***************************************************************************** * T A Y L O R O L O G Y * * A Continuing Exploration of the Life and Death of William Desmond Taylor * * * * Issue 77 -- May 1999 Editor: Bruce Long bruce@asu.edu * * TAYLOROLOGY may be freely distributed * ***************************************************************************** CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE: Maurice Tourneur ***************************************************************************** What is TAYLOROLOGY? TAYLOROLOGY is a newsletter focusing on the life and death of William Desmond Taylor, a top Paramount film director in early Hollywood who was shot to death on February 1, 1922. His unsolved murder was one of Hollywood's major scandals. This newsletter will deal with: (a) The facts of Taylor's life; (b) The facts and rumors of Taylor's murder; (c) The impact of the Taylor murder on Hollywood and the nation; (d) Taylor's associates and the Hollywood silent film industry in which Taylor worked. Primary emphasis will be given toward reprinting, referencing and analyzing source material, and sifting it for accuracy. ***************************************************************************** ***************************************************************************** Maurice Tourneur The following is a selection of articles by, and interviews with, Maurice Tourneur, a leading silent film director who was one of Taylor's contemporaries. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * July 3, 1915 NEW YORK CLIPPER Maurice Tourneur Voices a Few Opinions In the rapidly changing panorama of the moving picture production field there looms a new and important factor, a personality which will be felt. He is Mons. Maurice Tourneur, the latest addition to the World Film direction corps. M. Tourneur was born in Paris thirty-eight years ago, and educated there. He attained some degree of fame as a painter, and to this training may be attributed the artistic manner in which his photoplays are put on. Feeling the call of the closer touch with his fellow man, M. Tourneur abandoned the palette and brush for the stage and worked under the master hand of Andre Antoine, the Belasco of Paris, playing important parts with Mme. Rejane in England and South America and on the continent, and assisting in the stage direction. In one or the other capacity, he participated in four hundred plays, including Shakespearean and other classical presentations, before leaving the speaking stage for that of the silent drama. "I consider moving pictures," said M. Tourneur, in a recent interview, "the most important invention for education since the printing press. It is absurd to say it is in its infancy since so much has developed in it, but truly it is in its childhood, as is evidenced by the almost daily strides forward. It stands alone today as a growing industry, and so great is its promise, its future cannot be foretold. I do not favor the combination of the pictures with the spoken drama, as experimentally put forth in 'The Alien.' The silent stage is a thing as much apart from the so-called 'legitimate' stage as ice skating is from roller skating. "What we need for the cinema today is authors. There are few real screen authors. Whether acknowledged or not, nearly everything worth while in the pictures is an adaptation of a book, a play, a poem. A new sort of creative literary brain must develop for filmdom. There must be a better and a more natural showing of human nature, in which the conflicting sides, both good and bad, are shown in their true combination. "Our screen heroes and heroines today are saintly; there are no such people in life. Our villains are so bitterly bad and deep-dyed in their wickedness that nothing so evil can be found this side of hades. Let our hero digress occasionally from the flowery paths of virtue; otherwise he is far from human. Let us find a redeeming trait, a kindly impulse at least once in a while in our villain, there's a ray of good in every human breast." "Who is, in your opinion, the foremost director in moving pictures?" he was asked. The answer came with a smile and without a moment's hesitation. "Mr. Griffith," said Mr. Tourneur, "he had the first big chance and had brains enough and courage enough to seize it. He made the most of it. All others suffer by comparison with him. He stands alone." M. Tourneur's ambition is to produce strong and appealing detective stories. He believes they interest the greatest number of people. He has already produced J. Storer Clouston's "The Lunatic at Large," and is seeking for material along that line. His productions with the World Film in the last eight months have been "Mother," with Emma Dunne; "The Face in the Moonlight" and "The Man of the Hour" with Robert Warwick; "The Wishing Ring" with Vivian Martin; "The Pit," with Wilton Lackaye; "The Boss," "Trilby," with Wilton Lackaye and Clara Kimball Young, and "Alias Jimmy Valentine," with Robert Warwick. He is now producing "The Cub," with Robert Warwick." * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * November 6, 1915 MOTOGRAPHY Tourneur Heads New Firm With "Quality, not Quantity" as its motto, a new film manufacturing concern, the Paragon Film, Inc., will open a great studio, now nearing completion, at a factory at Fort Lee, N. J., about December 1. At the head of the organization, which is backed by ample capital, is M. Maurice Tourneur, the eminent French producer of motion pictures, who came to this country from Paris a year ago and has staged some of the most artistic screen productions seen in this country. His office in the New Jersey corporation is the dual one of vice-president and general manager. The Paragon will release its output through the World Film Corporation, with which M. Tourneur has been associated. "The new company," said M. Tourneur in an interview, "will enable me to present photodramas of five or more reels each, along special lines, which I have long felt would be very profitable. We will not attempt to turn out a million feet a week, nor even from thirty to forty reels, as nothing really artistic can be assured to such an output. Our intention is to produce about twenty-four big five-reel features a year and perhaps three or four larger ones, which will mean from 10,000 to 15,000 feet of film a month. We are certain of a market for such an output and we expect to produce better pictures than have yet been made. This will make the exhibitors our friends. "The new plant is ideally located in the center of the woods near the Universal plant, and it will contain many original improvements, the effect of which will be felt by those seeing our pictures. We have already contracted for the best French directors in America, the best original scenarios and adaptations from the recent plays of the most successful theatrical managers, and for the best American actors whom I regard as superior to any we have in Europe. "Although we have gone so far with our plans, the door is still open and always will be for new talent and for original artistic suggestions. While we start from a high point, we feel that we have much to learn, and our policy will be one of progress, and not of satisfaction to continue with what we have accomplished. I detest a crowded or a noisy studio and I feel that these two conditions have held back the motion picture more than any other factors. I shall have but three or at most four directors beside myself, and these will have plenty of room and privacy for their work. I shall try to eliminate rush, as time is most important to the artistic creator in any form of endeavor. "With the absence of noise and trouble, caused by imperfect system, I think I can do away with all the nervousness which has so often proved fatal to the production of the high-class drama. I have invented and adapted means for new and correct lighting, one of the chief requisites for convincing screen results. The greatest care will be taken in the selection of our casts. Our successes already in that particular will testify to our ability in that direction. "We will not hesitate to spend money to secure desired results, as our directors have been so carefully chosen as to make them worthy of the highest trust. They will not be hampered in any way. They will not have to wait and keep their actors waiting for hours while a scene is being set, for there will be stages enough to have these all set at night, so that the work on the actual making of the picture will begin the first thing in the morning, while all are fresh and can give the best that is in them. In this way, instead of devoting most of the day to the mechanical work and a small part to the artistic, the entire day will be given over to the acting, thus obtaining the coveted prize of director and actor alike, time." * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * April 29, 1916 Maurice Tourneur HARPER'S WEEKLY Movies Create Art Movies: a quivering rift in an emerald woods, silver-shot with a summer's sun; a startled nymph beside a mirrored pool, the play of whose form is a prayer; a charnel house, grimy and shadowy, its damp marble slabs glinting green against the moon; a baby's smile, also its tears, the one as unfeigned as the other; a mountain ridge at night with silhouetted riders speeding by against the clouds; a jungle kraal, with a panther brood frolicking about a recumbent mother, whose eyes are lit with the maternal fire that shines not on the land nor on the sea--these motion picture miracles, the tabulation of scarce more than a single hand against an overwhelming array, many as inspiring, many more thrilling, many more enthralling alike to the artist and all others--and these are but exhibits of a craft? Bezeul, now a confrere at the Paragon studios, several months ago stalked the woods of the Champagne section in France at the close of a battle, equipped with a movie camera, and the world has since thrilled with the chill of death as shown by war's horrors in the raw; no sheltering fiction of paint as Meissonier gives it, nor of molded mineral Rodin forms, but death real, stark, limp and fearful, carpeting an actual glade, animate only in the mute, orderly stepping from corpse to corpse to check the victims' identities