Pardon me. You are with far too many. I remember that in the early days, when you went about on tiptoe for fear of waking up the revengeful Muses, you employed actors without any technique. There was an uncouth, a delightful freshness, about your work. I had hopes then that you would contribute to the stage. Instead you have taken from it. You have borrowed all its worst conventions. And you have added some of your own. There is the dreadful convention of registering.
D. G.
Isn’t that from the stage?
W. P. E.
Hardly.
D. G.
Your actors and actresses register.
W. P. E.
Not as yours do. The long training in the expression of emotions has developed a suitable medium, the slightest variation on which becomes inestimably precious. In the moving picture the variation is unknown. And, although I am the last person to want to advantage the movie, let me tell you why. I can hear the voice of the director, just as the misguided husband leaves his wife—a favorite situation in the movies and very novel—I can hear him crying out, “Register grief!” If he does not cry out, the inner voice of the actress cries out. Not “feel,” not “express the feeling,” but express the semblance of grief. It is an art of superficies. Perhaps your actresses—and why, dear sir, do you choose such impossibly blond, pretty and stupid actresses?—have worked out a new expression, a new registration. At the terrible moment they forget. They register as they, or another actress as well paid and as hotly advertised, registered six months before. I am as tired of heaving breasts and eyes turned to heaven as I am tired of Charlie Chaplin’s walk when he does not walk it. Conventions? There is no end to them. What your art, as you call it, lacks, is limitations.
D. G.