An Open Letter to the Movie Magnates

The Failure of the Producers, and Why They Should Heed the Handwriting on the Wall

VIVIAN SHAW

IGNORANT and Unhappy people:

The Lord has brought you into a narrow place—what you would call a tight corner— and you are beginning to feel the pressure. A voice is heard in the land saying that your day is over. The name of the voice is Radio, broadcasting nightly to announce that the unequal struggle between the tired washerwoman and the captions written by or for Mr. Griffith is ended. It is easier to listen than to read. And it is long since you have given us anything significant to see.

You may say that radio will ruin the movies no more than the movies ruined the theater. The difference is that your foundation is insecure: you are monstrously over-capitalized and monstrously under-educated; the one thing you cannot stand is a series of lean years. You have to keep on going because you have from the beginning considered the pictures as a business, not as an entertainment. Perhaps in your desperate straits you will for the first time try to think about the movie, to see it steadily and see it whole.

My suggestion to you is that you engage a number of men and women: an archaeologist to unearth the history of the moving picture; a mechanical genius to explain the camera and the projector to you; a typical movie fan if you can find one; and above all a man of no practical capacity whatever, a theorist. Let these people get to work for you; do what they tell you to do. You will hardly lose more money than in any other case.

IF the historian tells you that the pictures you produced in 1910 were better than those you now lose money" on, he is worthless to you. But if he fails to tell you that the pictures of 1910 pointed the way to the really right thing and that you have since departed from that way, discharge him as a fool. For that is exactly what has occurred. In your beginnings you were on the right track; I believe that in those days you still looked at the screen. Ten years later you were too busy looking at, or after, your bank account. Remember that ten years ago there wasn't a great name in the movies. And then, thinking of your present plight, recall that you deliberately introduced great names and chose Sir Gilbert Parker, Rupert Hughes, and Mrs. Elinor Glyn. If I may quote an author you haven't filmed, it shall not be forgiven you.

Your historian ought to tell you that the moving picture came into being as the result of a series of mechanical developments; your technician will add the details about the camera and projector. From both you will learn that you are dealing with movement governed by light. It will be news to you. You seem not to realize the simplest thing about your business. Further you will learn that everything you need to do must be done by these two agencies: movement and light. (Counting in movement everything of pace and in light everything which light can make visible to the eye, even if it be an emotion: do you recall the unnatural splash of white in a street scene in Caligari? It will occur to you that the cut-back, the alternating exposition of two concurrent actions, the vision, the dream, are all good; and that the close-up, dearest of all your finds, usually' dissociates a face or an object from its moving background and is the most dangerous of expedients. You will learn much from the camera and from what was done with it in the early days.

I warn you again they' were not great pictures—except for The Avenging Conscience and—one you didn't make—Cabiria. To each of these a poet contributed. (Peace, Mr. Griffith; the poet in your case was E. A. Poe; and the warrior poet of Fiume contributed the scenario for the second.) Mr. Griffith contrived in his picture to project both beauty and terror by combining Annabel Lee with The Tell-tale Heart. A sure instinct led him to disengage the vast emotion of longing and of lost love through an action of mystery and terror. (I think he made a happy ending somehow—by having the central portion of his story appear as a dream. How little it mattered since the real emotion came through the story!) The picture was projected in a palpable atmosphere; it was felt. After ten years I recall dark masses and ghostly rays of light. And if I may anticipate the end, let me compare it with a picture of 1922, a picturization as you call it, of Annabel Lee. It was all scenery and captions; it presented a detestable little boy and a pretty little girl doing aesthetic dancing along cliffs by the sea; one almost saw the Ocean View Hotel in the background. Mercilessly the stanzas appeared on the screen; but nothing was allowed to happen except a vulgar representation of calf-love. I cannot bear to describe the disagreeable picture of grief at the end; I do not dare to think what you ma_v now be preparing with a really great poem. The lesson is not merely one of taste; it is a question of knowing the camera, of realizing that you must project emotion by movement and by' picture combined.