by their regiment tags. Merely mechanical, to turn the crank that rolls the film upon whose solution the heroism of a nation is writ indelibly. Staging death in the mass, yet with restraint, keeping the will master of the emotions, so directing the camera that the merely gruesome shall be but an underlying terror of the whole--this, too, is but craftsmanship--a cutey? I produced the French stage version of "Alias Jimmy Valentine." I later filmed the play for this country. Paul Armstrong's piece in its stage form needed little adapting for the films. Armstrong, as everyone knows, took the character of "Jimmy" from an O. Henry tale and that's all he took. Scarcely more than four printed pages in length in its O. Henry form, it was the idea of a semi-polished outlaw gaily fastening himself upon the payroll of a bank that he designed subsequently to rob, that fired Armstrong. Structurally there is no more resemblance between the O. Henry fiction and the Armstrong comedy than there is between a chess board and a woman weeping. Do the learned judges of the new art deny that Armstrong created an enlivening drama? Do they deny that the mere record of Jimmy's job-taking in the bank, even without the details of its original fiction, was in essence a play? Would they deny this adaptation practice to the credentialed film director! Isn't the history of the acting drama and the printed fiction that inspires it a voluminous record of interchanges? Didn't the great romancer take largely from Montaigne? Doesn't Montaigne freely confess his own appropriations from multiple sources? Aren't we all creatures of just so many emotions? Isn't drama mere criss-crossed collisions of these, taking new forms with each fresh alignment? Isn't there in Shakespeare an entire gamut of masculine character, also a more or less complete feminine galaxy as it exists about us today? Do filmdom's decriers concede the necessity for the preservation of something like a unified whole in a spoken stage piece or a mute filmed one? Do these captious weeping willows know that if a film director produced verbatim the average scenario as detailed in, say, a five reel picture, the audience would consider the six-day Chinese drama a delightful tabloid in comparison? Do they know that one entire reel of one thousand feet of film may be interestingly devoted to the mere entrance of a single person into a room? I have not seen anywhere any claim of any manufacturer of films that he considers himself an artist or even a purveyor of art, or that he aspires or seeks to mold public taste in photoplays, nor do I believe he makes a practice to producing what he thinks the public thinks it wants. Considering the difficulties besetting his supply, I think the film manufacturer is doing in the short time of his existence, a great deal more than any publisher or theatrical manager of an equally brief existence did, not even excepting the early days of the French, German and English stage and literature, which reminds me that Shakespeare shows in all his work that he would have reveled in the magical volubility of the motion camera. Not a play of his but shows his flair for scenic embellishment and brilliant variety. What he would have done with his filmed battle scenes--a flash here of panoply, a shift to a portentous conference, a flash of helmeted couriers, all filigrees of his main current. The quarrel with close-ups by the present school of film decriers is without consideration. The close-up, which, by the way, is not new, is merely a director's emphasis of a phase of his play, an auxiliary he employs to insure the conveyance of a definite thought at a definite stage of the play. Reference to their abnormal size is as intelligent as the same criticism would be of the colossal bronze of Daniel Webster in Central Park, the Bartholdi Liberty Lady in New York bay, or the Sherman equestrian figure on the Plaza on Fifth Avenue, New York. Authorities agree that the stage production methods of Max Reinhardt are art. Are film directors, who write, create, adapt stage and camera plays less entitled to the term? Capellani, a Paragon associate director, filmed "Les Miserables." If photoplay critics think the people--the common people-- are artistically obtuse, let them scan the royalty records of the Hugo fiction in films and note the millions who came, wondered and wept with Valjean and the other unfortunates of the imperishable tale. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Dorothy Nutting July 1918 PHOTOPLAY [from an article on Maurice Tourneur]...The cinema tried to beckon to him. He haunted the funny little theatres which soon sprang up, paying often as much as fifty centimes (ten cents) a ticket. This was a great extravagance for the young student at the Lycee Condorcet, and soon abandoned, for he obtained an engagement with the great tragedienne, Rejane, who was making a tour of the world, including Africa. "One unique engagement," says M. Tourneur, "Was at Dakar, on the northern edge of the Sahara in Algiers. We reached the town on a queer sort of boat, the engine of which was dying by inches. We were due at eight o'clock at night, and arrived at midnight exactly. Everyone was asleep and we would lose our evening's receipts. We were all truly dismayed! For we needed the money, so Madame Rejane, with all her adorable aplomb, merely attached bells to the necks of a few of the natives and turned them lose to announce the news of our arrival. Behold, in half an hour there we had an audience ten times larger than we would have had at eight!" But, to come back to America and the matter in hand, the art of this poet of the screen, his views are refreshingly different from that of most of the producers. For example: "There is an odious fallacy that a great many people still believe, in regard to the moving picture. It is almost as widespread as that the cinema is in its infancy. By that I mean the belief that we must give the public what it wants. To me, that is absurd. As absurd as if the fashion dictators should attempt to suit women's wishes in costumes. In reality, the opposite is the case, is it not? The fashion dictators say: 'Next year you shall look like umbrellas, ladies--but this year you shall be as a broomstick;' and the ladies obey like lambs and even enjoy their servitude! The public does not know what it wants until it sees it--how should it? So we must try over and over again, until we have discovered what it is they really do want to see." Another of the Tourneur antipathies is the remark that many people think must be true today because Shakespeare made it many hundred years ago, "The play's the thing." This idea M. Tourneur combats with all the force at his command. "I know there are few to agree with me," he said, "but I shall always assert that the play is NOT the thing. If it were true, one would merely read a play, and the acting, the beautiful presentation, the 'ensemble' as we say, would amount to nothing. Then, if the play were the thing, the lack of these, of the acting and good interpretation and ensemble would not spoil it. To me, neither the play, the acting, the star, the director, nor the presentation is the thing. It takes all of them. "Of course, I believe that the play, a classic such as 'The Blue Bird,' 'A Doll's House' or 'Prunella' should not be changed. Nor should there be a dragged-in, illogical 'happy ending' to replace the author's conclusion. But I do believe that to make a play of this sort there must be the best acting, the best directing, and the best presentation available. And with the showing of it, good music. Any one of these elements missing, and your picture will not succeed. "I enjoyed making 'The Blue Bird,'" he went on thoughtfully. "But if I could have had another six months to work on it, I would have enjoyed it much more. Then, too, I cannot work so well with children. They are disturbing. Work at the studio should go along smoothly like the clock--but, children, ah! they cannot be regulated! However, this I must say, that little Tula Belle and Robin MacDougall, the two child actors in 'The Blue Bird' are exceptionally clever little players and will be heard of one day in the future."... * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * May 18, 1918 EXHIBITOR'S TRADE REVIEW Maurice Tourneur Asserts That Wartime Mental Reaction Is Creating Demand For Shorter Films Maurice Tourneur, the famous director, now at work on his initial independent picture, "Sporting Life," which is to be a companion picture to his very successful production, "The Whip," believes that the world war is creating a trend towards shorter picture dramas. "The movement, as I see it, is distinctly away from the full evening photoplay," declares Mr. Tourneur. "This is psychological in its cause. The world war, with its attendant excitement, sacrifice and worry is playing upon the nervous system of the world. Whether we know or realize it, the war has keyed up our nerves to a high pitch. We are keenly restless, high strung, unable to concentrate for any length of time upon anything but the world's tragedy. "This nervous reaction is reflecting itself in every walk of life. Short stories, requiring but fifteen minutes or so to read, were never so popular as now. Poetry, which is, after all, but the drama of life condensed into more or less beautiful particles, is tremendously popular, too. So it is coming to be with pictures. "I am, of course, a steady patron of the film houses. It is part of my business to watch the progress of my fellow workers. I have come to note a marked unrest in audiences when a drama runs longer than six reels--or six thousand feet. Six reels requires about an hour and a half for adequate presentation. "I had a curious example of this nervous reaction presented to me the other night when I once again witnessed 'The Birth of a Nation.' This beautiful drama--a classic of the screen--did not seem overlong when first presented, but the audience of today reflects the war-time reaction. A man who sat just ahead of me remarked to a friend, 'It's beautiful--but just a little too long.' "For my part, I do not intend to run my productions over six reels, or seven at the very most, for the duration of the war. We must meet conditions as they are. "It