Breaking into the movies

by John Emerson; Anita Loos

"But they have no brains!" someone is sure to say.

That sort of thing is rather cheap cynicism. As a matter of fact, they have plenty of brains, but of their own peculiar sort. A movie actor, like any other type of artist, is an emotional, temperamental creature; but the problem which worries him the most is one of intellect rather than emotion; in short, just how to control the reactions inside that discredited gray matter of his.

Every movie actor—and you, too, if you enter this field—is at one time or another confronted with the perplexing problem of just how much thought he should allow to go into his work; that is, whether his acting should be emotional or intellectual. The question resolves itself into this:

Does an actor feel?

Should he feel?

There are two schools of thought on this seemingly academic but in reality most important subject.

First are those who say that an actor must feel the part he is playing. The greatest actors, they say, have always been those who wore themselves out in an hour's time, because they felt the emotions they portrayed. They tell stories such as that of Mrs. Kendall, who, having lost her own child, electrified an English audience by her portrayal of the bereaved mother in "East Lynne" to such an extent that women leaped to their feet in the pit, shouting, "No more, no more." They point to the fact that the great stars of the screen and the stage alike are able to simulate the three reactions which are quite beyond the control of the will—pallor, blushing, and the sudden perspiration which comes with great terror or pain. This, they say, is proof positive that these actors are feeling every emotion as they enact it.

The second group declares that all this is nonsense and that if an actor really felt his part he would lose control of himself, and perhaps actually murder some other actor in a fight scene. Acting, they say, is an art wherein the artist, by the use of his intellect, is able to simulate that which he does not feel—using his face merely as the painter uses his canvas. The moment an actor begins to enter into his part, his acting is either overdone or underdone and the scene is ruined. The whole trick of it, they add, is to keep perfectly cool and know exactly what you are doing, no matter how spectacular the scene.

Still a third school declares that both these views are wrong, and that acting is neither a matter of thought nor of emotion, but is purely imitative. An actor observes his own emotions as he experiences them in each crisis of his real life, they say, and remembers them so well that he is afterward able to reproduce them before the camera.

The truth of it seems to be that all of them are partly right and partly wrong. The great stars of the movies to-day, when one is able to draw them out on the subject, say that when they are acting they are thinking not about one thing but about several things. The brain is divided into different strata, and while one section is thinking about the part, another section is entering into it, while still a third stratum is busying itself with idle speculation about the cameraman and the director.