Tradition vs. Bogus Art

I AM trying to trace for you the development of the serious moving picture as a bogus art, and I can't do better than assure you that it was best before it was an "art" at all. (Or I can indicate that slapstick comedy, which you despise, is not bogus, is a real, and valuable, and delightful entertainment.) I believe that you went out West because the perpetual sun of Southern California made taking easy; there you discovered the lost romance of America, its Wild West and its pioneer days, its gold rush and its Indians. You had it in your hands, then, to make that past of ours alive; a small written literature and a remnant of oral tradition remained for you to work on. On the whole you did make a good beginning. You missed fine things, but you caught the simple ones; you presented the material directly, with appropriate sentiment. You relied on melodrama, which was the Tightest thing you ever did. Combat and pursuit, the last minute rescue, were the three items of your best pictures; and your cutting department, carefully alternating the fight between white men and red with the slow-starting, distant, approaching, arriving, victorious troops from the garrison appealed properly to our soundest instincts. You went into the bad-man period; you began to make an individual soldier, Indian, bandit, pioneer, renegade, the focus of your interest; still good because you related him to an active, living background. Dear Heaven! before you had filmed Bret Harte you had created legendary heroes of your own.

Meanwhile, Mr. Griffith, apparently insatiable, was developing small genre scenes of slum life while he thought of filming the tragic history of the South after the war. Other directors sought other fields—notably' that of the serial adventure film. Since they made money for all concerned you will not be surprised to hear these serials praised. The Exploits of Elaine, the whole Pearl White adventure, the thirty minutes of action closing on an impossible and unresolved climax, were, of course, infinitely better pictures than your version of Mr. Joseph Conrad's Victory, your Humoresque, your Should a Wife Forgive. They were extremely silly; they worked too closely' on a scheme: getting out of last week's predicament and into next week's can hardly be called a "form". But within their limitations they used the camera for all it was worth. It didn't matter a bit that the perils were preposterous, that the flights and pursuits were all fakes composed by the speed of the projector. You were back in the days of Nick Carter and the Liberty Boys; you hadn't heard of psychology, and drama, and art; you were developing the camera. You bored us when your effects didn't come off and I'm afraid amused us a little. But you were on the right road.

THERE was very little acting in these films and in the Wild West exhibitions. There was a great deal of action. I can't recall Pearl White registering a single time; I recall only movement, which was excellent. It was later that your acting developed; up to this time you were working with people who hadn't succeeded in or were wholly ignorant of the technique of the stage; they moved before the camera gropingly at first, but gradually developing a technique suited to the camera and to nothing else. I am referring to days So far back that the old Biograph films used to be branded with the mark AB in a circle and this mark occurred in the photographed sets to prevent stealing. In those days your actors and actresses were exceptionally naive and creative. You were on the point of discovering mass and line in the handling of crowds, in the defile of a troop, in the movement of individuals. Mr. Griffith had already discovered that four men running in opposite directions along the design of a figure 8 gave the effect of sixteen men—a discovery lightly comparable to that of Velasquez in the crossed spears of the Surrender of Breda. You would have done well to continue your experiments with nameless individuals and chaotic masses; but you couldn't. You developed what you called personalities—and after that, actresses.

Before The Birth of a Nation was begun Mary Pickford had already left Griffith. I have heard that he vowed to make Mae Marsh a greater actress—as if she weren't one from the start, as if acting mattered, as if Mary Pickford ever could or needed to act! Remember that in The Avenging Conscience at least four people: Spottiswoode Aiken, Henry Walthall, Blanche Sweet, and another I cannot identify the second villain-played superbly without acting. Conceive your own stupidity in not knowing what Vachel Lindsay discovered: that "our Mary" was literally "the Queen of my People", a radiant, lovely, childlike girl, a beautiful figurehead, a symbol of all our sentimentality. Why did you allow her to become an actress? Why is everything associated with her later work so alien to beauty? You did not see her legend forming; you began to advertise her salary; you have, I believe unconsciously, tried to restore her now by giving .her the palest role in all literature, that of Marguerite in Faust. You are ten years too late. In the same ten years Blanche Sweet has almost dis appeared and Mae Marsh has not arrived; Gishes and Talmadges and Swansons and other fatalities have triumphed. You have taken over the stage and the opera; you have filmed Caruso and Al Jolson, too, for all I know. You now have acting and no playing.