is part of our duty as purveyors of entertainment to the great majority, to see to it that the public gets wholesome, optimistic and, if possible, amusing entertainment. It is up to the screen to sustain the spirits of the nation. Let us keep away from the morbid and gruesome and throw the tremendous power of the photoplay into the civilized world's war for democracy. "Another interesting reaction I have noted in wartime audiences," continues Mr. Tourneur, "is the steadily growing spiritual note. We are all turning more and more to religious support in these grim days. You can observe this in the way audiences respond to the spiritual element in pictures. People are coming to think profoundly of the problems of life." * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * June 22, 1918 MOVING PICTURE WORLD Maurice Tourneur, who has just launched his own producing organization, is a firm believer in the big opportunities now offered the independent film maker. "The star system of today is fast proving its fallacy," declares Mr. Tourneur. "Consider the problem of the producer with a chain of stars. He must manufacture films regularly, using these stars at systematic intervals, in order to succeed. It is natural that the stars are allotted certain roles to which they have shown themselves fitted. From two and three to twenty stars must be fitted, and there is not time to study a player's possibilities. "Thus these stars come to get stereotyped stories, providing them with essentially the same characters. This is dangerous from many angles. Except in rare instances film fans tend to lose interest in stars who keep on playing upon the same string. Screen patrons come to be familiar with the stories and they know just what is likely to happen in their working out, so that all novelty is gone. All this spells the ultimate eclipse of the star in question. "Today the star has no substantial hold upon his or her following. A series of three bad pictures can send a star sliding downward rapidly, while one or two unusual vehicles will pull a star back into popularity. This has been demonstrated a dozen times this year. This all goes to show the insecurity--steadily growing--of the star system. "Don't think that the stars do not realize all this themselves! Note how they change leading men and leading women with each production, hoping to gain some novelty in this fashion. "The independent producer, on the other hand, can afford to select the star to fit his photodrama or to produce his film play as he feels it should be produced. He can put time, undivided attention and care into his efforts as against the machine-made productions of the star system." Mr. Tourneur, in speaking of the steadily advancing prominence of the director, says: "The charge is made that to substitute the prominence of the director in place of the player is but to shift stars, and is therefore no cure for the star system evil. This is obviously not true. The director is the man who paints the dramatic picture. Give him a bigger canvas and recognition and he will do bigger things; but make him paint around the limitations of a certain player and you curb him, stunt his growth and prevent his development. "Let us not forget that the director and the scenario writer must be the big factors of the photoplay's future." Mr. Tourneur is now completing his first independent production, "Sporting Life," adapted from the famous Drury Lane melodrama. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * July 27, 1918 MOVING PICTURE WORLD Tourneur Protests Use of "Photoplay" Promiscuously Maurice Tourneur, the independent producer, who has completed his production of the Drury Lane melodrama, "Sporting Life," which is to be released by Hiller & Wilk, Inc., protests against the indiscriminate use of the word "photoplay." Says Mr. Tourneur, "We see the word used in various ways, as 'photoplay comedy,' 'photoplay farce,' 'photoplay tragedy,' and so on, all of which are as wrong as the theatrical use of drama comedy, drama farce or drama tragedy would be. Why not photofarce, photocomedy or other combinations? "Again, the use of 'photoplay' to cover all forms of silent drama from that written originally for the screen to the adapted drama and novel, is not correct. "Personally, I don't think photoplay is the word we have been awaiting to describe the motion picture drama. Why not try to get a better one? "The movies have brought many words and new uses of old words to the language, as fade-out, switchback, cut-back, iris, register, shoot (otherwise to photograph), screenization, scenario, script and continuity and we need a bigger word to describe the output. "Movies is, of course, hardly a word to be used professionally. It only indicates something that moves. Surely the screen drama is something more than that now. Not that I dislike the Americanism of the word. It is rather a term of endearment, indicating the hold of the motion picture play upon the heart of the masses. We will never be able to get away from it." * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * September 1918 Maurice Tourneur MOTION PICTURE Stylization in Motion Picture Direction It was Gordon Craig who developed the new impressionistic school of stage production. With him in the field of stylization, as the newer stage tendency is termed, appeared Max Reinhardt, Stanislavsky, Granville Barker, and others. I take pride in the fact that the opportunity was given me to bring stylization to the screen. Stylization has been defined as the development of style in stage settings; style, in turn, being the manner of doing a thing. In stage settings or studio direction, style implies an expression of the individuality of the producer. Before Craig, realism was the thing behind the footlights. A room must be perfect in every detail, from the real pictures on the wall to the real wooden door; from the real glass windows to the real books in the real bookcase. Then came Craig, who declared for style in place of realism. "Why copy nature," he demanded, "without adding something of our own? A mere copy is imitation, and not art." Craig, for instance, has explained how he attained his results. "We take 'Macbeth,'" he has said. "How does it look, first of all, to our mind's eye; secondly, to our eye? "I see two things. I see a lofty and steep rock, and I see the moist cloud which envelops the head of this rock; that is to say, a place for fierce and warlike men to inhabit; a place for phantoms to nest in. Ultimately, this moisture will destroy the rock; ultimately, these spirits will destroy the men. Now, then, you are quick in your question as to what actually is created for the eye. I answer as swiftly: Place there a rock! Let it mount up high. Swiftly, I tell you, convey the idea of a mist which hugs the head of this rock. Now, have I departed at all for one-eighth of an inch from the vision which I saw in the mind's eye?" Having fixed upon his exterior, Craig utilized a rearrangement of the same setting for his grim castle interiors, thus retaining a unity of staging. Volumes could, of course, be written upon stylization. I have here tried to condense into a few sentences something of a definition. In a phrase, it is an endeavor to express to others one's mental reactions upon studying a drama. I endeavored to apply stylization, in the best of my ability, to my production of Maurice Maeterlinck's "The Blue Bird." Here I tried to sound the note of fragile, symbolical phantasy. Again, in Laurence Housman and Granville Barker's "Prunella," I tried to catch the gossamer of whimsical romance. Again, in Ibsen's "A Doll's House," my purpose was to utilize simplicity of setting to accentuate the drama of the grim Norseman. Whatever my own personal failure or success with stylization, I am content of the value of impressionistic methods on the screen. The artistic effects alone are invaluable. It affords better opportunities for lighting, better balance of scene, opens up unlimited effects of blacks and whites. The time has come when we can no longer merely photograph moving and inanimate objects and call it art. We are not photographers, but artists--at least, I hope so. We must present the effect such a scene has upon the artist-director's mind, so that an audience will catch the mental reaction. It was obvious that early directors would be impressed with the importance of photographing real scenery as a background for their actors. To the pioneer, this was the one instance where the movie topped the spoken drama. For the camera can catch the stretch of many miles where the stage presents but a series of canvas hangings. That day is passing. The idea of sending a company to Central America to film a Central American story is, to my way of thinking, valueless from the standpoint of art. What we really need is an artist to produce the story so that we will get an artist's impression of tropical America. I have an instance in mind. I recall Raoul Walsh's production of "Carmen." Walsh had never been to Spain; but, being an artist, he gave an artist's impression of Spain that is still unforgettable to me. The appalling cost of constructing elaborate sets and of transporting large companies about the country in the making of photoplays has made the cost of a five-reel production run anywhere from $10,000, at the very lowest, to extreme instances of as much as $90,000. The average has been for some time in the neighborhood of $30,000. Spend this money, if we must, on the scenario, and let us utilize the inexpensive but artistic impressionist methods. And let us not forget that we have been foolish and extravagant--as well as inartistic--enough to spend small fortunes on real marble staircases, solid wood interiors and even on reconstructing whole cities. Now let me turn to another subject dear to my heart. With all our spending of millions of dollars, we of the screen world have neglected to pay tribute to the pioneers who blazed the way to the Motion Picture drama--the men who made the photoplay possible. For instance, how many film fans realize that the photoplay is exactly forty years old? Back in 1878, out in California, one Edward Muybridge perfected his investigations which ultimately gave us the Motion Picture. In 1872, Muybridge started to study the movements of animals, particularly of race-horses, for the purposes of science and art. He placed a number of plate cameras side by side and had a horse galloped in front of the machines. Tiny threads, connecting with the shutters, stretched in front of each camera. They were pulled and broken by the horse as he passed, the jerk of the thread snapping the shutters. The result was a series of instantaneous pictures of a race-horse in motion--the forerunners of the photoplay of today. I believe some distinct honor should be paid Muybridge, Edison, Eastman and the other pioneers. Let us, I suggest, build a movie hall of fame, where the representative pictures of each year may be preserved, where films of important men and events may be kept for posterity, and where the records of the development of pictures may be safely housed. Such a hall of fame would be a mighty encouragement to artistic advance. