Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

The D\dovietone in France Yes, I understood, but I reflected desperately : " How can a man listen visibly?" The answer popped into my mind: "With the eyes." So, in addition to facial expression, appropriate movement and speech, I had to invent ways of using my eyes expressive of different moods of listening — four collaborations to harmonize instinctively. At last the grim watchers expressed a qualified approval. " Lights on 1 " said the director. At once the massed illumination blazed into my eyes. The basting-tins, with groups of twenty huge incandescent lights apiece, poured glory over me, while over their shoulders the big moons of arc-lamps concentrated on me long columns of light. But, in addition to light, they also flooded me with heat. I felt like Lamb's sucking-pig on a spit. If they had spun me round I should have browned nicely and would no doubt have provided quite excellent crackling. My mind was already perspiring with stage-fright ; my body perspired to match. Beyond the massed lights everything was black ; only the youth held the open clappers dangerously near my nose. " After the clappers have clapped," said the director's voice from the blackness, " count five slowly in your mind and then begin." I had a horrible sense of helplessness before those inanimate mechanisms, the camera and the microphone. They were as abstract as the stars, uninterested. In front of a human audience a slip could be corrected, a fault excused. But no exercise of personality could influence those frigid mechanisms. Only a week before C had told me that an English colonel, accustomed to command, had broken down helplessly under the fright of that mere mechanical audience. An actor draws vitality from the audience itself: it helps him on ; but here was nothing but the dazzling, burning light, the unresponsive darkness, and these aloof recording instruments. [299]