The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

Teaching The Young Idea How To Feel By KENNETH MACGOWAN LOOKING out from the cool, and quiet of the academic shades — and back three or four years — I seem to remember studio debates on the value of education. They were one-sided debates. A writer said just what he though of some producer who had never known the benefits of higher education, and the next day another writer tore another producer apart for trying to live up to an LL.D. acquired in his misspent youth. Is education good for the film maker? Or for the man or woman who works in the other two theatre arts — the stage and radio? I think so, but that is not the point of this article. Education may or may not be good for the theatre arts, but I know that the theatre arts are good for education. George Pierce Baker began shoving the theatre at a reluctant Harvard faculty forty-five years ago. He won the undergraduate body, or at least a very vocal part of it. He attracted to his playwriting class in Cambridge and later in New Haven youngsters who turned out to be Eugene O'Neill, Sam Behrman, Sidney Howard, George Abbott, Philip Barry, Maurine Watkins, Talbot Jennings, George Sklar, Albert Maltz, George Haight. From this demonstration that playwriting and education could be profitably associated it was a short but very vigorous step to bringing all aspects of the theatre into the university curriculum — and some of them down into the high schools. Now radio and the film follow along. I mention radio first because it is taught far more widely than film in the universities, and it threatens to displace the interest of the high school student in stage production. This is a natural result of the ease and economy with which radio can be taught and enjoyed through a mike, a recording machine, a record, and a loudspeaker, compared with the far greater expense of working with film. Yet the skills as well as the uses of the motion picture are being taught in universities. Under the head of visual aids in education, many institutions teach the use of film. A few, like Minnesota and Penn State, maintain production units to make film for distribution by their extension divisions. More colleges are exploring these possibilities, and also looking for people who can teach film. Four universities have definite curriculums — Southern California, New York University, the College of the City of New York, and UCLA. BESIDES the basic question of whether education is good for the theatre, the movies and the radio, and whether they are good in turn for education, there are a lot of other problems involved in the teaching and learning of these three theatre arts. Can you teach them effectively without turning an educational institution into a trade school? Can you teach film or radio without teaching theatre? Who can teach these subjects effectively — men and women with A.M.'s and Ph.D.'s or students and graduates of film studios and radio stations? When I say I think UCLA has the answers, I take no credit, for the basic scheme of teaching there and the basic curriculum were worked out by a faculty committee before I became the chairman of the new Department of Theatre Arts. No university should be a trade school ; its job is turning out men and women with broad interests and sensitivities as well as trained minds. (Incidentally, education, even in a trade school, won't open the doors of the film studios.) Too much specialization in either the stage, the screen, or radio, is profitless. UCLA avoids this not only by requiring a broad education outside a major area, but also by giving the student of film or radio a grounding in theatre, too. THE three theatre arts are joined in one department at UCLA — and not elsewhere — because the two younger arts have grown out of the older, because the younger can be taught more easily on the basis of training in the fundamentals of theatre, and because this prevents too narrow a concentration on the newer, superficially more attractive, and speciously more profitable arts. To be boringly concrete, during the first two years all students in the Theatre Arts Department take courses in the fundamentals of acting, the history of the theatre, and the physical crafts involved in stage production. They must pass a course called Social Aspects of Mass Communication that is designed to give them a broad sense of the audience they may be dealing with, and their responsibilities if they elect to practice or teach theatre arts, The Screen Writer, August, 194