(1918)
This is the last of a series of three articles dealing with the inner side of the motion picture industry. The previous articles appeared in The Independent of August 24 and December 7.
In annis domini 1915 and 1916 the favorite outdoor sport was picture making. Gentlemen of swollen wealth- or of no wealth at all, but blest with credit and assurance- hastened to southern California or other semi-tropic paradise and helped Art cut up capers. The general obsession was that "anybody could make a picture." Why, certainly he can, just as anybody can write a dull book, or design a tame sketch, or compose a 'pointless' play. The job is always experimental, for even the practised artificer in one kind may quite fail in another. I purpose in this article to tell of three attempts at pictorial greatness that may serve to illustrate the virtues and the limitations of the screen.
My friend the Author stood in the foremost ranks of America's "best sellers." One of his novels had been picturized with enormous success. The director of the production was a veritable wizard of the films. There came a rift between the two men which widened into a personal breach. "Go to!" said the Author. "The plot, characters, incidents, settings, all were mine. Of my next story, I shall be the director general!"
True to his word, the Author organized a stock company, bought land, built a studio, hired players, cameramen and technicians, and completed his picture operations during the California winter season. Then he came to New York and engaged a Broadway theater, entrusting me with the work of publicity- a congenial task, as I admired his talent and liked him personally. With a great fanfare of advertising and on the whole a favorable verdict from the press, we embarked on a Broadway run to tremendous opening receipts. Within a month the business dropt to practically nothing, and in six weeks we were obliged to close.
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The causes of the failure were (1) an old story, (2) a poorly selected cast, (3) bad direction. Some time later the Wizard Director who used to be the Author's partner came to bat with a rival and authorless production. He lasted three months and a half, then had to close. This work was characterized by no story, great acting and superb direction. The point is that each man needed the other, tho neither would admit it. When they broke apart, the creative impulse ceased to function. My next connection was a "low-brow" job in which my dealings were with a cunning but uneducated and almost illiterate type of showmanship. It consisted first in exploiting a well-known vaudeville star in allegorical film spectacle and afterward in writing up an underworld drama. The first task would have appealed to a Phidias, and the second to a policeman. The lady was the frankest and the most innocent that I had ever met. Like most vaudevillians she was sedately and happily married, her husband being a sort of fidus Achetes who fetched and carried with the utmost zeal. "Director slighted us horribly in the field photography," he explained. "He paid Mimette no attention whatever- actually allowed her no personal stills in the nude! We fixed that," he added naively, "by hiring our own ‘still’ artist, taking train down to the end of the Jersey coast, and posing her in 'the altogether' among the ocean sands and the pine woods."
It occurred to me that such a Grecian nymph had best be represented in the advertising "copy" by reproductions of Aphrodite rising from the sea or disporting Eros and Psyche. When, however, I showed the Phidias and Praxiteles reproductions to the head of the company, he yelled: "Trash! Trash! Don't you know any better than to bring me junk like that?" 'Twas evident the proprietor's classical education had been neglected. Per contra, his ideals of female loveliness were founded on the Irish-American and Teutonic "Egyptian dancers" at Coney Island. Consequently all our advertising campaign centered around the heroine as an Egyptian princess to whom the danse du ventre was no mystery.
About this time the proprietor and the director of the show fell out over the question whether the director's name should appear in three-foot characters on the billboard posters. The proprietor decided it should not, whereupon the two parted company, and it was understood that the director was to be barred from admission to the theater on the opening night of his own handiwork. The boss' factotum even personally took the tickets at the door. The director, being an actor, knew how to fool 'em; he enjoyed the performance from an aisle seat in the third orchestra row, having smuggled himself inside in the guise of a physician with the aid of property whiskers borrowed from a wigmaker. He also caused the newspaper to print conspicuously the fact that he had made the picture.
