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* T A Y L O R O L O G Y *
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* A Continuing Exploration of the Life and Death of William Desmond Taylor *
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* *
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* Issue 77 -- May 1999 Editor: Bruce Long bruce@asu.edu *
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* TAYLOROLOGY may be freely distributed *
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CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE:
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Maurice Tourneur
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What is TAYLOROLOGY?
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TAYLOROLOGY is a newsletter focusing on the life and death of William Desmond
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Taylor, a top Paramount film director in early Hollywood who was shot to
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death on February 1, 1922. His unsolved murder was one of Hollywood's major
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scandals. This newsletter will deal with: (a) The facts of Taylor's life;
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(b) The facts and rumors of Taylor's murder; (c) The impact of the Taylor
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murder on Hollywood and the nation; (d) Taylor's associates and the Hollywood
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silent film industry in which Taylor worked. Primary emphasis will be given
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toward reprinting, referencing and analyzing source material, and sifting it
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for accuracy.
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Maurice Tourneur
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The following is a selection of articles by, and interviews with,
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Maurice Tourneur, a leading silent film director who was one of Taylor's
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contemporaries.
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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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July 3, 1915
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NEW YORK CLIPPER
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Maurice Tourneur Voices a Few Opinions
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In the rapidly changing panorama of the moving picture production field
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there looms a new and important factor, a personality which will be felt.
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He is Mons. Maurice Tourneur, the latest addition to the World Film direction
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corps. M. Tourneur was born in Paris thirty-eight years ago, and educated
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there. He attained some degree of fame as a painter, and to this training
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may be attributed the artistic manner in which his photoplays are put on.
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Feeling the call of the closer touch with his fellow man, M. Tourneur
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abandoned the palette and brush for the stage and worked under the master
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hand of Andre Antoine, the Belasco of Paris, playing important parts with
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Mme. Rejane in England and South America and on the continent, and assisting
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in the stage direction. In one or the other capacity, he participated in
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four hundred plays, including Shakespearean and other classical
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presentations, before leaving the speaking stage for that of the silent
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drama.
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"I consider moving pictures," said M. Tourneur, in a recent interview,
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"the most important invention for education since the printing press. It is
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absurd to say it is in its infancy since so much has developed in it, but
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truly it is in its childhood, as is evidenced by the almost daily strides
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forward. It stands alone today as a growing industry, and so great is its
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promise, its future cannot be foretold. I do not favor the combination of
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the pictures with the spoken drama, as experimentally put forth in 'The
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Alien.' The silent stage is a thing as much apart from the so-called
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'legitimate' stage as ice skating is from roller skating.
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"What we need for the cinema today is authors. There are few real
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screen authors. Whether acknowledged or not, nearly everything worth while
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in the pictures is an adaptation of a book, a play, a poem. A new sort of
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creative literary brain must develop for filmdom. There must be a better and
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a more natural showing of human nature, in which the conflicting sides, both
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good and bad, are shown in their true combination.
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"Our screen heroes and heroines today are saintly; there are no such
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people in life. Our villains are so bitterly bad and deep-dyed in their
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wickedness that nothing so evil can be found this side of hades. Let our
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hero digress occasionally from the flowery paths of virtue; otherwise he is
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far from human. Let us find a redeeming trait, a kindly impulse at least
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once in a while in our villain, there's a ray of good in every human breast."
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"Who is, in your opinion, the foremost director in moving pictures?" he
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was asked. The answer came with a smile and without a moment's hesitation.
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"Mr. Griffith," said Mr. Tourneur, "he had the first big chance and had
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brains enough and courage enough to seize it. He made the most of it. All
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others suffer by comparison with him. He stands alone."
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M. Tourneur's ambition is to produce strong and appealing detective
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stories. He believes they interest the greatest number of people. He has
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already produced J. Storer Clouston's "The Lunatic at Large," and is seeking
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for material along that line. His productions with the World Film in the
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last eight months have been "Mother," with Emma Dunne; "The Face in the
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Moonlight" and "The Man of the Hour" with Robert Warwick; "The Wishing Ring"
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with Vivian Martin; "The Pit," with Wilton Lackaye; "The Boss," "Trilby,"
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with Wilton Lackaye and Clara Kimball Young, and "Alias Jimmy Valentine,"
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with Robert Warwick. He is now producing "The Cub," with Robert Warwick."
