Screenland (Sept 1922–Feb 1923)

MOUVWOOD CALIFORNIA Jn newspaper offices they call this habit of wallowing around in saccharine sweetness "slopping over." The movies are slopping over most of the time. They are altogether too beautiful and too sweet. Especially the movie mothers. Iri real life what makes mothers interesting and advisable is that they are human. When they bind up your wounds they usually scold you. They vary self-sacrifice with spankings. The movie mother is an insufferable saint. She always sits in a rocking chair with her knitting and just smiles and smiles. After seeing one of Charley Ray's pictures I made a formal request to be allowed to run over the sweet old mother with a loaded truck after he finished with her. She irritated me beyond human endurance with her patient smile. There are no such people in the world — praise be to heaven! I can't understand why directors persist in putting these silly rubber stamp, painted-on-one-side characters on the screen. No mother can possibly raise a healthy normal family through the measles and whooping cough and wash dishes three times a day for twenty years without getting her dander up once in a while. I never knew but one woman in my life who always presented such a smiling patient face and went through life with the unvarying sweetness of a screen mother. She was a crazy woman who thought she was Mona Lisa. They sent her to the insane asylum and she's there yet. It would be a good thing to do with screen mothers. Not that I really blame the mothers. It is the directors. To me, it is a source of never-ending amazement that any grown men could go through 30 years or more as most of them have and observe I s a confession that the director cannot you ever loved? Then truth in this discerning B y Warr y Illustrated by so little about life — not to mention the art of acting. I once heard D. W. Griffith say that nearly anybody can act except an actor. To this I might add that nearly anybody can understand acting except the average director. Consider the big crisis in almost any motion picture ! I have seen a lot of people in the midst of real life dramas. I have seen a lot of women informed of sudden and horrible tragedies. I have never seen a single one act the way they always act in the movies. In the movies they close their eyes and sway around like the pendulum of an eight-day clock apparently with the idea of impressing the audience that they are going to faint and are trying not to. This is not only a silly departure from real life but bad psychology. The first reaction of people in real life to tragedy is incredulity. They can't believe it. The first thought that enters their minds is a denial. "No," they say, "This can't be true. My father can't be killed. These things happen to other people but they don't happen to me." At such times they stand like dummies. I have seen several men told that they had but a few moments to live. They all said things that would sound silly and inconsequential. I remember one man who was told he would die in a few minutes as the result of burns. He didn't stare wild-eyed. He just stood there, dumb and silent with a foolish, embarrassed smile on his face as though he had been caught in some disgraceful and foolish predicament. All he said was a queer, choked grunt. In the death bed scenes on the screen, the dying person in his last moments usually manifests enough strength in the way of fist shaking or embracing to represent half a day's work with a pick and shovel. One of the truest pieces of emotion ever shown on the screen was in D. W. Griffith's Intolerance where Mae Marsh wadded and wadded her little flimsy cambric handkerchief while her lover was being sentenced to be hanged. I saw an old woman do that identical thing once in a courtroom while her daughter was being tried for conspiring with a bunch of crooks to rob her own father. A NOTHER time, I saw a young man sentenced to be hanged. He had his hat in his hand and he kept turning this hat around and around with the most careful attention as though he had to make a certain number of careful revolutions of the hat band within a given time. Watching him, you would have thought that the fact he was hearing the judge rule his life away was of no importance at all, but that the matter of turning his hat in just that precise and certain manner was of the most overwhelming importance. 44