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * December 27, 1918 Maurice Tourneur VARIETY Directing Pictures Directing motion pictures is merely capturing life. There is no one set way of staging pictures. It is a realm in which there are no precedents. It is a very rare thing for any two human beings, even of the same temperament, to act alike under the same conditions. One has but to observe an excited mob at a thief chase or at a fire in a factory or dwelling that may mean tragedy to be convinced of this. Directors cannot be turned out by tutelage any more than can actors. The player is born. In the myriad ranks of everyday life there are countless geniuses that would win fame and fortune on the stage or in the studio if the powers they have were but developed. It is this latent capacity for drama that makes children in their pantalettes and frocks play house and weave romances and tragedies in their little worlds of make-believe that often startle listening grown-ups. It is this same quality that makes an audience artistically critical, enabling certain of its personal components to discover instantly flaws in character drawing, incident or feeling in the screened work of a director. Directing a picture presupposes the possession of dramatic instinct and artistic perception in the man entrusted with the transfer to the screen of the play of an author. The author possesses the instinct else he couldn't have cohered in dramatic form the characters, scenes, incidents, situations, complications, suspense and other elements of which his play may be compounded. Like music, plays must address and stimulate the emotions. An added quality of the play as against music is that it must engage the intellect as well as the feelings. If it isn't plausible, doesn't measure up to the intelligence standards of the observer or auditor, it is poor stuff. If it merely stabs at the emotions without comprising a definite and cumulative conception, gripping the attention despite the will or whim of the auditor, it might just as well at once be relegated to the playhouse for small children or morons. When an author has turned out a man's size concept in playmaking, instantly engaging in characters, with reasonable consideration of the desirability of contrast in types, and with a story that is heard by the heart and the brain, the director that gets the privilege of screening such a play has made another big stride toward his right to rank with efficient stagers of the mute drama. Just as no two plays are alike, so, too, no two plays will respond to the same kind of treatment. There are no stereotyped laws that practiced men may lay down for students save those designed to conserve fidelity to life, truth and beauty. The human element is the mixture with which the director is ever dealing. And the human element is ever changing its complexions. What was true yesterday is often false tomorrow, and vice versa. The war changed almost all human values, just as other wars did before it. It is for each of us who have selected the screen for our workshop to be observant of these changes, and to be faithful to such new truths as come to us. Even the most practiced of us must ever be at school. There isn't an hour of a director's day that isn't fascinating with the magic of studying human character. If more of us would give more time to studying faces and the psychologies and impulses of people there would be fewer useless books. The screen is not an endless white page upon which we may write or draw what characters we please. The screen's tools are limited. Cinematography is not a plastic art. If our theatrical forms were like those of the Chinese when days and even weeks may be devoted to the presentation of a single play, we might call our material elastic. But we must, within a limited number of feet of hypersensitive chemicals, crowd related scenes that in their entirety will animate and beautify the concepts of the author we are striving to adapt. Ours is a selective responsibility. We have not the space to picture all that the author might tell in words in a spoken drama or on the printed page. We must seize that part of the whole which within our limited space best approximates the spirit and action of the original concept. To effect this transfer faithfully we must endeavor to allow for the absence of the living bodies of the characters of our play. We must concede that without the warmth of pulsing vocal speech, or the magnetism of the living human spirit, our task is not an easy one. There is no greater address to the emotions than living bodies and animate speech where the story and situation introduce thoughts of fear, hope, love or sacrifice. We lack this vocal aid on the screen. As directors we must aim deftly to create substitutes for these mediums. There is no set way to do this either. Our success or failure depend upon our particular genius at the moment of our consideration of the material we would flash to screen form. And the measure of our successes or failures will depend upon the measure of our possession of dramatic instinct and our personal sympathy with the particular play we are directing. The screen play has evolved a form of its own wholly apart from a manner of the spoken play, and all but wholly apart from the form of what might be termed the pantomime of the legitimate stage. The form is yet far from anything like its finale. Yet it is leagues and leagues away from the infancy about which so many thoughtless critics lightly prate. It is possible to compress in five reels of one thousand feet each the dramatic spirit and color of any spoken drama of average length. It is possible to build up character so that it enlists our approval, pity, admiration, resentment or hate. It is possible within the limits of a screen play of five reels to seize interest at the outset and hold it in suspense during the entire unspooling. It is possible to hold the attention of a screen audience during an entire reel with a single situation, though such a course would mar the symmetry of one's play as a whole. The little boy who, after several years' attendance at the movies, was one night taken by his father to a staged play--Stevenson's "Treasure Island"- -a marvel of high adventure in strange places across strange seas, even in its stage form--summed up for me the crux of difference between the spoken and the screened drama in what he said after the curtain had fallen on the last act. "Well," said the pater, "now, Bobbie, that you've seen your first spoken play on the regular stage, after all the many plays you've seen at the movies, what do you think of it?" "The people stayed too long at the same place!" * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * August 22, 1919 Maurice Tourneur VARIETY Los Angeles, Cal., Aug. 8. Editor VARIETY: Thank you, Miss Variety--or is it Mr.?--for your new symposium. A welcome harbor of refuge it must be for all of us who are striving to get the best there is out of the cinema privilege of dramatic expression. I feel certain that none of us in the industry will abuse its good offices by seeking to make it the medium for recording desires that properly belong in the advertising departments. A council table to which we may resort for a ventilation of points that no advertisement could so adequately elucidate must work for the eventual clarity of our cherished craft. And now for the immediate inspiration of my own voice at this week's meeting: I wish to chat informally with authors, telling them of some particular things that stand as obstacles between their genius and the interpreting arteries of their creations--the directors--and hope, in turn, the writers will through your weekly opportunities, talk as freely with me so that thereby both branches may swiftly clear the barriers that cause so much unnecessary loss of time in the transaction of our ends of the business. I want scenarios. And I am but one voice among several hundred directors similarly plighted. Almost every other division of our industry is moving smoothly save this all important department. Writers there are aplenty, gifted with visions that might entertain, excite, thrill and otherwise divert the multitudes that now find in the motion picture play a satisfying form of emotional excitant. Directors temperamentally, emotionally, dramatically, poetically equipped to translate the visions of these writers there are too, in sufficient array. But the system of communication between the two factions is without order. Director So-and-So doesn't know where to get the special kind of material he seeks at the time he seeks it. Perhaps at the very moment of his greatest anxiety in his search for the desired material, the identical story or play he wishes--fiction carrying the thought he wishes to translate--is knocking unheard at countless other doors which at that particular moment are not interested in that particular kind of play. How may such a condition be corrected? I am sure I myself do not know. Many ways suggest themselves, but it would require more space than I feel privileged to employ at a single writing to outline even the more interesting of these. Perhaps your readers of this new department who are authors or directors might aid with suggestions that may finally chart the courses for all clearly--writers and directors. Just