Screenland (Sept 1922–Feb 1923)

Myron Zobel, Editor Editors' PAGE Syl. MacDowell, Managing Editor The Perils of Politeness THE most important part of a star's education is to recognize the perils of being polite to insignificant people. In an industry where a producer ranks a director and a director ranks a leading man and a leading man ranks an assistant director and the assistant ranks a cameraman, professional ethics demand that human kindness must be carefully measured. A star with the poise that her success demands recognizes the limits of geniality she can exert upon the assistant director in order that he will let her sleep an extra half hour on location days. But if she is extravagant with her charms, she loses caste. When impressing producers, the one with the most solid financial backing is obviously the one for the star to sit closest to at table. A feminine touch on a masculine coat sleeve has put many a name on bill posters. Politeness is of two sorts— warmth and frigidity. Frigid politeness is reserved for insulting purposes and is sometimes known as "up-stage work" or "ntzing." When a producer has hard luck and goes broke he gets the ice-box from the star. A star must never be seen in public with poor pills whose social alliance offers nothing. Friends cannot be chosen in the movies for their likeability. A catholic selection of congenial and wholesome friends has ruined more girls' careers than late and unusual hours and habits. A star must guard her air of good breeding with extreme care when it has taken her almost two years to acquire it. Nature A PUFF of smoke from an industrious steam shovel in a glen not far from our window informs us that another prosperous director is building himself a cozy $10,000 nook in the comforting quiet of the hills. The billowy verdure that once clad the shady slope has been uprooted and buried under tons of earth. The scent of the sumac and the tonic of the sweetladen breezes that sift over Nature's wild garden is mixed with dust and the noise of a concrete mixer. The bees and mocking birds and the myriad of living things that have made their homes there have been frightened farther up into the canyon. When the landscape gardener gets his imported shrubs set out, and the wild growth has been uprooted and heaped and burned, the director will take his big car out of the new garage some morning and coast down to a boulevard cafe and breakfast. He will tell his friends that there is nothing like a quiet night's rest in the primitive wildwood to fit a man for a good day's work. A Lesson in Diplomacy A LL Mexicans are bandits. To realize this, all you •have to do is to visit the movies. The only people who disagree with the movies in this respect are the Mexicans, themselves. Thy resent the racial libel to such an extent that an embargo has been exerted on certain brands of American films especial culprits — whether those particular films contained Mexican villains or none at all. But the screen has finally shown some favorable characteristics of our warm-blooded brethren, in Blood and Sand. Mexico has been quick to reciprocate by lifting the ban on films and decorating box-offices with their pesos. It is plain to see that modern diplomacy is being wound on reels as well as invested in the will and goodwill of our plenipotentiaries. The Obscurant A' N iconoclastic magazine names a list of twenty-six studio 'scenario editors and derides them under this blistering exordium : "Who has ever heard of them? What have they ever done? Wrhat have they written? What is tikiqualification for the positions they occupy? Where did they come from? What has been the nature of their former experience? What do they know of literature and drama? Who found them — and where?" We note with admiration the cuttlefish skill editorially plied to evade names of scenario ivriters who are known in special fields of literature and drama as well as the embracing motion picture art. An editor is a pilot. It would be as just to condemn a pilot because he could not sing a sailor's chanty as to hold scenario editors as nit-wits because they are neither novelists nor playwrights. A Stop Signal w rHEN public appetite makes gluttony of risque sex novels, vulgar popular songs, nasty plays and inflammatory films, it is time to censor the public and learn the cause of its perverted taste. Bad entertainment is a stop signal lighted by the current of popular demand. Most movies are poor but fewr are vicious. But the same assertion does not apply to the vogue in fiction, popular music and the spoken stage. High school girls sing Not Lately and read freelove verse. When their wholesome girlhood is swallowed up in the shadows of life, some shad-eyed, clappertongued reformer bellows about the movies.