Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

Once again a scene practically without dialogue, and once again different from the pages of the script. In these the pursuer had recognized Greg and there had been a męlée with shots fired and mirrors broken; Greg had eventually managed to escape through a back door. If, therefore, Paul’s scene could have been called over-subtle, the one it replaced had no subtlety at all. But it would have played well enough, and the original dialogue between Greg and the pursuer had been of the tried and true variety— “Put ‘em up or I’ll shoot”—“You think you’ve got me, do you? Stand back, you—” etc. etc.

The writers had urged on Randolph that Paul’s scene, both as to incident and motivation, would not be understood by an average audience, and Randolph (miffed because once again a vital change had been made at the last moment without consulting him) had agreed with them.

“And what’s going to happen?” Carey asked.

“Who cares any more about that?” Paul began to chuckle. “It’s happened. I shot the scene my way.”

“Oh dear, you’re very obstinate.”

“OBSTINATE? ME? After all my compromises?”

“Paul, do you know what the word compromise means?”

“Sure—it’s what I’m doing now by working on a picture like this at all. The only thing it can be, at best, is a bag of tricks. Well, that’s all right—I don’t expect them to let me produce a work of art. But if it’s going to be a bag of tricks, for God’s sake let the tricks be tricky enough. And that’s what really beats me, Carey—here’s this business of telling stories by means of tiny photographs—it’s just about fifty years old—fifty out of the thousands since people began telling stories at all—yet already there are factory rules laid down— mustn’t do this, mustn’t do that… And you call me obstinate because I dare to answer: TRY IT! See if an audience is as dumb as you think! There they are —the groundlings—all crunching popcorn just like Shakespeare’s crowd at the Globe if there’d been popcorn in those days—all you have to do is to give them a Twelfth Night—it doesn’t have to be a Hamlet every time!”

“I’d like to see you shooting Hamlet, Paul—you’d cut half the lines.”

“So would Shakespeare if he’d had a camera to play with.”

“You must admit, though, you do seem to have a special grudge against dialogue.”

“No, not a grudge at all—only a realization of what films have done in their first fifty years. They’ve broken the bottleneck of words that we’ve all endured for centuries—they’ve challenged the scholars and grammarians who built their little private fences round enlightenment— they’ve freed us from the thraldom of Gutenberg!… You’ve heard some of the old jokes about producers out here who’re supposed to be illiterate? Too bad the breed seems to be dying out—I think I could have got along with one of them better than with Randolph. Because that fellow READS. God, how he reads! He and his wife, when they get hold of what they think is a good book, d’you know what they do? THEY READ TO EACH OTHER ALOUD. From chair to chair and bed to bed—a chapter apiece every evening! He TOLD me… and with a straight face!”

Paul’s guffaws lasted for some time, and Carey laughed more moderately, reflecting that, for all his tirade against books and Gutenberg, there could be few people on earth who had read more. During the periods of his life when he had been out of a job he had borrowed five or six books a day from public libraries, and when he had been earning money he had usually come home with purchased books under his arm. He had probably spent more time in Brentano’s than in all other New York shops put together. And she had rarely heard anyone mention a play or a playwright or an episode of theatrical or dramatic history that he did not seem to know plenty about. It was true he was not a scholar in the pedagogic sense, but his range was wider—he had an artist’s acquaintance with all the arts, plus a technician’s familiarity with all the theatrical arts, plus an immense if disordered store of general knowledge. He would probably have been a great success on Information Please… But of course the way he digested books was photographic; he could acquire the sense of pages without taking words consecutively, and the notion of his ever reading aloud a whole chapter of anything or wishing her to read him one, was certainly comic. Sometimes, when she had been driving the car in those old days, she had asked him to read her the headlines in the paper, but before he was through a couple of them he had usually launched into comments or fulminations that had made her exclaim: “Darling, will you please read me what it says and leave what you think about it till afterwards.”

Pleasant, in a way, to remember these things now, while his guffaws continued.

The barber-shop scene was cut, entirely; a conclave of studio executives decided after seeing the rushes that it simply did not ‘come off’. As it was only an episode in the chase, the cut did not spoil the finished picture. To Paul, however, it might have been his own lifeblood that had been arbitrarily drained away, and since he blamed the writers for it he looked for an early chance to get his own back. It came when one of them, a quiet, studious- looking youth named Mitchell who had said little during story conferences and had always seemed anxious that his more voluble partner should act as spokesman, chanced to visit the set on some personal business that had nothing to do with Paul. But Paul spotted him and drew him into a conversation that began quietly enough; soon, however, the youth was the centre of a group with Paul baiting him gleefully. When Carey came up, hearing a commotion, she was in time to catch Paul at his familiar game of repeating before a larger audience something he had originally tried out before her. “Of course you writers don’t really like motion pictures— how could you? Pictures have broken the bottleneck of words that’s been your mainstay for centuries—they’ve freed the world from the thraldom of Gutenberg! In one silent shot I can tell more of a story than you could set down in a whole chapter!”

“Yes, but to create a character, Mr. Saffron—” Mitchell began in feeble protest.

“All right,” Paul snapped. “Create your character—write your pages of dialogue to make your audience feel the way you want about him. Let’s say he’s the heavy—the worst villain you can invent—liar, crook, murderer—Simon Legree and Dracula rolled into one—take fifty pages to put your readers in a fine lather of hate. Then call me in with my camera and I’ll undo it all in ten seconds. And you know how?”

Mitchell stammered that he didn’t know how, but Paul was going to tell him anyway. “All I need is a little lame dog dodging traffic at a crossroads. Your villain comes along, picks him up, carries him over, sets him down again. Ten seconds. Not a word spoken. And the audience loves the guy for ever. Do you doubt it?”

“No,” Mitchell admitted, amidst the laughter. Then remarkably he seemed to acquire stature, shaking off the nervousness that had made him till then a rather ineffectual figure. He went on, gathering power as from some unsuspected source: “I don’t doubt it at all, Mr. Saffron. It’s always quicker to raise a prejudice than plant an opinion. That’s part of what’s wrong with the world today. You talk about the thraldom of Gutenberg, but it was under that thraldom that men learned to THINK. Today thinking’s out of style, it’s highbrow or longhair or whatever smear you have for it; you’ve learned to bypass the brain and shoot for the blood pressure—all your stuff is really for the twelve-year-old!”

“ALL my stuff?” Paul managed to interrupt. “How much of it have you seen? Did you ever see Erste Freundschaft?”