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OPEN LETTER TO AMERICAN SCREEN WRITERS
It would give us great pleasure to be known to you.
You will see, we will have a good time together, we will get along fine and you will find out that we’re not such awful guys after all . . .
You will then wonder why people were so slow in introducing us to each other, why they built up between us so many walls and bulwarks of money, why we wasted so many beautiful years without knowing each other.
Well, it’s very simply because someone found it to his interest to keep us separated, to isolate us in our continent, yes, it is because we have the same adversaries, the same foes. And who are these mutual enemies of ours?
First of all hypocrisy with her handmaidens, the moral, religious, puritanical, capitalistic and sectarian censorships; then the trusts and monopolies, in fact if not in name. Finally, the imbeciles whom more or less everywhere in the world one meets in studios and outside of them, the thousandlegged imbeciles, the innumerable imbeciles, male and female, whose imbecility extends to all of nature, the imbeciles who only too often get the best of the intelligent people . . . They know very well that our getting together, which they have tried so hard to put off, will mean a thousand disturbances for them, and that the agreements we will sign among ourselves will have over the ones signed in Washington the advantage of having been conceived by technicians of good faith for whom the film is something else than what is talked about in the dimestore magazines and in the corridors of Parliaments . . .
The cinema is also a bloc.
We are all part and parcel of the same thing.
We French writers are the ones who taught our public to like your films. There is a long list of motion picture people from Louis Delluc to Cocteau, by way of Antoine, Marcel Achard, Alexandre Arnoux, Pierre Bost, Beucler, Michel Duran, Nino Frank, Jacques Natanson, Steve Passeur, Carlo Rim, Pierre Seize, Philippe Soupault, Bernard Zimmer and the unforgettable Desnos, who showed our spectators (who did not always know how to see it) the true meaning of a film of Mr. King Vidor or Riskin. It was Louis Delluc, screen writer, poet, director, critic and novelist, who showed the crowd the way to Chaplin and who gave Chap¬ lin his title of nobility. Delluc devoted a whole portion of his life, through
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