didn't quite hang together and the subtitles were much too flowery. "Can you undertake to remedy this for us ?" was the next leading question. This was a facer. A critic can usually express his opinions without being compelled to explain them. When he says a picture is rotten he isn't supposed to tell how it might be made good. If he could do that, he wouldn't be a critic. But I was cornered, and I feebly admitted that I might try. So I became one of the army of cutters who were then engaged in editing The Hunchback of Notre Dame. heroic work by its director, Wallace Worsley; by its actors, Lon Chaney, Ernest Torrence and the rest, and by all the other citizens of Universal City who had been striving to make it a success. It was a superhuman effort on their part — the best that they could give. And yet here was I, and several others like me, called upon to censor the work of these determined laborers and whip it into form for popular consumption. It seemed like a bit of gross effrontery on my part to step in at the last minute and tamper with something that had been made by others with the sweat of their official brows. However, I swallowed my scruples and went to work. My colleagues in the cutting room were Hugo Risenfeld, director of the Rivoli and Rialto Theatres in New York, and Max Fleischer, who creates the ingenious Out of the Inkwell animated cartoons. Our first task was to decide, "What is wrong with this picture?" Each of us picked out the flaws that seemed to be most glaring, and then lumped the complaints together. When we had filed these reports, it looked very much as though there would be nothing left in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, except the Hunch. What Happened in Cutting Room ^^\^e then started to remedy the various defects as best we might. There were too many mob scenes, so these were cut to the bone. There were episodes that had no direct bearing on the story, so these were lopped out. There were characters overplayed, so these were trimmed. There were moments when the most important characters were allowed to drop out of sight, so the arrangement of sequences was altered hi order that the distribution might be more even. All through the picture, the tempo was pepped up materially. When this arduous task had been completed, we set to work on the sub-titles — and here was the most delicate problem of all. The original titles had been couched in the stilted phraseology of Victor Hugo's novel, so that the various characters were going around saying lines like, "Fie ! I know thy reputation. Thou wouldst say as much to any maiden," and, "Think ye to take our Esmeralda for a plaything? Have done with her or I'll slit thy throat." T. Cutting Slang of 1482 I Trimming Out a Fortune T was an interesting job. Here was a picture that had cost a great deal of money. It represented several months of ^ hese flowery utterances had to be simplified, because many words and phrases that were considered good slang in 1482 are practically unknown to movie fans of the present day. Moreover, the titles weren't quite consistent. In some of them, the "Thee" and "Thou" form was used, while others were content with the everyday "You." And in one title a lady of King Louis' court was forced to utter the word "Cute " The result was that, out of 199 titles, only five remained unchanged. The rest were either re-worded and boiled down, or were completely altered to fit the continuity as it had been revised in the cutting process. Thus is a strange situation brought about. Dr. Riesenfeld, Max Fleischer and myself revised The Hunchback of Notre Dame to suit our own ideas— although we actually had nothing to do with its preparation, and we shall receive no credit or blame for its success or failure. (Continued on page 94) 18