One of the noted authors won to the screen by Mr. Goldwyn.
Charlie may have had a number of similar tastes back in that remote incarnation of his, but I don’t think they were brought to light. For the roars of merriment which greeted this presentment stilled the voice of the seer. To this laughter Charlie himself contributed most heartily. In fact, I don’t believe any one ever laughed at Chaplin quite so hard as Chaplin laughed that evening at Elinor Glyn.
Regarding the introduction of these two an amusing story is current in California. It is reported that on this occasion Mrs. Glyn said to the comedian, “Dear, dear, so this is Charlie Chaplin! Do you know you don’t look nearly so funny as I thought you would?” To this reassuring message Chaplin is said to have responded promptly, “Neither do you.”
To go back to my dinner. After Mrs. Glyn had concluded her report upon previous abodes of the ego, our conversation drifted toward the profession engrossing our present incarnations. Pictures! The topic was started, I believe, by Miss Elsie Ferguson, who at that time was working with the Famous Players-Lasky Company. To her announcement that she did not like her leading man of the moment, Mrs. Glyn turned a swiftly sympathetic ear.
“My dear,” said she, “what do they know about soul, about art, about poetry? Blind, absolutely blind! The other day I took the loveliest young man to see them—he had the most beautiful eyes—but they didn’t see it—they didn’t appreciate it.”
This verdict regarding my competitors’ callousness to the finer issues of life is not to be taken too seriously. For Mrs. Glyn was then in the midst of that period of disillusionment which seems almost inevitable in the career of the author who tries to adapt his manuscripts to the screen. Out of the depths of my own experience I can speak of the friction which arises among author, producer, star, and director.
I thought that I had encountered some eminent difficulties before I organised the Eminent Authors; but when the Goldwyn Company introduced this literary faction in the fold, I was to look back on other days as being comparatively placid. This fact does not reflect upon the personalities of those writers whom we engaged. Socially, each one of them is a delightful being; but when the tradition of the pen ran athwart the tradition of the screen I am bound to say that I suffered considerably from the impact.
The great trouble with the usual author is that he approaches the camera with some fixed literary ideal and he can not compromise with the motion-picture view-point. He does not realise that a page of Henry James prose, leading through the finest shades of human consciousness, is absolutely lost on the screen, a medium which demands first of all tangible drama, the elementary interaction between person and person or person and circumstance. This attitude brought many of the writers whom I had assembled into almost immediate conflict with our scenario department, and I was constantly being called upon to hear the tale of woe regarding some title that had been changed or some awfully important situation which had either been left out entirely or else altered in such a way as to ruin the literary conception.
Nor did this end the difficulty. For often the author and the star became hopelessly entangled in similar controversies. This latter situation is deftly suggested by Will Rogers when he says, “I was on the lot the last year of the reign of the Eminent Authors and, while I helped spoil none of their stories, I made various ones for the near-Eminents and lost the friendship of every living one of whose stories I made. So now,” adds Will, “I have made Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane. I am off all living authors’ works—me for the dead ones!”
Undoubtedly the warfare which so frequently wages between star and author is to be attributed many times to the inflexibility and prejudice of the former. Thus I remember hearing Miss Rita Weiman tell of an interchange of thought between Nazimova and herself regarding the production of a certain story in which the one figured as author, the other as actress.