The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

The Goldwyn Fallacy IT was a happy circumstance that brought together Ernest Pascal's "What IS a Screen Writer?" and Samuel Goldwyn's "Where Do You Go From Here?" in the April issue of this magazine. Mr. Goldwyn's article was a well-meant offer of help to writers to speak freely, but a comparative consideration of the two articles reveals in his the important fallacy which is at the heart of so much reckless criticism of screen writers. More than that, recognition of the fallacy points the way to a new and challenging possibility in making motion pictures — or at least some motion pictures. The challenge is one that writers will be happy to meet. Will the producers meet it? Even producers like Mr. Goldwyn, who profess enlightened interest in breaking away from trite screen material? There's a way of changing things, but producers are warned in advance that it isn't a surefire way, and that while writers will have to risk their time, producers will have to risk money. That, however, seems fair enough. The writer's time is his working capital as money is the producer's. Mr. Pascal threw into relief Mr. Goldwyn's fallacy by shredding away delusion and cant in analyzing the quintessential function of the screen writer as the motion picture industry is constituted at present. That function is, solely, to help insure profit in a vast real estate operation, to fill eighty-five million seats weekly in twenty thousand theatres. Only that and nothing more. Mr. Goldwyn sounded a stirring call for writers who write "what is inside of them ; what their reason, their emotions, their experience, their perceptions, dictate they must write." He wants writers to be, in his own words, "truly creative artists." We're dying for the chance, Mr. Goldwyn, but we can't do it without your help. A very loose term, indeed, "truly creative artist," but by Mr. Goldwyn's definition, specifically set forth, it clearly means a writer who expresses himself in disregard of formula, of the demands of the market, of the known preferences of studios or producers, and who will, further, insist on the transcription to film of his W eltanschauung exactly as he presents it, just as the writer in the theatre is free to do. rT,HIS is muddled thinking. No -* brigade of such iconoclastic spirits could possibly fill the seats in those twenty thousand parcels of real estate. Since motion pictures first crystallized into big business, their cost has made imperative the widest possible appeal to the widest possible audience. Inexorable limits are set the writer by the taste of that audience, its prejudices, its capacity for understanding. The motion picture story of today must fit cosily into the concepts of the good life or of entertainment as they are shared by eightyfive millions weekly. The writer whose daemon drives him to express a non-conforming concept, whose words are meant to break like thunderclaps through fogs of popular prejudice or habit, had better look to a smaller audience and a method of expression that uses less expensive machinery. In the era of the comic book and the radio serial, the movies acquit themselves with relative dignity and honor, but the restrictions placed on the American motion picture story today are definite. Fundamentally it must be a love story. The protagonists must be attractive people, and all must end well. That story cannot delve into the dark, tangled depths of human impulses and relationships, it cannot even toy lightly with them. It must remain on the glittering surface and there satisfy every adolescent's dream of romantic love. You may cite deviations. Bette Davis, for instance, doesn't always get her man, but she doesn't get him with such grand passion and such exalted suffering that it's like going to the opera. Occasionally a group of men are in prison, or, a submarine, or go looking for gold in Mexico. The fact that females are omitted from such pictures is hailed with awe by the critics and sometimes even accepted by many of the patrons. These do not affect the rule. There is also the welcome branching out into the so-called semi-documentary film, in which romance is subordinated, but this is an expansion of technique, not of basic subject matter. ' I 'HE time has come when produc-* ers are stirring restlessly, wondering if there isn't more to it than has been told, and audiences, we find, tend to stay away from pictures after attaining the age of thirty-five, having by then, presumably, discovered the facts of life. Hence the producers cry for new ideas and use the writer as a whipping-boy because he does not have them handy. What new changes can be rung on the formula of a slick-paper romance between two pretty people? What chance has the writer of bringing to the screen what his perceptions dictate if he perceives issues and values and drama outside the pale of the formula ? What if he happens to want to say, out of his experience, that there are stresses in married life which cast ominous shadows even as the star 14 The Screen Writer, May, 1948