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The Spectacle Rises and Falls

THE emergence of Mary Pickford and the production of The Birth of a Nation make the years 1911-14 the critical time of the movies. Nearly all your absurdities began about this time, including your protest against the word movies as no longer suited to the dignity of your art. From the success of The Birth sprang the spectacle film which was intrinsically all right and only corrupted Griffith and the pictures because it was unintelligently handled thereafter. From the success of Mary Pickford came the whole tradition of the movie as a genteel intellectual entertainment. The better side is the spectacle and the fact that in 1922 the whole mastery of the spectacular film has passed out of your hands ought to be sufficient proof that you bungled somewhere. Or, to drive it home, what can you make of the circumstance that one of the very greatest successes, in America and abroad, was Nanook of the North, a spectacle film to which the producer and the artistic director contributed nothing-for it was a picture of actualities, made, according to rumor, in the interests of a fur trading company? You will reply that my assertions are pure theory. It is true that I have never filmed a scenario in my life. But as a spectator I am the one who is hard-headed and you the theorists. What I and several million others know is that something wrong crept into the spectacle film. We know absolutely that the over blown idea of Intolerance was foisted on the simple tale of The Mother and the Law, and that while single episodes of this stupendous picture were excellent, the whole failed of effect. In The Birth Mr. Griffith had two stories with no perceptible internal relation, but with sufficient personal interest to carry; even here not one person in ten thousand saw the significance of the highfalutin' title. But after the time of Intolerance Mr. Griffith receded swiftly, and his latest pictures are merely lavish. it is of no significance that Mr. Griffith treats Thomas Burke as though the latter were a great writer instead of a good scenario writer; the prettifying of Broken Blossoms was so consistent, and the fake acting such good fake, that the picture almost succeeded., Everywhere Mr. Griffith now gives us excesses-everything is big: the crowds, the effects, the rainstorms, the ice-floes, and everything is informed with an overwhelming dignity. He has long ago ceased to create beauty-only beautiful effects, like set pieces in fireworks. And he was the man destined by his curiosity, his honesty, his intelligence, to reach the heights of the moving picture.

It is a hard thing to say, but it is literally true that something in Mr. Griffith has been corrupted and died-his imagination. Broken Blossoms was a last expiring flicker. Since then he has constructed well; I understand that his success has been great; I am not denying that Mr. Griffith is the man to do Ben Hur. But he has imagined nothing on a grand scale, nor has he created anything delicate or fine. People talk of The Birth as if the battle scenes were important; they were very good and a credit to Griffith who directed and to George Bitzer who photographed them; the direction of the ride of the Klansmen was better, it had some imagination. And far better still was a moment earlier in the piece, when Walthall returned to the shattered Confederate home and Mae Marsh met him at the door, wearing raw cotton smudged to resemble ermine-brother and sister both pretending that they had forgotten their dead, that they didn't care what had happened. And then-for the honors of the scene went to Griffith, not even to the exquisite Mae Marsh-then there appeared from within the doorway the arm of their mother and with a gesture of unutterable loveliness it enlaced the boy's shoulders and drew him tenderly into the house. To have omitted the tears, to have shown nothing but the arm in that single curve of beauty, required, in those days, high imagination. It was the emotional climax of the film; one felt from that moment that the rape and death of the little girl was already understood in the vast suffering sympathy of the mother. So much Mr. Griffith never again accomplished; it was the one moment when he stood beside Chaplin as a creative artist— and it was ten years ago.

