Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood to exhibit the movies as an even thinner kind of exhibition by contrast. They proved clearly that the real function of an everyday film is to offer a cheap, restful, and innocuous drug to lethargic and work-tired masses. But the function of providing cheap drugs to tired masses would not support magnates, supervisors, stars, directors, camera-men, and authors at their inflated salaries. So the sick movies were wildly seeking for any road by which they might recapture novelty and thus climb back to the position they had lost. Directors such as Lubitsch, Murnau, Vidor, or Von Sternberg were trying to push technique to higher realms of artistic expression. Authors like Ornitz were struggling for greater honesty of expression. Colour had been tried with little success. Suddenly the movietone appeared, and the capitalists cried with a unanimous voice : "We are saved." Clearly they were saved. Why, queues of people waited for hours to see Warners* first ioo-per-cent. talking-film. At a bound movies had recaptured novelty and, with novelty, the uncritical interest of a great American public. In consequence every big movie lot clamoured with a fury of building. Cement-mixers clattered day and night compounding material for deep foundations of pure concrete that should isolate the apparatus from all earthy tremors ; forests of iron wires sprouted, the backbones of thick, reinforced walls ; millions of capital were being flung back into the movies* last hope : huge sound-proof studios in which, once completed, you might shut yourself away and find there the very silence of the dead itself. But, though magnates and supervisors might chant paeans of relief, there was no such rejoicing among the other branches of the industry. Stars, directors, and even the Milky Way were inclined to believe that the cure was almost worse than the disease. Charlie Chaplin, the one actor whose position [>74]