I also fussed about with LADY FINGERS, a musical version of my old farce, EASY COME, EASY GO, and wrote a show called SPRING IS HERE for Aarons and Freedley. SPRING IS HERE, in spite of a good cast and charming score and lyrics by Rogers and Hart, was only so-so. As a matter of fact, Bill McGuire and Otto Harbach need not worry; they can have the musical comedy field so far as I am concerned. Of all the forms of writing I find it the least interesting and the most difficult; to me it remains a trick like putting peas up your nostrils, not at all impossible, but why do it? The mere statement that I soon discovered that the properly concocted musical show must be dominated by its score and not by its book is explanation enough as to why a vain old dramatist can’t rave about this form of expression.
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CHAPTER VIII ◆ HOLLYWOOD
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Of late years I have been jumping between the New York theater and the studios of Hollywood, searching for the old spark of enthusiasm that made our lives so colorful, and I find Hollywood dull and depressing and the Broadway theater sad and discouraged. This sounds, I suppose, like the opinion of advanced age, but as a matter of fact it isn’t. I haven’t had a minute in the last thirty years in which to grow old and I share not at all in the pessimism of those who think the theater is doomed or the optimism of those who think the talking picture is all triumphant. I am absolutely sure in my own mind that the theater will advance and that the talking picture will fall back, not to ruin, because it fills a place in the lives of so many people that nothing can replace. But soon now both theater and pictures will have a clearly defined audience—a true drama for an audience that demands a mature form of entertainment and a fictional entertainment for the millions who demand a sugar-coating on their pill.
The picture men need not begrudge us this share of the amusement business because without a prosperous theater they would be in a bad fix. They are, and it seems to me they must always be, dependent in great measure on the theater for their raw material. The good play does not always make the best picture, but a produced play is easier to judge than an unproduced manuscript, and the highly successful play is always welcome on the screen.
Then, too, the best training school for actors is not the screen but the stage, although screen and stage acting are very different and the great actor of the stage is by no means sure of screen success, while a pretty girl or good-looking boy with no training at all can frequently do better work than an actor of long training. In the theater the actor projects his personality, on the screen the camera projects it—a very different thing. Still, however, the theater is needed by the screen and there is no reason for a feud between them. In fact, the dangers and the problems that confront the theater are less complex than those the screen is called upon to face. We have but one—to do good plays. I have another silver cup for any one who can persuade me that a really fine play has ever failed. On the other hand, ahead of the men who control the destiny of the talking picture there are many problems, almost staggering in their complexity. Let me try to state the vital one, from figures I have carefully prepared.
Twenty percent of the talking picture audience is composed of children. Another twenty percent consists of persons to whom the English language is in whole or in part unfamiliar. Sixty percent of the remaining percentage consists of those with what we may safely call immature minds, leaving an audience to be thrilled, amused and satisfied in which persons of a fair degree of culture and taste number some thirty odd percent. If you care to stop for a moment over these figures, you may find in them the answer to many of your moments of bewilderment. To satisfy this thirty odd percent, who do the writing of and the critical condemnation of talking pictures and at the same time to thrill this seventy percent who put up the money that makes them possible, is already a big problem and it grows bigger every day as the novelty of the mechanical device wears off, and the suitable supply of fiction becomes exhausted.
Hollywood to-day demands about four hundred good stories every year, and my third and last silver cup goes to the one who can list for me four hundred great stories written since the world began. Just for fun I tried my hand at making such a list, and from a rather extensive knowledge of the fiction and the plays of both the past and the present I was able to get two hundred and eight. After that they began to fall into squads with the precision of well-drilled soldiers and although many of them told the same story very charmingly it still remained a twice-told tale.
I had, reluctantly, agreed to make a trip to Hollywood the previous spring for Mr. Sheehan of the Fox Company, and there I had made for Will Rogers an adaptation of my friend Homer Croy’s novel, THEY HAD TO SEE PARIS, for the screen. As a result I had signed a six months’ contract starting in December. My experience with Famous Players Lasky Company had been unsatisfactory in spite of the real kindness of Mr. Lasky, and I felt that under the present conditions an author’s position in Hollywood left much to be desired. But I had the advantage of an unusual contract and I had two strong reasons for wanting to see more of Hollywood. The first reason was that both of my boys were there, and my wife and I are, I am afraid, rather too dependent on them and never completely satisfied unless they are near at hand. Then, too, I was greatly troubled by the difficulty of forming a fixed opinion of conditions out there and determined to at least satisfy myself that I understood them. I had never been able to see why a writer in Hollywood should be forced to deliver up his self-respect, and with it his only chance of being of real value. I saw both sides of the issue but to me the pressing need of the only men and women who are trained to write stories was so great that I thought it my duty, as one who has given a great part of his life to the effort to improve the condition of the men and women of his craft, to make an effort to find out if it wasn’t possible to break down the barrier that has always existed between New York writers and the studio executives in Hollywood.
Owen was a featured player for Fox and Donald was a staff writer and stage director. When I left New York I was pledged to a six months’ stay and had some difficulty in laying out my future plans with the degree of exactness that has become my habit; we got away at length, however, and I left behind me only the remains of one “tryout,” a farce called THE SHOTGUN WEDDING, produced by Wm. Harris, Jr., for a brief tour and never developed beyond that point, THE SHOTGUN WEDDING was funny, but not funny enough. Wm. Harris, Jr., is, I think, the best judge of a play of any man alive, although his critical judgment has been developed to the same extent that Sherlock Holmes developed his sense of deduction, and when it comes to discovering a clew to a bad play he could give Sherlock a stroke a hole.