The long, rambling spectacle illustrated the appalling ignorance that causes so many movie attempts to miss solid excellence. It was in fact compiled from a dozen persons' hazy recollections of British pantomime, the contradictory mythologies of many nations being scrambled into it and almost every sort of scene or stunt being used. The effect of it was a "stag" burlesque show; but the boss, with his curious, topsy-turvy ideas, featured it as a "fairyland idyl for women and children." I personally arranged short tours for the star to the more important cities where she appeared before large feminine audiences and told 'em how to be "healthy, happy and wise." My efforts likewise succeeded in getting her face, figure and life-story into the magazines, and for a while she was the most talked of woman in America.
The burlesque spectacle lasted half a season, after which we did the underworld drama. The latter had a sociological squint, so we were busy rounding up authors, feature writers and social reform experts. The picture itself was a really creditable piece of work. It "got" the police and their quarries and the specialists who are trying to reform conditions, but nevertheless failed to arouse the public outside this class interest. One extraordinary idea of the boss was to attract attention by means of scathing indictments of distinguished public men for their alleged slighting of the wrongs exposed in the play. This was worked up in a series of "open letter" advertisements in which each statesman was publicly addrest. The cunning scheme would have proved sure-fire for one untimely element: the country was on the brink of war and Americans recked little what their statesmen did or thought concerning any lesser issue. The dramatic picture lasted about as long as the spectacle.
It is often asked, Does extravagance still prevail in Filmland? Yes; but it has been reduced materially, and will be still further curtailed by the war. Perhaps half a dozen popular screen idols net a personal income of several hundred thousand dollars each per annum. It should be understood clearly that they "draw" this, i.e., each attracts a total patronage so enormous that the stars' salary is only a fair percentage of the intake. Indeed the compensation is scaled on this very basis: 65 per cent of the receipts of a picture goes to the public favorite who made it. Out of that 65 per cent he or she must defray all the production expense an arrangement which obviously encourages economy. The other 35 per cent of the picture rentals from the cinema theaters, goes to the distributing company. These companies have shortened sail, and some of them are running at half-mast. The average cinema actor is not overpaid. Gentlemen of swollen wealth are no longer taking "fliers" in the films, there's so much else to spend money on in these serious times; picture magnates have quit vying with each other as to "million-dollar spectacles"; the bidding up of stars from the theatrical world has stopped altogether.
Another query: Why don't the manufacturers make useful pictures? Simply because they're purveyors of commercialized amusement, no more called upon to produce educationals than fiction publishers are to issue textbooks. The impulse toward useful pictures must come from the outside. Educators must be won over to the cause of cinema instruction, and the eyes of philanthropists opened to the fact that film universities are exactly as important as book libraries or college professorships.
On the side of artistry, the fiction-picture has improved vastly thru the recognition of the scenario-writer. We no longer hear of the director "throwing away the scenario" and relying on his Caesar-like self to complete the story. It is found better and cheaper to hire able authors and advertise their collaboration than to steal ideas or to plagiarize unconsciously. Any kind of a first-class scenario gets at least $500. Magazines and books are scrutinized for good stories by known authors, and the filming rights are bought for round sums. It is even beginning to dawn on the trade or the craft or whatever you like to call the motion picture industry, that "scenic productions" and other Persian apparatus have little to do with artistic excellence. Given a handful of players, an author's creativeness, and a director's skill, and you have the potentiality of a masterpiece.
I cannot believe that the present system of a dozen giant corporations- each centering in itself the functions of producing, exploiting and distributing- is the best for artistic development. The product is too apt to be of a machine-like character, and it seems to me that better results could be obtained with the production-units kept separate and distinct. Two or three big sales agencies could furnish all the distribution necessary for the United States. The first three years of the war gave the United States an overwhelming lead over all the other nations in the international film mart. In the trade war that will follow the military struggle, economy and efficiency will be the watchwords.
Captions:
Restaurants were built inside of studios and cabaret entertainments of enormous cost were given to the "patrons," who ate real food and drank vintage wines.
"Confessions of a Motion Picture Press Agent," The Independent, December 21, 1918, pages 398, 407.
© 1999, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)
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