The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

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(which might have taught the writer something and bettered the paper), it would be cut out, rewritten or tossed back at him. You never see dialogue in newspapers the way the people speak it. And of course one result of this is that, when they essay to do a picture or a novel, newspapermen rarely know how to write dialogue ; they hardly ever have any ear for it because any natural talent has already been corrupted by the stupid practices of practically every city room in the country. When people talk they say "er" and "uh" and make grammatical errors and get wound up in sentences that run into others and never finish ; they say salty, odd, twisted phrases, they sprinkle in curses, they leap from topic to topic within sentences. The reporter hears them talk this way, but it is not the way they talk in the stories he writes for the paper. There they all sound the same — the tired phrases like political oratory, all neatly rounded. They convert human speech into a stiff, unreal tasteless pap. I have digressed a little here and I may as well carry it through and add that the newspapers which so freely and often criticize motion pictures for cliches in dialogue and story had better take a look at themselves and the lazy, threadbare, cliche-ridden prose' which they serve up to their own customers. But my point here is that this kind of training can obviously be fatal to the writer whose need will be. later to set down human speech as if it were spoken by live people. After all, you tell all your play in dialogue, and a goodly part of your screenplay, and you ought to have an acute ear for living speech — which you can not have after years of writing what passes for human talk in the newspapers. THE enormous success of Time and Life is in part attributable to the tasteless sawdust writing and lethargy of the newspapers ; these magazines, unhampered by the old hacks, old ideas, and inertia that rule most newspapers, write freshly, and quote people at least partly the way they actually speak. They cover news and write it with a different outlook. However, they, too, are brutally stylized and more than a short term on them would also stultify genuine talent. I think the few competent screenwriters and dramatists who once worked on newspapers had a harder road than if they had not done so, and that their brilliance now is in spite of their newspaper experience and never even remotely because of it. And I think any young man who is drawn to the over-rated trade of newspapering as a possible stepping stone to dramatic writing should be warned to avoid it at any cost. It is likely to kill his talent. Kenneth Macgowan {Continued from Page 10) contribution, not only to the students who study these arts, but also to those who come in contact with its products— its plays, its films, its radio work. Too often the teacher and the administrator think and talk of a university's aim as "teaching a man to think." That is a fine aim, a necessary aim ; but it is also important to teach a man to feel, to feel finely and fully and also critically. Thinking, except in some special fields, is not divorced from feeling. We may behave as though it were, but by so much we are debasing thinking and adding to the friction of life. It is difficult to think except on the basis of feeling ; the man who has learned to feel and who knows how to help others to feel makes a contribution to the kind of consciousness of life out of which healthful, personal and social relationships may grow. That, too, is education. Kenneth Macgowan, author, critic, stage and motion picture producer, is now chairman of the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of California at Los Angeles. William Morris Agency, Inc. NEW YORK * BEVERLY HILLS * CHICAGO * LONDON EST. )QQQ( 1898 The Screen Writer, August, 194 25