now I am seeking manuscripts with, perhaps, a finer poetic appeal than is generally considered the best market material at this post-war period. I, personally, feel sure that human consciousness is at a stage when no play or story can err that reflects the eternal sublimity of spiritual truths. I do not mean religious truths, but that something that is the mentor of every soul, that other person that is in every one of us, that voice whose messages are conveyed to us often in actual words that come in articulate whispers to our brains or our hearts, messages that direct our steps, if we be receptive, to the higher things of the spirit rather than the sordid desires of the flesh. No more dramatic character has been conceived in all the writings of man than that of the Saviour. Dismissing absolutely any relation that the Messiah may have to creeds, the story of this one Man's sensitive understanding of the human heart and its countless vagaries, is and must ever be the one great drama of all time. Transcendently beautiful in all its aspects of pity, fortitude, sacrifice, patience, courage, who will say that it did not inspire Hugo to give us that big and powerful modern reflex of human life in its passage through life in the places and at the times the French author circumstanced his characters? The story of Jesus is a drama of suffering, a play of infinite appeal, with forgiveness, charity, pity, humility, intermingled in its phases and with beauty of the tincture that magically inspires all ennobling thoughts, ambitions and desires--its guardian angel. It is of plays that have an underlying understanding of the great spiritual stratas that vibrate and quiver beneath the whole structure of human kind that sincere directors speak when they say they are in need of plays of spiritual appeal. The physical matter of the dramas they desire may be as blood-curdling as the most sanguinary melodramatist may conceive, if beneath this physical conflict will be found logically interwoven something of man's pity for his fellow man, the right of every human creature to fair shares in the world's happiness, the concession that to the humblest of God's children may come moments of great exaltation, instances when Bill Sykes may become divine in a spiritualizing of his love for Nancy, when the bishop in the Hugo gallery of unfortunates reflected God himself in his tenderness for the outcast who had robbed him. Give us plays of the spirit as well as of the body, another "Bluebird," if you will, another "My Lady's Dress," another "Daddy Long Legs," another "Prunella!" Maurice Tourneur * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * September 13, 1919 Richard Willis PICTURES AND PICTUREGOER Visited Maurice Tourneur--looks rather like an enlarged version of late Sydney Drew--distinguished looking, courteous, gentlemanly--appallingly outspoken--says "don't give public all it asks for; educate it"--born in Paris--directed and appeared in over four hundred speaking stage productions--hard work--directed screen stories in Paris--came to America-- technique, methods, everything away ahead here...--great admirer of D. W. Griffith--thinks Mary Pickford finest screen actress and Elsie Ferguson brilliant artist--voracious reader--artist in oils and water-colours-- humorous and kindly--deplores present-day taste in photoplay--wishes he did not have to study commercialism--loves his art--thinks nothing of money-- Maurice Tourneur--fine gentleman and credit to screendom. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * May 1920 Maurice Tourneur SHADOWLAND Meeting the Public Demands Oliver Goldsmith once said, "The little mind which loves itself will write and think with the vulgar; the great mind will be bravely eccentric, and scorn the beaten road." Had Goldsmith been a present-day producer of motion pictures he would probably never have spoken that line, for the mind that tries to be eccentric and scorn the beaten road in pictures usually leads the head in which it is contained to disaster. Making pictures is a commercial business, the same as making soap and, to be successful, one must make a commodity that will sell. We have the choice between making bad, silly, childish and useless pictures, which make a lot of money, and make everybody rich, or nice stories, which are practically lost. No body wants to see them. The State right buyers wouldn't buy them; if they did, the exhibitors wouldn't show them. I remember how delighted I was when I read what the reviewers had to say about my "The Blue Bird." Do you know, amongst the hundreds of exhibitors in New York, how many showed it? To my knowledge Mr. Rothapfel and a few fellows uptown. Those of us who are familiar with the productions of the articulate stage know very well that every time we go to see a show we sit before the curtain in a thrill of anticipation, waiting for the magic moment to come, feeling certain that we shall get an excitement of some sort or other. The orchestra plays, the footlights go on and the curtains part. But what do we see if it is the screen? A sneering, hip-wriggling, cigarette-smoking vampire. She exercises a wonderful fascination upon every man that is brought anywhere near her, and so far as I have been able to judge, the only reason for this strange fascination is the combination of the three attributes I have already mentioned. They are good enough to apparently kill any man at fifty yards. If it is not a vampire, it's a cute, curly-headed, sun-bonneted, smiling and pouting ingenue. She also is full of wonderful fascination. She runs through beautiful gardens, (always with the same nice back-lighting effects), or the poor little thing is working under dreadful factory conditions that have not been known for at least forty years. Torn between the sheer idiocy of the hero and the inexplicable hate of the heavy, is it any wonder that her sole communion is with the dear dumb animals, pigs, cows, ducks, goats-- anything so long as it can't talk. If it is not either a vampire or an ingenue, it is a band of cowboys, generous-hearted, impulsive souls. They never do a stroke of work; they couldn't--they have not got time. They must be hanging around the saloon, ready to spring into the saddle and rescue the heroine, whether she is a telegraph operator or a lumberman's daughter, or a school-teacher up in the mountains. I saw all that many times, but I have yet to see a cowboy looking after a cow. Next comes our old friend the convict. He is always innocent, but unjustly imprisoned. Although the picture is one of today and the clothes of everybody were bought last week, our unhappy convict's sole consolation is the fact that he is able to wear striped clothing, abolished years ago. He insists on wearing it; it is the one thing that reconciles him to the rigors of the prison existence, from which he escapes so easily whenever he has a mind to do so. Another old friend is the screen doctor. Carrying always his little black bag, he enters the room where the patient lies unconscious; he feels the pulse, listens to the fluttering motions of the heart, and then one of two things occurs. If the patient is a man, the doctor steps back from the bed, takes off his hat and looks sadly at the floor. This indicates the patient is dead. If the patient is a girl, more particularly if she is the leading lady, he gives her a glass of water, and whether she fell from a thirty foot cliff, was poisoned by the villain, shot in the back by a Japanese spy or run over by the Lumberlands Express, she is instantly cured. You would imagine that the doctor would express some sort of delight at such a miracle, but he doesn't; he remains comparatively unmoved. It is only when a patient dies that he develops an intensity of sympathetic grief such as he would exhibit if the patient were his own twin brother. One thing is certain; if many of his patients die, his own life will be seriously endangered, a merely human constitution being unable to withstand many such shocks. I could keep on describing types like those from now till the middle of next week. Up to the present time the public has not seemed to realize how bad the average picture is, because they have been rather fooled by the fact that directors have introduced new lighting effects, by the personality of the star and by tricks generally. I would rather starve and make good pictures, if I knew they were going to be shown, but to starve and make pictures which are thrown in the ash-can is above anybody's strength. As long as the public taste will oblige us to make what is very justly called machine-made stories, we can only bow and give them what they want. "Prunella" was one of my productions that the reviewers spoke of as an artistic achievement. The first time I saw it shown to the public was in one of the side-shows in Atlantic City. An automatic piano furnished the musical score, which consisted of popular dance music. A week or so later it was shown in one of the leading New York theatres with success, but the managers of the smaller houses throughout the country considered it "too high brow" for their patrons. "Broken Blossoms" was a very good picture, but suppose it had been shown without the two Russian orchestras, the two prologues, and about fifty thousand dollars' worth of publicity, who would have gone to see it? Suppose Mr. Cecil De Mille made "The Admirable Crichton" as Barrie wrote it, instead of putting on "Male and Female" as Mr. De Mille saw it, what would have been the result? The picture wouldn't have made any money, which is not so important, but it would not have been shown, and this is the main thing to a producer, and to my mind it is going to be the greatest event of next year. The American producers will have to change entirely their machine-made stories and come to a closer and truer view of humanity, or the foreign market is going to sweep us out with their pictures, made in an inferior way, but carried over by human, possible, different stories. I am not going to elaborate on the mental anguish of the director who has been talked into accepting a bad script that he knows is bad, because this has happened to me four times out of five and I would rather not think about it, as it is too painful and I remember only too vividly the feeling of gloom and depression with which I have walked away with a script of this sort under my arm, wondering how in the name of heaven I was going to live the next few weeks without committing suicide, or what sort of new stunt I could invent to make it get by. Good stories are not only a necessity, but some day they will actually come. The industry is founded on the firm basis of providing healthy entertainment, and I look forward to the future with confidence. If anyone wants to awake the sleeping beauty, I certainly do, but the poor lady has been sleeping for so many years that at times it seems like an impossible job. