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The satirizing of Hollywood is now firmly entrenched as one
of the most thriving branches of the national literary
industry. The genesis of this staple is easy to trace. To
make fun of Hollywood is, in the first place, extremely
simple. Its vulnerabilities are manifold; almost without
aiming, you may fire and scarcely miss. An industry which is
forced by the exigencies of its demands to turn out five
hundred or more productions a year in a medium that twenty
years ago hardly existed is bound to commit gaucheries, and
these so glaring, often, that to lampoon them you do not
precisely have to be a wit. Secondly, the popular interest
in pictures is so enormous that discussion of them and their
protagonists, no matter what the plane, will attract
readers. The incredible effusions of the film magazines,
which exceed in banality the most bathetic of the product
they eulogize, are an indication of what the more literate
sections of the film public will stand; behind this stratum,
of course, is a vast hinterland of fans, for whom even an
idle hour with a film magazine must be a strenuous
intellectual exercise, like an excursion into Spengler or
Marcel Proust. These presumably, as they do in the picture
theatres, merely scan the photographs.
The great mass, therefore, of Hollywood criticism, whether
adulatory or vituperative, does not in itself merit
appraisal. But rising to the surface of this flotsam there
does occasionally emerge a rebuke that, owing to the
sincerity and eminence of the author, challenges a reply
from the dissident. Of such, in the last several years,
there have been four: from I. A. R. Wylie in Harper's,
Edmund Wilson in "The American Jitters," Sidney Howard
(most virulent of all) in the New Republic, and
Bernard Shaw in the Metropolitan Opera House. Mr. Shaw
denounced the immorality of Hollywood, rightly enough, not
on the score of sexual extravagance but because it exalts
the "sock in the jaw" as a means of settling differences of
opinion among individuals. (One Hollywood executive told me
that he was stung by this criticism into ordering a sketch,
for a revue he was planning, in which the hero, while his
sweetheart is being pummeled by the villain, sits
frantically jiggling the receiver to get the police station
on the telephone!) For Mr. Shaw to expect Hollywood to
eliminate entirely the "sock in the jaw" as a popular human
expression, when the wisest and most altruistic spirits have
made little progress in abolishing it from international
relations, is somewhat quixotic. Lord Irwin, retiring as
Viceroy to India, in a London speech attributed the
decline of white prestige in the East to four causes: the
defeat of Russia by Japan, the employment of colored men by
white in the Great War to fight their battles for them, the
unresolved irritations in India, and the picture of
Occidental civilization as reflected in the films from
Hollywood! Not all its honeyed sentimentalities can conceal
from the observant Oriental that life here in America is
something less than civilized, but to blame Hollywood for
this failure in concealment is to be as unreasonable as Mr.
Shaw. If anything, the Hollywood magnates are creatures of
this time, and it is unfair to expect them to raise,
single-handed, the ethical level around them. Before the
films themselves become more edifying, the moeurs
they reflect will have to be improved, and after all these
men are not, and do not pretend to be, either educators or
uplifters but businessmen.
Mr. Howard, for example, puts a good deal of the blame for
the meretriciousness of the films on the fact that they are
made in Los Angeles. Granted that Los Angeles, as H. G.
Wells once said of Chicago, is the "abeyance of
civilization," does Mr. Howard really believe that the
disparity in civilization is so great between Los Angeles,
Decatur, Atlanta, Boston, and Princess Anne that you would
get a different product if the film capital were transferred
to any of these Athenian resorts? To have the pictures made
in New York would really be unfair, because there is a great
deal to be said for the charge that in its tolerance, in its
intellectual ferment, and in its social promiscuity, New
York is un-American. The truth is that even the sincerest
and most enlightened of these criticisms are academic, in
that they are based on a misconception of the basic fact
that pictures are a mob art and that the sentimentalities
and the banalities inherent in them are reflections of
identical volition in the public they serve. I can
understand Mr. Wilson and Miss Wylie because neither of
them, I imagine, has had any practical contact with
picture-making, but I can't understand Mr. Howard. Surely he
has read the cards at previews which reflect the taste of
the fans. My first revelation of the mental common
denominator of the film public came at my first film preview
in San Jose, California. At the picture previews—which
correspond to out-of-town tryouts of plays the sponsors
distribute cards so that the audience may register its
opinion of the film. The occasion of my initiation was the
advance showing of Molnár's
"Liliom." Except for a negligible minority—contemptuously
dismissed by the producer as highbrow—the opinions were in a
realm which Münsterberg
used to describe as the "intellectual underworld." Many of
the cards sent in by the sensitive citizenry denounced the
Fox Film Company for allowing a nice American boy like
Charles Farrell to play a part in which he strikes a woman!
The amazing thing is that any executive should have had the
foolhardiness to antagonize the tide of sentimentality,
predictable enough, by producing Molnár's
"Liliom" at all!
And this to me is the true news story of the film capital:
the courage and often foolhardy recklessness of experiment,
the long chances the executives take. Imagine, for example,
producing Sierra's "The Cradle Song," of which Richard Watts
said the other day that it has "a gentle, fragile tenderness
which makes even 'Little Women' seem a rowdy adventure in
typical melodrama." The desire of the average executive in
Hollywood to do something good is really pathetic. The
overpaid hacks who sit around in the Brown Derby lamenting
the masterpieces they would be writing if their souls were
not being scarified in Hollywood are less sincere than the
frankly commercial executive with his eye—often enough
myopic—on the box office, and often their aims are less
lofty. Incidentally, the extent to which the executives in
Hollywood have been bullied and exploited by "artists,"
literary and other in varying degrees, passes belief. Many
of the executives, survivors from the silent era, have a
phobia of the written word; "talk," "dialogue" confound
them, and this ignorance and this fear have cost them
plenty. The racketeering of the executives at their worst
has nothing on the racketeering of the writers and artists
at their worst; if Voltaire were in Hollywood, I have a
strong notion that it is the artists he would decimate and
not the executives. Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Moss Hart chose the
executives in "Once in a Lifetime" because neither of them
had ever been there. Mr. Moss Hart's second lampoon, the
Fairbanks-Crawford divorce sketch in the current "As
Thousands Cheer," which is at once subtler and truer,
concerns the artists. After he wrote "Once in a Lifetime,"
Mr. Hart went to Hollywood!
