The screen writer (June 1947-Mar 1948)

THE SCREEN WRITER for seriously amending it is dangerous. Outcries against the screen portrayal of the fight against the international illegal narcotics traffic has been, in my opinion, used as a smokescreen to obscure something of importance to the entire industry — namely, its right of selfgovernment and the duty and even necessity of change to meet the conditions of our changing world. In preparation for writing the treatment of Assigned to Treasury, I studied over eighty motion pictures and then did "homework" analyzing the screenplays from which these pictures had been made. This study disclosed an interesting difference in the prewar technique of Hollywood picture making and the wartime so-called "documentary technique," a difference which I had to understand if the experiences of skilled veterans in both fields were to teach me anything in preparation for the writing of my first treatment and screenplay. The prewar film technique seemed to concern itself most actively with the Great Man, the individual who bends all situation to his fabulous will. The story was placed at the complete service of validating this one unusual hero. (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) Supporting players and plot action were subordinated to make the solitary jewel shine. I may be wrong, but it seemed to me that the evil of the star system, rather than creating this technique, emerged out of it, and that this technique, in turn, was created by the unrealistic social climate of the pre-depression and prewar years. I learned a great deal from this technique about swift and oblique theatrical revelations of what purport to be character. However, in the end, these revelations remained false for my purposes, for they were set forth in unreal situational context. I had assured the Treasury Department that I would be faithful to the facts in the file (which in theatrical terms meant the basic dramatic situations). Against that objective, the prewar technique became "make-believe" in an unusable sense. The lone individual never bends dramatic situation (otherwise known as environment) or supporting players (otherwise definable as the community as seen from the protagonist's viewpoint) to his own exclusive will. Even the "status-quo individual" is no exception. With the aid of the weight of environment he hamstrings the efforts of others to reshape it. Environment, as we all know, takes one powerful lot of bending before it yields. It acts upon the individual with at least as much force as the individual, no matter how heroic, acts upon it. In Assigned to Treasury a consideration of this social truth ceased to be academic. The other technique, the wartime "documentary" like the prewar Hollywood technique referred to above, likewise taught me many important things. How to find people and events in their native habitat (among other things, by actually bringing a camera there!), the power of understatement, of matter-of-factness, the attention to small, but exciting detail which creates the illusion of reality, faith in the dramatic values implicit in environment (dramatic situation) which prevents gilding the lily or distorting it. All this proved invaluable. Yet, taken by itself — for my purposes — it seemed to exaggerate in one direction as the prewar technique exaggerated in another. (I am not referring to Hollywood wartime films like Sahara, Wake Island, Destination Tokyo, which attempted the beginnings of a synthesis between the two techniques. I refer to the government documentary film, a technique almost as old as entertainment film making itself) which had its origin in visual education. In it, the protagonist is subordinated to dramatic situation. During the war this technique dealt with a great global social crisis. To meet that crisis the individual either subordinated or associated himself with the community in a joint effort to reshape the environment which created this crisis. But that could not have possibly meant that the individual was less important than the task he performed. Quite the reverse. It caused tremendous personality changes, making heroes out of ordinary men and thus making the individual more important than ever. The wartime documentary technique in many cases implied the opposite. How to load a gun, what to do for wounds, how to behave when captured, was treated more importantly than the person who performed these deeds. We learned no more about people than was indispensable for carrying the documentary story forward. Perhaps this over-simplification was born out of the social climate of a war for which we were not sufficiently prepared ideologically, in much the manner as the social climate of rugged individualism in the prewar period created the over-simplification of environment in prewar Hollywood film technique. In any event, I felt that technically, in writing Assigned to Treasury my task was to synthesize the best of both, striking a tone and style which authentically dramatized environment on the one hand and authentically and dramatically revealed the importance of the individual on the other. This meant neither environment nor character would be distorted to serve the other's needs. Whether this synthesis has been achieved, remains of course to be seen. If it has been on film, it will be the result of the joint efforts in this direction, not only of myself, but in the first place of Sidney Buchman, the producer, and after him, of every other person seriously