The screen writer (June 1947-Mar 1948)

THE SCREEN WRITER for his lack of it. The moon-faced, greasy South American, the Vodka-swilling Russian, the bowing, "chopchop" Chinese are figments of a prejudiced, undemocratic imagination. It is only justice that audiences composed of these people and self-respecting audiences generally throughout the postwar world should, in a competitive film market, reject any American film that perpetuates this slander. Obviously, eliminating these "well-established" forms of domestic boxoffice insurance necessitated further research into character rather than caricature. Finding the theatrical expression of the true national characteristics of these people yielded the reward of foreign characters who are not "alien." While valid and entertaining, they are understandable and worthy of the high regard to which the peoples they represent in life are entitled. The character who best illustrates the point I am trying to make regarding the raising of the human document to the same level as the situational document is Homer, the boy without hands in The Best Years. The documentary development of how Homer uses his artificial hands could have met the strictest requirements of wartime documentary technique. This was a carefully researched statement of "know-how" in using artificial hands. But in a story "of some people facing real problems" it would have been a terrible blunder to make the issue of how Homer uses his hands more important than why he has to. Hence, it was necessary to deepen the character of Homer. We learn how and why simultaneously, without distorting either one to suit the dramatic needs of the other. As a result we are emotionally bound up with the larger issue of men like Homer who fought for something they are entitled to and the assistance as well as the courage they must have in order to secure it. I believe that is why Homer proves the theme of The Best Years better than his two buddies, with or without artificial hands. Because a true balance was struck between who he was (documentary characterization) and what he faced (authentic situation) he stands out as something new in picture making. The effectiveness of The Best Years remains at this writing the strongest evidence to support my conviction that integrating the prewar Hollywood technique with the war-time so-called documentary technique is the problem of serious minded picture makers today. It parallels the nation's postwar social problem of integrating the best elements of our prewar life with the experiences the GI and all of us had during the war. In my own case, being steeped so deeply in the case file mate rial, I was able to contribute a kind of resistance to its distortion, while being flexible as to its use. The effort to integrate a full authentic plot story and a full human story created certain problems in exposition and recapitulation, which are no doubt "old stuff" to the reader who has written screenplays before. To me they were in the nature of new lessons. The size of the problem came with the "discovery" that a film is in constant motion, whereas the stageplay, the radio show and the novel on the other hand, have their intermissions. In the play, in the radio show, they are imposed. In the novel, the reader decides the intermission when he sets down the book to reflect on what he has read before picking it up again. Obviously, the so-called "interruptions" in the theatre, radio show and novel put the audience's and reader's mind to imaginative work (even if only partially). The film, conversely, by virtue of its uninterruptedness can quickly create mental fatigue (all the more so if considerable data either story wise or character wise has been unfolded) unless recapitulation is forthcoming to make up for the absence of these intermissions. This, in turn, could not be done at the expense of "stopping the story." In a tale as full as Assigned to Treasury is, both in plot and character data, the solution came from placing recapitulation (which invariably pertained to situation, plot action, story development) at the service of discovering something new about people. In the first section, recapitulation comes from tht Chinese operative at a time that we discover underneath his calm and seemingly professionally indifferent attitude an intense, burning hatred for those Japanese who are attempting to subjugate his people with narcotics. The disclosure of his hatred is specific, rather than general, and therefore is new. In the second section, recapitulation comes from the Egyptian operative, in a scene in which we learn the reasons why he does his work (it is international in scope and coming as he does from a minority people he strives for a better understanding between peoples which would yield more equality for his own people, etc.) In the last section, it comes at the moment when our protagonist, Mike Barrows, comes fully of age and now gives leadership to the Cuban operative and then to his North American associates, much in the manner in which he has heretofore taken leadership from the Chinese, Egyptian, British and French operatives. Thus, the very agent which created a complicated story-telling problem also provided the key to simplifying the telling of the story. 8