Screenland (Nov 1941-Apr 1942)

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But the studio tests him, wastes his money, finds he won't do and away flies Jimmy. I tested him a year or two before he came out here. My studio was trying to accumulate a few players. They didn't like him. If they'd owned "The Philadelphia Story," they'd have grabbed him, they'd have had him and with him a nice tinkle in the cash register. But no, the imagination to look beyond the moment was lacking. A boy can't be any boy nor a girl any girl. It's folly to test a player for the part you happen to have open at the moment, unless you've convinced yourself that he's got the physical and emotional equipment to make 'him believable in the part. If he hasn't got it for you, how can he have it for the audience ? Take the case of Martha Scott. And while we're about it, take my apologies if I seem to be sounding my own horn. My experience has been paralleled by most of the directors in town, but obviously I'm better acquainted with such details as I handled myself. So if I use them to point my arguments, I also trust your indulgence to understand that it's done in a spirit of scientific objectivity and not, like Jack Horner, to prove what a fine boy am I ! Martha Scott was a Broadway stage sensation in "Our Town." They brought her out here, tested her for many parts at many studios, and reached the conclusion that she didn't photograph. Why didn't she photograph? She had two eyes and a nose. I'd seen her in New York and wanted her for the picture, but kept bucking up against a stone wall. Dutifully I tested dozens of others, but always went back to Scott. In the end I collected all the tests made of her here and ran them. "You see, Sam," they told me, "she doesn't photograph." I turned mulish and insisted on having her brought out. There was weeping and wailing, but she got here, she played the role, and the chief mourners became her chief admirers. She hadn't looked like the thing they'd wanted her to look like when they made their tests. So she doesn't photograph, they said, instead of saying that she didn't suit the parts they'd tested her for. Much the same thing happened to Greer Garson. She was hauled over from England, and sat for a year going crazy with nothing to do. I was going crazy, trying to find Mrs. Chips. I'd decided to hunt for her in England where the picture was to be filmed, but on the day I was leaving for New York to sail to London, I ran some tests — as a final desperate measure and to satisfy myself that I'd left no stone unturned. One test was of Garson, playing a society girl. A few feet, and I prickled with excitement. Then came a sense of relief and perfect peace. This was Mrs. Chips. How did I know? You form a conception of a character. You want the audience to find certain qualities in her. Those are the qualities you look for. If you don't see them, the audience won't. If you do, they may. That's how roles should be cast, but they're not. The girl Chips married had to be attractive and desirable, to account for her lifelong influence on him and the school, though she lived with both for only a year. She had to have compassion and insight, or she'd never have discovered the heart of the man behind the pedantic school teacher. She had to have humor and tact and tenderness, else she couldn't have worked in him the^ transformation that had to be worked. She had to be honest in spirit to convince the audience that no matter how many Prince Charmings came along, she'd always love Chips. I believed the^Se things possible of the woman I saw in that test. As it turned out, audiences believed them, too. How does this help you? By opening your eyes to what you may have to contend with if you ever do reach Hollywood. Don't let them pour you into a mould. Don't let them make you look like a thousand other ingenues and juveniles. Fight to keep your personality, the spark which sets you apart from the rest of the world. On every lot you'll find people who'll help you fight against the stodginess of routine. Then when we have enough fighters, maybe some day a great white light will break over the studios, and we'll get the system that will give you the chance you're worth. Baseball has it today. Baseball scouts the country from sandlots to minor leagues. They take these kids, watch them, groom them, wet-nurse them, discipline them. Sure it takes time and money, but it pays. The misfits drop out. The rest are fit for big-league ball. We get our Tracys and Davises by accident. They get their di Maggios and Greenbergs by labor pains. As they scout the sandlots, we ought to scout summer stock, dramatic schools, amateur productions. Every studio should maintain a training department, run by professionals who know their business — people intelligent enough to recognize personality when they see it, patient enough to develop it. Unless a man's downright deformed, you can't tell till you've worked with him how he'll turn out. Run the early tests of some of today's moneymakers, and you'll find they screened like slabs of cheese. They're the lucky ones, the ones who by some chain of accidents came through. But again I repeat, and I can't repeat it too often, we're suckers to trust to luck. We should build up an army of possibilities, finance them till they're whipped into shape, present them to the public only when they're ready for the public. What baseball can afford, so can the films. If we get one star out of fifty — ; and we will — the returns are astronomical. Casting nowadays is left mostly to the director, who wants new material but can't be expected to use his pictures as training schools. Sometimes he's driven to it. I was, in a couple of cases. I needed a child for "Rangers of Fortune" — an honest kid caught in a rat-trap, sensitive but independent and aggressive enough to stand on her feet and battle the world. I interviewed plenty of kids who had been in pictures, but they were all polished up, pretty and artificial and unconvincing. Tim Whelan came in with Betty Brewer. He'd found her outside the Brown Derby, singing for nickels. She'd fought like hell to exist, mothered her family, bossed them, made herself responsible for them. She kept watching me during the tests with this look in her eye that said it couldn't come true, and if it did, it couldn't last. She was real, so I took a chance on the acting end. When you take that kind of chance and win, you feel swell. For your own sake, of course, but for the player's, too. There's a very human gratification involved in the sense that you've opened for someone a door to a whole new world. I interviewed dozens of boys for the part of Mark in "Kitty Foyle." I needed a contrast to Dennis Morgan, yet someone equally attractive. Kitty had been married and madly in love with Wyn. I couldn't foist her off on someone who didn't measure up to the other fellow. I couldn't afford to have women in the audience thinking, "Well, after Wyn, I'd never fall for that guy." One day an agent brought James 74 SCREENLAND