In none of these strictures on Hollywood, neither in Miss
Wylie's, nor in Mr. Wilson's, nor in Mr. Howard's, do you
get any faint inkling that Charlie Chaplin was brought to
world fame by Hollywood and that he has done all his work
there. You get no inkling that anything good has come out of
Hollywood at all—that it has produced and sustained, for
example, some of the finest directors in any theatre. They
never mention that Mr. Lewis Milestone did "All Quiet on the
Western Front" there, a magnificent anti-war document which
has stirred the whole world, except in those places where
the militaristic authorities have been afraid to let it
appear; that Mr. Ernst Lubitsch, one of the wittiest and
most resourceful of living directors, functions agreeably in
this Eldorado (Mr. Lubitsch's pictures, incidentally, are
not supposed to pay; the companies keep supporting him and
he is given carte blanche, year after year, on
the score of prestige); or that Miss Greta Garbo, in whom
many discerning people see a spark of divinity, came to
world fame there. The instances could he multiplied. The
majority of theatrical productions and the mass of the
fictional output in this country would stand up no better
under this kind of searching appraisal than Hollywood does.
Mr. Wilson makes a great point of Hollywood's suppression of
Mr. Eisenstein. It would have taken an appropriation from
the Rockefeller Foundation properly to distribute Mr.
Eisenstein's film: in its original length, it ran several
hundred thousand feet; the cut version Mr. Upton Sinclair
finally managed to carve out of it, with an idyllic finish
tacked on to satisfy the Mexican jingoes, has hardly been
able to sustain itself. The original, I am told, is longer
than "Mourning Becomes Electra."
Without exception, the Hollywood satirists—except when they
are, as they reproach the producers for being, frankly
commercial—are either academic or unfair. I imagine that the
producing group in Hollywood have done as well as any group
could have done in the face of the unprecedented impact of
the demand for pictures by a public circling the globe.
(Certainly a brief period, during the last few years, when
the bankers were reading and passing on scripts produced
some humorous contingencies; in one instance, a
distinguished financial gentleman unused to the custom of
sending half-finished scripts to the executive offices
mistook a fragment for the whole, okayed it, and later
protested against a "sequel" which was merely the last half
of the story!) On the whole, I am inclined to agree with Mr.
Arthur Richman, who says that in the majority of the issues
between executives and artists the executives are right.
The simple truth is that the difficulties of transferring
vehicles from other media to the screen are immense. A
virtuoso of this subtle alchemy, Miss Sonya Levien—whom Guy
Bolton describes as "chief liaison officer between good
taste and the movies" and who has to her credit such films
as "Cavalcade," "State Fair," and "Berkeley Square"—manages
to transmute the works assigned to her so sensitively that,
in most cases, the authors of the originals shower her with
blessings, but the labor is heroic and beset with pitfalls.
Most of the difficulties of transposition come from the fact
that the original vehicles are written for publics
infinitely smaller and more special than the movie one, and
since ideas are actually less elastic than more mechanical
structures, they refuse stubbornly to yield to isolated
modification. In practice, one modification leads to
another, and finally the entire contour of the original work
has to be altered. This is why so many people are startled
by the remoteness of a picture from the original on which it
is based. The question arises: Why do the companies buy
these things? And the answer is that they must produce
something; that they are not fed, as the theatres and the
magazines and the publishers are, with original work. They
have to beg, borrow, buy, or steal material.
And it is this condition, I respectfully submit to Miss
Wylie, to Mr. Wilson, to Mr. Howard, and even to Mr. Shaw,
that is, from their point of view, the real trouble with the
Hollywood product. It is that Mr. Howard, when he gets an
idea (and very properly!), puts it into a play or a book.
Nobody wants to give an idea which may serve for anything
else to pictures. The films have inspired no one to write
for them except on salary. When Mr. Howard writes a play, or
when I write a play, we are willing to trust to the vitality
we have put into it to sustain it before the public. We are
not willing to do that with pictures. This dilemma of the
picture business is to my mind—I hope I may prove to be
mistaken—insoluble. Writing for pictures, as a matter of
fact, isn't, as compared to other forms of writing, very
much fun. It is bits-and-pieces writing. The individual
scenes are small. You can't get a run on them. You are
constantly cutting away to some other place. The physical
limitations of playwriting, the agonizing technical
difficulties imposed by the very compactness of the medium,
the impossibility of leaving a room, force you to a
disciplinary freedom, to concentration and fluency. The
great freedom of pictures, the fact that you can go
anywhere, is boring and harassing, like a perpetual picnic.
There is no reason someone shouldn't come along who might
use this extraordinary medium with a Shakespearean fullness.
He might inspire a group who will write for pictures because
they prefer it, and not because they can't write anything
else. Pending that millennium, the producers will be forced
to use the hacks and those established writers who
contemptuously accept the enormous fees paid them for the
leavings of their creative talents. |