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * November 1920 Truman B. Handy MOTION PICTURE That Exotic Frenchman Perhaps pictures will develop in the next two or three years more than they have in the past three or four; perhaps the various obstacles that today stand in the way of producers will be removed. Perhaps. Maurice Tourneur, the man who has brought stagecraft into photoplay production, although he says that the market is filled with worse plays at the present time than it was two years ago, looks hopefully at the silversheet, feels the public pulse, and refuses to prophesy. Prophesy is mere speculation, and he emphatically says that he will not take a chance. Wherefore, we shall deal with pictures as they are and have been--not as they will be. When Griffith produced "Judith of Bethulia" some years ago, says Tourneur, he sold something that would not sell today. "Judith," "The Woman God Forgot," "The Blue Bird," "The Birth of a Nation," combined the artistry of their directors. Today the same men, Griffith, De Mille and he himself, are putting fourth romances of happy valleys, sporting lives, you-can't-have-everythings, et al. But Tourneur believes--and says--that the public taste is not lowered; the reasons are multitudinous mediums between the public, the exhibitor and the producer. Why, he doesn't know, although to him the mediums are potent. "When we were working on a program we could make pictures as we wanted," he sighed. "Now we who are independent producers must consider our market; we must regard the little exhibitor in the Bad Lands of Dakota as carefully as we look to the various Sam Rothapfels of our biggest metropolis. "The future? We shall have to do something--something to get out of the rut. It is a rut. The new director will be a young man who will neglect everything done by his predecessors. He will do things his own way; he will take untrained actors and make a series of snapshots of them--he will work with the kodak rather than the time-exposure camera. We shall notice a great difference, a dissimilitude as great as that between the present-day war pictures made in the Hollywood trenches and the real Pathe views of the European battlegrounds." Artificiality in plays today is one of the decadent reactions. Contemporary screen love-making is a thing of public interest, pictorially speaking, that takes place amidst the most sumptuous surroundings. Tourneur looks forward to the day when love-making in pictures will take place as it does in real life, away from the spotlight, in secluded corners, and not always amid aesthetic surroundings. The director of the future will open the doors and the windows and let the sunlight in. With this preamble, permit me to introduce Maurice Tourneur, the man. He is a big-hearted, generous Frenchman, perhaps in his late thirties, who refuses to glimpse life through a pair of rose-colored spectacles held in place by egotism. He has struggled from the depths of theatrical craft to a leadership in the photoplay thought. His first days on the stage were spent with a cheap French repertoire company on the outskirts of Paris, in which he frequently played not only the butler who announced the guests but the guests themselves. And received ninety francs, fifteen dollars, a month for the performance of such domestic duties. "It was the salary I asked for," he chuckled. "The director said to me, 'Can you get along on it?' and I said, 'Yes.' I didn't get along very well, although I saved a little money. Things weren't expensive in those days and I didn't have much to eat." After a number of seasons in repertoire, each season with a better company, he played with Rejane on her South American tour, and still later with the great French director, Antoine. He has been making pictures in America for five years, developing his ideas in each new release, making practical his theories, and carrying out his convictions. His record in this country reads like the tale of leading-ladies-whom-I- have-loved-professionally, as his work has been with everyone from Emma Dunn to Pauline Starke, including Elsie Ferguson, Petrova, Mary Pickford, Marguerite Clark, the Binney sisters, Constance and Faire, and Alma Hanlon, in such plays as "Mother," "Barbary Sheep," "The Rise of Jennie Cushing," "Rose of the World, ""The Butterfly on the Wheel," "Trilby," with Clara Kimball Young and Wilton Lackaye, "The Whip," perhaps the most popular of the earlier melodramas given to the screen, "Prunella," "The Blue Bird," "Woman," "My Lady's Garter," "White Heather," "Sporting Life," and "Treasure Island." Legend has it that Tourneur is temperamental, a leader who drives with a hard rein; that he is egotistical, that he is eccentric. Not at all. Tourneur, when I saw him, was fearfully worried lest the Kliegs were too bright for the leading lady's eyes, and that the "heavy's" beard would make him a laughing-stock on the street. He looks and dresses like other normal men, and he begged me profusely not to tell anything about him that wasn't true. If he is either eccentric or egotistical, he leaves no such impression. Stories are his particular bete noire. In each he requires a great deal of human sympathy, understandable psychology, and intense, quick action. "Show the people anything, but show them something," he declares. "This can be either funny or dramatic, but there must be something." And at this juncture Tourneur proves something of an iconoclast. The screen ought not to be a platform for the uplift of the masses, he told me. Its forte is amusement, first, last and always. "I do not believe in using the screen as a way of teaching; we have the pulpit and the college. It may be a means of propaganda, but I do not intend to use it as such. Never!" He doesn't believe in the star system, and says no good story can be built around a single gleaming personality, as there are no real "stars" in real life. The most obscure man can in a moment become a so-called "star," afterward only to return to oblivion. The man who stops the runaway, Tourneur tells, is the star of the moment. And after the incident, typically, he is forgotten. "And neither is anyone very good or bad," he remarked. Tourneur works differently with his actors than any other director. He tells them the story as he goes along and asks them to think for themselves. When I saw him, the "set" was the gallery of a cheap London playhouse. Dramatis personae, typical cockneys, and afterward he told me that the entire effect was practically an exact reproduction of the theater and audience of the little repertoire company on the outskirts of Paris. I noticed particularly that he showed the effect on his audience of the supposed drama on the stage below. But not the drama. This is his particular fad. In none of his plays he has showed the subject of his discussion, but always the suggestion. An assistant, crouched underneath the camera, held in his hand a stick to the end of which there was tied a small cloth doll. This he moved slowly in front of him as the supposed actors on the stage below were likely to move in front of the footlights. The "audience" followed the movement of the doll with their eyes, evincing more or less signs of emotion. "He's got a knife!" yelled the "heavy," wild-eyed, pointing to the doll. "Shut up!" echoed an extra in the top row of the gallery. By that method Tourneur will hold the attention of his audience in the picture theater without showing an actual flash of the play within the play. The suggestion is far more dramatic than the actuality, is his theory. In an electrocution, for instance, he says that he would show everything but the actual death in the chair--the warden, the empty cell, the chair, the prisoner, the reporters making their notes--everything but the very thing. Such a means gives the audience's mind a chance to work and every individual will at once form his conception of the subject. The director must be a psychologist who can fathom the mind of his audience as well as of his actors. His duty does not consist in showing artists their business, says Tourneur, and when he works with stars he does not consider it necessary to teach them their work, nor they to instruct him in his. He must create "atmosphere." You can't tell a girl that she has lost her father and must emote over the incident. With the noise of the carpenters, the sight of the bystanders and the irregularity of the entire situation, she may be self-conscious. Tourneur tries to talk her into the mood by explaining the situation and suggesting the atmosphere. When she is emotionally in the right mood she will do her scene, he says. If not, he will work with her until she has grasped the meaning. Nor can a director get results with his actors by thundering at them, he insists. Some are self-conscious and will lose their heads if yelled at. "Just tell them and the work is easy," is his motto. "The whole motion picture business is our joy, our trouble," he remarked philosophically. "We think, we talk of nothing else. Nothing else but our work interests us. If we make money, it is all right--that is, if we believe in picture standards and have ideals to guide us. Personally, if I don't make money on this picture or that, I shall try again. We are all in business to succeed, to make the most of what we can. "Only now since I am in America, am I getting to know what money is and how to have a good time. We owe all this to Mr. Griffith. "Whatever new effects we try to get, we discover that Mr. Griffith made them before we did. Without him we should not be where we are, riding in limousines and talking in terms of sunken gardens and fine homes. Griffith has invented everything in our business. I can't see a thing he hasn't done. "It's a shame we use the screen the way we do. When I see that beautiful white sheet I realize all the lovely things that we haven't done. We have no limitations as to production, funds, nor as to ideals. And still we do continue to see cowboys loitering around bars, and vampires smoking cigarettes. We have been falsified so many times and from so many sources that it is a lifelong task to live down the effect." * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * February 1922 Maurice Tourneur PHOTOPLAY [from an article discussing whether New York or Los Angeles is better suited for film production] From the material standpoint of facilities, costs, climate and the like there is no comparison; Los Angeles is vastly superior. I have always regarded New York's theaters, its music, its arts, its hustle and bustle, its noise and clamor and color, its startling cosmopolitanism, as a most valuable mental stimulant. I honestly consider that bigger things artistically could and would be done were the industry more largely centered in New York and more productions made there. New York's intellectual circles preclude any possibility of cerebral staleness. They awaken new ideas and revive lagging ambitions. London, Paris and Vienna are like that. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * February 4, 1923 NEW YORK TELEGRAPH Motion Pictures Should Be Impressionistic--Tourneur Maurice Tourneur was originally a French actor who played in Paris with Rejane and other French actresses, but is now ranked among the ablest directors in the country. That is why Goldwyn selected him to make its screen version of Sir Hall Caine's "The Christian," which will be the feature at the Capitol Theatre next week. That, also, is why what Mr. Tourneur has to say about motion pictures and the new tendencies in their development is worth hearing. Mr. Tourneur is keenly interested in mental action in films--in getting psychological effects instead of physical action. "I heard a good deal of discussion to the effect that we were going to photograph 'The Christian' in its natural settings in England for the sake of 'realism', said Mr. Tourneur recently. "That to my mind is not the important thing at all. I believe we have passed through the period of physical conflict and crowds, so far as the screen is concerned. What we are after now is the psychology of the drama--the mental action of the characters. "Realism has been emphasized too much. I think that most of us would prefer to see Africa through the eyes of the artist, than through the prosaic lens of the camera. The impression is the thing. "There is such a thing as overdoing beauty in settings. A pretty background is all right, but the background should never be allowed to interfere with the dramatic action. The action should overshadow all else. Pictures must get away from being merely tales portrayed against pretty backgrounds. "The screen is a better medium than the dramatic stage for getting over psychological effects. We can drive ideas across. For instance, what better way is there to express corruption than to show a close-up of the check with which a man has bribed. It takes much longer to put over a mental state like that in words. "The Goldwyn company agreed with me that you can get more to the spectators by showing a banging shutter, by indicating the howling of the wind, or the shrieking of a woman, than by numberless words. Motion pictures, first of all, should be impressionistic. "No artist thinks of his public. If the public likes the results-- great! If the public doesn't like the results--too bad, but all right! Better luck next time. Perhaps you have found in your own experience that you can't reach any measure of real success if you are trying to please any one except yourself. It's the same old story that if you wish to meet a woman or a man favorably, you generally do the wrong thing and make a bad impression. "'Let 'em come to you,' is the best motto. Do your best and see what happens. That's what the artist has to do." Mr. Tourneur's attitude on background comes as a surprise, particularly as he has enjoyed an enviable reputation for the beautiful "composition" of his photodramas. And there is extra food for thought in his statements that "we in pictures now are conveying subtle states of mind," and that "there is no sense in sacrificing reality for mere beauty of sets." * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * July 1, 1923 Maurice Tourneur NEW YORK TELEGRAPH Next Generation Will See The Great Motion Pictures The present generation will never see the really great motion pictures. The difference in film entertainment a hundred years from now will be as great as that between the present aeroplane and the ox cart mode of transportation of the past, is my contention. We are too close to the pioneering stage of the motion picture to develop its subtleties. We of this generation have been clearing away the brush, felling trees, blasting out stumps and carting away boulders. We are preparing the soil. With the next generation will come the cultivation of the really fine things on the screen. The most distinctive evolution in motion pictures will be in the "language" of the pictures or their method of telling a story. The picture of the future will suggest rather than depict. An indication of this is had already. A man leaves his home and goes to his office. We show him today with his arms about his wife at the door. Then in his office dictating to a stenographer. When pictures were new we would have shown him running down to the curb, stepping into his automobile, riding, with trees, homes and telegraph poles flashing by, then with business houses appearing through the automobile window, alighting from his car, getting into the elevator, hanging his hat on the rack, opening the door with his name lettered on it, calling to his stenographer and then the dictation scene to which we jump now. Pictures ultimately will jump with the abruptness of present day cartoons. For instance, Jiggs contradicting Maggie. In the next drawing Jiggs on the sidewalk with a black eye and stars rotating around his head. You don't see him hit, but you know what has happened. Just as the pioneers of this country were in the main occupied with building their homes and developing the soil for the present generation which has developed the finer inventions now common in municipal life, so are we of the motion pictures merely preparing the way for the real things to be portrayed on the screen by the coming generation. But I want to call attention to the fact that certain producing organizations are stifling the progress of the motion picture by taking away from directors various responsibilities and lessening the importance of the director in motion picture production. This practice among some of the larger producing organizations disclosed in recent months of buying stories, adapting them to scenario form, casting the picture and building the sets before the director is engaged is one that will do more to block the progress of motion pictures if it is allowed to continue than anything else. Among one or two big companies the director is having less and less to say about the pictures he makes. In one instance, a fortune was paid for a story, an expensive cast was engaged and work on the building of tremendous sets actually started before the director was engaged. Then a director of doubtful talents was placed "in charge" of the picture. Evidence of giving the director less and less to say about the selection of stories, the casting of pictures and the building of sets is had daily. But wonderful pictures from large organizations are very much the exception. Big organizations can maintain a certain average quality of production, but they cannot create the real masterpieces that mark progress in the march of the photoplay. Pictures, the kind that mean something to the industry, are the works of individuals who are solely responsible for all phases of production. The big achievements of Griffith, the late George Loane Tucker, Neilan, Ingram and others of prominence in the producing field embody the execution of the creative ideas of individuals and not the dictatorial conglomerations of large organizations. These men are allowed--in fact, they demand--free rein. In this manner only can pictures reach a higher average of merit. A review of film history clearly proves this. Organizations which endeavor to relieve the director of all the most important responsibilities of his job are blocking the path of progress. Such organizations may turn out a fair average product and keep the standard of production where it is today. They will never be conducive to progress. The motion picture cannot stay where it is. If it does not progress, it must stagnate. On the shoulders of the director should rest the full responsibilities of a production. To relieve him of any of these responsibilities and to compel him to confine his efforts to adapting himself to the ideas of a half dozen "experts" will strike at the very foundation of successful pictures. If allowed to continue the motion picture both from artistic and financial standpoints will promptly start on its downward path in public favor. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * October 14, 1923 NEW YORK TELEGRAPH American Public Wants Types, Not Facts, Says Film Director Los Angeles, Oct. 8.