Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

Yet another point might have been noted—that the scene bore small resemblance to anything in the script, in whose mimeographed pages the girl had not been blind, and the men, before they could fill their pockets with food and get away, had had to dodge in and out of rooms like erring husbands in a French farce.

After the word “Cut” there was a spell of continued tension as if even hard-boiled technicians were impressed; then Paul added: “Print the first one,” and everybody laughed. Already he had become somewhat notorious for saying that.

Greg joined Carey at the edge of the suddenly unloosed commotion; Paul was already talking to the camera-man about the next scene.

“How does he do it?” Greg exclaimed. “An old ham like Barrington…”

Carey said: “I’ve never seen Barrington before.”

“That’s the point. Nobody’s ever seen him before… How does he do it? Paul, I mean.”

She said: “It was the same in the theatre. He had a way of getting things out of people.”

Greg nodded. “Now go back and finish your nap. We shan’t be wanted for another hour at least.”

“I’m glad you fetched me, Greg. It’s a wonderful scene. Who changed it this way?”

“Can’t you guess? The writers haven’t been near the place. They’ll probably kick when they find out, unless they know a good thing when they see it, and who does, when it’s somebody else’s?”

“Did Randolph approve?”

“He wouldn’t have been given a chance only he happened to come on the set while the whole thing was being cooked up and re-rehearsed. I don’t think he really liked it. He finds it hard to like anything that Paul does at the last minute without consulting him. But the big row was because Paul wanted the girl to speak in German—said it was more natural and the words themselves didn’t matter—the voice would give the meaning. Of course Randy wouldn’t stand for that, and Paul had to give in. The rest he did the way he wanted it.” Greg laughed. “What a way to make a picture! And yet WHAT a way—if you can do it!”

She had already admitted Greg to full membership in the conspiracy of those who knew the formula derived from measuring Paul’s faults against his virtues.

“Personally,” she said, “I agree with Randolph about the German. Paul goes overboard sometimes.”

“Sure. Ninety per cent of Paul and ten per cent of Randy make a good mixture.”

“I think I’ll drop by and talk to him before I go home. Perhaps I can smooth matters down a bit.”

“Couldn’t do any harm. He likes YOU.”

So she called at Randolph’s office before leaving the studio that evening. She didn’t defend the changed scene, but chatted about it in a seemingly impartial way and somehow conveyed her own satisfaction with the progress of the picture as a whole. Randolph, frosty at first, thawed under her influence till at last he admitted that some of the scenes LOOKED all right. The test, of course, would be in the public’s reception. He was a tall dome-headed tweedy fellow in his late fifties, as proud of his Bond Street shoes as he was of his hundred-odd pictures that, over a period of twenty years, had earned fabulous profits without ever collecting a single award or distinction. He was not cynical about this, merely matter of fact. Picture-making was an industry; art was all right, but it usually did not pay. If by chance it did, it was either a fluke, or else the artist involved had been kept in careful check by men of proved experience. He himself was a man of proved experience and he was determined to keep Saffron in check, but Saffron, being not only an artist but also a so-and-so, was harder to check than most artists. This was his attitude, which he did not put into words, but which Carey understood perfectly. She had even a certain amount of sympathy—not with it, but with him, for Paul’s habit of rewriting scenes at the last minute was really inexcusable. But then Paul had found many other things inexcusable. His first big row with Randolph had occurred after the first day’s shooting when the two of them, along with Carey, Greg Wilson, and a fourth man, had sat in the back row of a projection-room to see the rushes. The fourth man, introduced indistinctly, was ignored until Randolph suddenly addressed him across the others. “Cut from where the girl enters the room to the long shot of the cab arriving. Then go to the two-shot inside the cab.” Paul rose from his seat immediately. “What’s going on? Are you joking? Who is this fellow?” The fourth man, who had been taking notes, was then solemnly reintroduced as a cutter. Paul erupted for about ten minutes. It was then explained to him that Majestic Pictures Incorporated employed producers to produce, directors to direct, and cutters to cut. Paul said he would do his own cutting or quit. He had had to concede control of production, casting, and music, but there was a limit beyond which he would not surrender. The argument continued in the darkened projection-room until Randolph was fuming and Paul had begun to inveigh against the entire output of Majestic Pictures, hardly any of which he had seen. The cutter sat silent, aware that his salary did not entitle him to an opinion. In the end the matter was left somewhat undecided, with Carey and Greg appealing to both sides to wait till the picture was finished before any cutting was done at all. “If it’s good,” she said, “surely it won’t be hard then to agree on the details.” This may not have made much sense (since it would always be hard for Paul to agree with anyone else on anything), but it provided a needed excuse for shelving the issue; but of course Randolph hated Paul from then on, and Paul, who already hated Randolph, began a grim accumulation of ammunition for the eventual fight. One of his procedures was to see earlier pictures that Randolph had produced, whenever the chance occurred, and gloat over the details of their badness.

There were other troubles. Randolph’s way of shooting a picture (he had been a director himself in his time) was to make a long master-shot of everything in a scene, then break it up into medium and close shots, ‘favouring’ the star—for naturally, under the star system, who else could be ‘favoured’? The final jigsaw was then assembled in the cutting-room, where, if any supporting actors were so good that they drew too much attention, the error could be corrected by blanketing their voices against the star’s close-up. This had been done so often in all Majestic pictures that it had become a formula which Randolph took for granted; even to question it seemed slightly impious. Paul not only questioned it, he called it nonsense. First, he did not believe in master-shots, and he hated close-ups of faces while other actors were speaking. And he liked the camera to move, not to chop and change from one fixed position to another. Nor did he believe a scene could be stolen except by what deserved to steal it —which was good acting against bad acting. He thought Greg Wilson, for instance, was a pretty bad actor, and hadn’t wanted him in the picture at all. Randolph, however, knew that Carey had no following among movie-goers, and had insisted on casting Majestic’s biggest box-office name opposite her. Carey was prepared to agree that in this Randolph might be wise, but Paul resented it until one day Greg told Paul that no director he had ever experienced had done so well with him. This flattered Paul and made him think Greg not nearly as bad, which was the necessary self-hypnosis before Paul could make him, as he presently did, rather surprisingly adequate.

As for Carey herself, her introduction to a new technique of acting, if it were such, seemed less significant than a return to the discipline of working with Paul. After an anguished rehearsal of the first scene, she wondered what had ever possessed her to undertake a renewal of this ordeal voluntarily; a hundred memories assailed her, mostly of similar anguish when she had been unable to please him during stage rehearsals; she might have guessed he would have become no more indulgent with the years. But then one day while she was before the camera in a rather difficult scene, another memory touched her —the renewal of that curious trance-like bliss that told her she was ACTING, and with it the renewal of ambition to act, and of the feeling that what she was doing mattered by some standard shared by other arts. She tried to catch Paul’s eye when the scene ended, but he was looking elsewhere; she heard, however, the inflection in his voice as he spoke the one word “Print,” and in that she had her answer. She felt suddenly radiant. It was all worth while. God knew how or why, but it was.