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Speaking of hokum always reminds me of the town strumpet. And that always reminds me of Grandpa, because I stole the line from him. Grandpa had the right idea about hokum. "Hokum," he always used to say as he dangled me over his knee and read me Frank Merriwell, "is like the town strumpet. Nobody will admit knowing her; but nobody's not known her — if you will pardon the double negative."
What I'm trying to say is that no Hollywood writer will ever admit he injects the hokum hypodermic into his delicate brain babies. Yet should he fail to hop them up with a couple of pleasure bindles, they'd die of the dreaded Hollywood disease — BoxOffice Anaemia.
Then he'd be forced to give up his selffiltering swimming pool with the cupids along the edge, those intellectual Sunday evenings at the Trocadero, necking his stenographer, his valley ranch with badminton court and rumpus room, and go back to writing punctuationless verse for the magazines.
I'll go still further. Were Hollywood suddenly to stop lushing up its assorted product with hokum, the producers would have to close the joint and turn it back to its original owners — the most shiftless, worthless tribe of Real Estate Indians that ever lived — who, I understand, don't want it anyway.
Rashly I shall attempt to prove all this. First, let me say I haven't the slightest idea what hokum is, except that I know circuses don't flop and "terrific," "stupendous," "colossal" still sell tickets. Aside from that,
press me to the wall with a gun in my ribs, threaten to tear up my contract if I don't tell, and I'd say hokum was a deliberate attempt to assault an audience sitting helplessly and without defence with well known, time-tried theatrical devices that nauseate George Jean Nathan.
These include such items as the Chase, the Spectacle, Mother Love, the Heavy Father, the Boy and Girl, the Marines to the Rescue, the Gigantic Catastrophe. These and sundry other dramatic gadgets calculated to jog the nerves agreeably, rouse the flush of tears to the sentimental eye, titillate the well known animal sense, or in some way drench the sitter in inartistic glucosity. All with one of the writer's eyes on the box-office and the other on a second Duesenberg.