--The American public demands "types," It has a standardized conception of the farmer, the banker, the Western sheriff, and scores of other characters, a conception which it will not allow facts to alter. So Maurice Tourneur told Samuel Guard, of the American Farm Bureau Federation, in an open letter this week, when Guard challenged the screen depiction of the farmer. Complaints that film producers have "failed" to depict farmers, but prefer to picture them as "hicks and rubes," Mr. Guard declared in a statement at a federation convention that its publicity division would produce its own pictures unless the farmer was given justice. Tourneur's reply has given wide publicity in newspapers here which published Guard's original statement. Pete Smith, Tourneur's press representative, saw to that. The letter follows: "The American public demands types. It recognizes a farmer as a farmer only when he chews a straw, wears jeans and chin whiskers. It wants a Texas sheriff to wear a sombrero with a six-inch brim, not a derby, as one of my acquaintance does. "You are quoted in a news dispatch from Chicago in this morning's Los Angeles Times, a dispatch doubtless printed in hundreds of other newspapers as saying that 'the farm is modern and up-to-date, with all the conveniences of the city, but the film producer has woefully neglected to keep pace with the farmer. They fail to depict us as citizens, but prefer to picture us as hicks and rubes. We don't want this kind of caricature before the public, and if the motion picture interests won't picture rural life and districts as they should be, we intend to produce our own pictures.' "That, sir, would be a financial mistake, from which I hope I can save you by two statements of fact. The first is, no propaganda film has ever returned enough to repay the cost of making. The second is, if you can show us how to make a financially successful motion picture depicting rural life without introducing into it characters which picture fans will instantly recognize as rural characters, I shall be only too happy to do so. "No American bankers that I have met wear frock clothes to business. Yet the public would not recognize a banker without a silk hat and frock coat. I have lived most of my life in France. I never shrug my shoulders. I gesticulate no more, I dare say, than you. But if I were depicting a Frenchman on the screen I would both shrug and gesticulate frequently. "Gypsies, today, I found during several weeks of visiting Southern California camps, travel in motors and live in tents. Some of them even have gasoline stoves and hot water flowing from the tank through a faucet. But when I filmed a gypsy story, 'Jealous Fools,' his Summer, I pictured a band of them living in the wagon; tradition says they do. Gypsies in a motor would not have been accepted by the motion picture public. "Life as it exists in the imagination of the American public is not life as it is lived, but it is the life that must be pictured for the public's entertainment, whether in a novel or a newspaper, on the stage or on the screen. "Every man with an income of more than $5,000 a year and who habitually wears a white collar, is a clubman in the newspapers, particularly if he is involved in a scandal. Every feminine member of his family more than fifteen years old is a society girl and beautiful in the same circumstances. "All newspaper reporters carry notebooks, all Englishmen wear spats and a monocle, all Southerners besprinkle their conversations with "you-all" on the stage. All detectives carry caps and false whiskers in their pockets; all farmers' daughters have the purity of the lily and a complexion like a rose petal; all chorus girls live in great luxury and sell their charms to the highest bidder--in novels. "Do sailors really have a sweetheart in every port? Do all policemen have big, flat feet? In how many barber shops have you ever heard a barber shop chord? Is a manicure girl necessarily naughtier than a milkmaid? "If you still object to chin-whiskered farmers who lift their feet high enough to step over the stubble as they walk, come to Los Angeles, and within Twenty-four hours I will have summoned, through a motion picture employment bureau, a hundred men who have spent their whole lives on farms, who do wear chin whiskers and do step high. "Although California farmers, as a class, are the wealthiest in the country, I will take you to a score of farms within fifty miles of Los Angeles which have no water supply, except the barnyard pump, no light except that from an oil lamp, no automobiles, tractors or other modern machinery; farms on which the owner owns no clothes, except those on his back, where the barn is bigger and more substantial than the house." (signed) "Maurice Tourneur." * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * November 25, 1923 NEW YORK TELEGRAPH Shorter Feature Pictures Coming Back, Says Tourneur That shorter feature productions will come back into favor among producers as a result of the present condition of the producing industry is the contention of Maurice Tourneur, following a survey of producing and exhibiting conditions. "The present slump in the producing industry has proved to film executives that it is a fallacy to make a so-called special production for the sake of achieving a physically big picture," says the director. "Splendor, tremendous sets and long footage will never prove good sales points to either the exhibitor or the public in the distribution of pictures. "A number of recent illustrations of this have been evident. The moving about of the characters of a story amidst towering sets as so many chess men is not sufficient to hold public interest. Big sets must have a reason for being in the picture aside from the belief that they offer an excuse for higher film rentals and higher admission prices. "Many of the 'big' pictures released in recent months in nine, ten or more reels could not only have been told as effectively in six or seven reels, but better. "Excessive footage is the enemy of the theatre owner. It is the picture's downfall as far as the public is concerned. Harold Lloyd's five- reelers will make more money than most ten-reelers. It's not the length of the production, but what's in it, that counts. There are some few stories that are best told in ten reels, but these are mighty scarce. "A favorite remark among those identified with the production of a recent super-film (as to length and settings) was 'It has bigger sets than "Robin Hood."' This is a phrase that started on the lot and was carried on through the organization and to theatre owners by the salesmen of the company. The sets did look larger than those in the Fairbanks picture, but 'Robin Hood' continues a tremendous success, not because of its spectacular effects, but because the other production is a failure. "Since my affiliation with M. C. Levee in the production of First National pictures we have enforced a definite policy of telling our stories in six or seven reels. This policy has saved us from making the mistakes that have led others into trouble. It is my belief that this policy will be general in the producing industry within the next two months." * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 1924 Maurice Tourneur THE TRUTH ABOUT HOLLYWOOD Why Motion Pictures Reach Greater Artistic Heights Than The Stage When motion pictures first became a commercial possibility in length longer than two reels, the leaders of the industry naturally turned to the stage to recruit their actors, directors and technicians. The first motion picture of feature length was really a motion picture of stage plays. Their interiors were identical to those used on the stage. The added advantage was in being able to show what went on behind the scenes, which, on the stage, was explained by the spoken word. Particularly were they able to photograph their exteriors in the actual settings in which the plot was laid. This added the element of realism. The settings used on the stage at that time were not very different from those used today. In other words, the stage has not made very great strides in the direction of realism. In comparison with the strides made by motion pictures, it has practically stood still. Nowadays, when we have the opportunity to see some of the pictures made long ago, it is a source of great merriment. To think that when the villain came blustering into the room covered with paper snow and slammed the door, the entire scene would rock back and forth, is amusing. If the pictures were not painted on the walls they might fall off or assume weird angles. In one of the older pictures, I remember a bit of realism injected by using the limb of a tree projected through a back drop on which was painted a tree. When the scene was photographed, the man holding the limb of the tree would sway it back and forth. Today, those in the motion picture business look at such things in amazement. They have progressed tremendously toward greater realism and they have only begun. Before I returned West to begin production on a new picture I had the opportunity to visit the principal current stage attractions in New York. The one thing that impressed me most was their lack of progress in settings. It seems unbelievable that, in this day and age, we should still see framed pictures painted on the back drop. Yes, and even windows, doors and furniture treated in the same manner. Paper snow and rain that looked as if it were being poured from a sprinkling can by a stage hand. Food cooked on the stove heated by red electric lights and no steam coming from the pots on the stove. Property food and water in the tea and coffee pots, are only some of the things I might mention. In one scene, the setting shook as if it were about to fall down when the door was closed a bit more vigorously than planned. It reminded me of the first motion pictures. These are minor details but they keep the audience reminded that they are watching an unreal performance. If we should attempt to do such things in motion pictures today, we would never hear the end of it. The motion picture industry from the prop man to the star is constantly working to improve itself. The theatre has been content to rest where it was ten years ago. The result is that motion pictures have reached greater artistic heights than the stage and will continue on--years in advance of the stage. ***************************************************************************** ***************************************************************************** Back issues of Taylorology are available on the Web at any of the following: http://www.angelfire.com/az/Taylorology/ http://www.etext.org/Zines/ASCII/Taylorology/ http://www.silent-movies.com/Taylorology/ Full text searches of back issues can be done at http://www.etext.org/Zines/ or at http://www.silent-movies.com/search.html. For more information about Taylor, see WILLIAM DESMOND TAYLOR: A DOSSIER (Scarecrow Press, 1991) *****************************************************************************