Of course if Griffith hasn't come through there is hardly anything to hope for from the others. Mr. Ince always beat him in advertised expenditure; Fox was always cheaper and easier and had Annette Kellerman and did The Village Blacksmith. The logical outcome of Griffithism is in the pictures he didn't make: in When Knighthood was in Flower and in Robin Hood, neither of which I could sit through. The lavishness of these films is appalling; the camera runs mad in every thing but action which dies a hundred deaths in as many minutes. Of what use are sets by Urban if the action which occurs in them is invisible to the naked eye? The old trick of using a crowd as a background and holding the interest in the individual has been lost; the trick of using the crowd as an individual hasn't been found because we must have our love story. The spectacle film is down to the level of the stereopticon slide.

The Atrophy of Imagination

IT would be easy to exaggerate your failures. Your greatest mistake was a natural one-in taking over the realistic theatre. You knew that a photograph can reproduce actuality without significantly transposing it, and you assumed that that was the duty of the film. But you forgot that the rhythm of the film was creating something, and that this creation adapted itself entirely to the projection of emotion by means not realistic; that in the end the camera was as legitimately an instrument of distortion as of reproduction. You gave us, in short, the pleasure of verification in every detail; the Germans who are largely in the same tradition-they should have known better because their theater knew better-improved the method at times and counted on significant detail. But neither of you gave us the pleasure of recognition. ,Neither you nor they have taken the first step (except in Caligari) toward giving us the highest degree of pleas-ire, that of escaping actuality and entering into a created world, built on its own inherent logic, keeping time in its own rhythm-where we feel ourselves at once strangers and at home. That has been done elsewhere-not in the serious film.

I would be glad to temper all of this with praise: for Anita Loos' captions and John Emerson's occasionally excellent direction; for George Loane Tucker, for Monte Katterjohn's flashes of insight into what makes a scenario. I have liked many more films than I have mentioned here. But you are familiar with praise and there remains to say what you have missed. The moving picture, when it became pretentious, when it went up-stage and said, "Dear God, make me artistic" at the end of its prayers, killed its imagination and foreswore its popularity. At your present rate of progress you will in ten years—if you survive—be no more a popular art than grand opera is. You had in your hands an incalculable instrument to set free the imagination of mankind— and the atrophy of our imaginative lives has only been hastened by you. You had also an instrument of fantasy—and you gave us Marguerite Clark in films no better than the "whimsy-me" school of stage plays. Above all you had something fresh and clean and new; it was a toy and should have remained a toy—something for our delight. You gave us problem plays. Beauty you neither understood nor cared for; and although you talked much about art you never for a moment tried to fathom the secret sources, nor to understand the secret obligations, of art.

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Can you do anything now? I don't know and I am indifferent to your future —because there is a future for the moving picture with which you will have nothing to do. I do not know if the movie of the future will be popular—and to me it is the essence of the movie that it should be popular. Perhaps there will b a period of semi-popularity—it will be at this time that you will desert—and then the new picture will arrive without your assistance. For when you and your capitalizations and your publicity go down together, the field will be left free for others. The first cheap film will startle you; but the film will grow less and less expensive. Presently it will be within the reach of artists. With players instead of actors and actresses, with fresh ideas (among which the idea of making a lot of money may be absent) these artists will give back to the screen the thing you have debauched—imagination. They will create with the camera, and not record, and will follow its pulsations instead of attempting to capture the rhythm of actuality. It isn't impossible to recreate exactly the atmosphere of Anderson's I'm a Fool; it isn't impossible (although it may not be desirable) to do studies in psychology; it is possible and desirable to create great epics of American industry and let the machine operate as a character in the play—just as the land of the West itself, as the corn, must play its part. The grandiose conceptions of Frank Norris are not beyond the reach of the camera. There are painters willing to work in the medium of the camera and architects and photographers. And novelists, too, I fancy, would find much of interest in the scenario as a new way of expression. These possibilities are limitless.

The vulgar prettiness, the absurdities, the ignorances of your films haven't saved you. And although the first steps after you take away your guiding hand may be feeble, although bogus artists and culturehounds may capture the movie for a time —in the end all will be well. For the movie is the imagination of mankind in action— and you haven't destroyed it yet.