The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

by Frank Hursley on the contrary, is specifically upon the functioning writer. In that respect, The Screen Writer is like any professional journal. The fact that it is written by screen writers for screen writers is in itself a pretty good guarantee that it make sense. In the thirty-six numbers which I have read, I cannot recall a single piece which was not an intelligent expression of an intelligent and honest point of view — and this in a field which is practically a provocation to drivel. Many of the articles were ardent. You had the feeling that the typewriter had hardly cooled off from some particularly irritating job before the wielder of the instrument was pounding it again to ask why such things should be and to hell with it. But always, whether in anger or in detached analysis, in despair over the movies as they are or excited with what they might be, or in the plain recording of factual experience, he had to make sense. The doctor writing in the medical journal had better steer clear of hoke. TPHE job The Screen Writer is -* doing is a job that badly needs to be done. That job, as I see it, is to explore critically every circumstance that impinges on the problem of how better screen plays can be written. It is familiar matter that the moving picture is still something new, that its potentiality has not been realized, that as an art form it has not teen given definition and delineation in the way that, for example, the novel or the stage play has. Furthermore, its development as an artistic product is inhibited or accelerated, in any event controlled, by a complex of technical and financial consideration such as have plagued no other form of art. One of the most valuable services being performed, and it seems to me brilliantly and realistically, by The Screen Writer is the exploration of the milieu of the screen play. Certainly among the most valuable articles that have appeared in The Screen Writer are those in which the writers — and I may say they do a zestful job of it — lay bare the economic structure of the movie industry. Nobody knows better than the screen writer that the economics and aesthetics of moviedom are never very far apart. On this point, and it's obviously an important one, I judge from The Screen Writer that screen writers have no objection to the movies making money. In fact, they would even like them to make more money, but they, apparently, have some differences with the front office over how that can best be done. It seems to be the conviction of the latter that, since nineteen-year-olds attend the movies in the greatest numbers, the movies should be designed to attract nineteen-year-olds. The screen writers, very realistically I believe, point out the greatest potential audience for the movies is the mass of adults who seldem, or never, attend the movies and that this audience can be attracted only by more adult pictures. This is the only direction in which the movies can advance either artistically or financially. The most hopeful thing I know about the movies is that the screen writers are all for going after adults with adult pictures. How to create adult pictures and do it effectively poses another prob lem. Certainly a terrific amount of debris from the unsavory past of the movies has to be sent to the incinerator. That all hands are eager to join in this ceremony is indicated by the vigorous, and hilarious, onslaught upon cliches in the movies launched by Roland Kibbee's "Stop Me If You Wrote This Before," and quickly followed by I.A.L. Diamond's "Darling! You Mean . . .?", and Ken Englund's "Quick! Boil Some Hot Cliches." (You should be a radio writer after reading these three pieces. Kibbee and company leave you nothing to write about and no known way of writing it.) I j UT it isn't enough merely to -*— " clean house and get rid of the gimcracks and gewgaws left over from the days of the stereopticon. The house itself has to be remodeled. The thoughtful series of articles by Sheridan Gibney, to mention only one contribution to the architecture of the adult screenplay, would seem to be ver}' sound building. "The screen writer must present a continuous action, sustained through many scenes to a final climax ■ — ■ at which point the picture ends. In this respect the 'form' is closer to the Shakesperian drama than to the modern three-act play. The writer is presenting a series of tiny little scenes designed to have a cumulative effect. — It might be said that he (the screen writer) is writing a long one-act play in two or three hundred scenes." The most insistent demand, voiced time and time again in The Screen Writer and implicit in practically every article, is that the production of (Continued on Page 22) The Screen Writer, June-July, 1948 15