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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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November 6, 1915
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MOTOGRAPHY
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Tourneur Heads New Firm
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With "Quality, not Quantity" as its motto, a new film manufacturing
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concern, the Paragon Film, Inc., will open a great studio, now nearing
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completion, at a factory at Fort Lee, N. J., about December 1. At the head
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of the organization, which is backed by ample capital, is M. Maurice
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Tourneur, the eminent French producer of motion pictures, who came to this
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country from Paris a year ago and has staged some of the most artistic screen
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productions seen in this country. His office in the New Jersey corporation
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is the dual one of vice-president and general manager. The Paragon will
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release its output through the World Film Corporation, with which M. Tourneur
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has been associated.
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"The new company," said M. Tourneur in an interview, "will enable me to
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present photodramas of five or more reels each, along special lines, which I
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have long felt would be very profitable. We will not attempt to turn out a
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million feet a week, nor even from thirty to forty reels, as nothing really
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artistic can be assured to such an output. Our intention is to produce about
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twenty-four big five-reel features a year and perhaps three or four larger
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ones, which will mean from 10,000 to 15,000 feet of film a month. We are
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certain of a market for such an output and we expect to produce better
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pictures than have yet been made. This will make the exhibitors our friends.
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"The new plant is ideally located in the center of the woods near the
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Universal plant, and it will contain many original improvements, the effect
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of which will be felt by those seeing our pictures. We have already
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contracted for the best French directors in America, the best original
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scenarios and adaptations from the recent plays of the most successful
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theatrical managers, and for the best American actors whom I regard as
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superior to any we have in Europe.
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"Although we have gone so far with our plans, the door is still open and
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always will be for new talent and for original artistic suggestions. While
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we start from a high point, we feel that we have much to learn, and our
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policy will be one of progress, and not of satisfaction to continue with what
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we have accomplished. I detest a crowded or a noisy studio and I feel that
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these two conditions have held back the motion picture more than any other
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factors. I shall have but three or at most four directors beside myself, and
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these will have plenty of room and privacy for their work. I shall try to
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eliminate rush, as time is most important to the artistic creator in any form
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of endeavor.
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"With the absence of noise and trouble, caused by imperfect system, I
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think I can do away with all the nervousness which has so often proved fatal
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to the production of the high-class drama. I have invented and adapted means
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for new and correct lighting, one of the chief requisites for convincing
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screen results. The greatest care will be taken in the selection of our
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casts. Our successes already in that particular will testify to our ability
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in that direction.
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"We will not hesitate to spend money to secure desired results, as our
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directors have been so carefully chosen as to make them worthy of the highest
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trust. They will not be hampered in any way. They will not have to wait and
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keep their actors waiting for hours while a scene is being set, for there
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will be stages enough to have these all set at night, so that the work on the
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actual making of the picture will begin the first thing in the morning, while
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all are fresh and can give the best that is in them. In this way, instead of
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devoting most of the day to the mechanical work and a small part to the
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artistic, the entire day will be given over to the acting, thus obtaining the
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coveted prize of director and actor alike, time."
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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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April 29, 1916
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Maurice Tourneur
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HARPER'S WEEKLY
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Movies Create Art
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Movies: a quivering rift in an emerald woods, silver-shot with a
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summer's sun; a startled nymph beside a mirrored pool, the play of whose form
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is a prayer; a charnel house, grimy and shadowy, its damp marble slabs
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glinting green against the moon; a baby's smile, also its tears, the one as
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unfeigned as the other; a mountain ridge at night with silhouetted riders
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speeding by against the clouds; a jungle kraal, with a panther brood
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frolicking about a recumbent mother, whose eyes are lit with the maternal
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fire that shines not on the land nor on the sea--these motion picture
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miracles, the tabulation of scarce more than a single hand against an
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overwhelming array, many as inspiring, many more thrilling, many more
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enthralling alike to the artist and all others--and these are but exhibits of
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a craft?
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Bezeul, now a confrere at the Paragon studios, several months ago
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stalked the woods of the Champagne section in France at the close of a
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battle, equipped with a movie camera, and the world has since thrilled with
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the chill of death as shown by war's horrors in the raw; no sheltering
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fiction of paint as Meissonier gives it, nor of molded mineral Rodin forms,
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but death real, stark, limp and fearful, carpeting an actual glade, animate
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only in the mute, orderly stepping from corpse to corpse to check the
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victims' identities by their regiment tags. Merely mechanical, to turn the
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crank that rolls the film upon whose solution the heroism of a nation is writ
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indelibly. Staging death in the mass, yet with restraint, keeping the will
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master of the emotions, so directing the camera that the merely gruesome
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shall be but an underlying terror of the whole--this, too, is but
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craftsmanship--a cutey?
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I produced the French stage version of "Alias Jimmy Valentine." I later
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filmed the play for this country. Paul Armstrong's piece in its stage form
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needed little adapting for the films. Armstrong, as everyone knows, took the
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character of "Jimmy" from an O. Henry tale and that's all he took. Scarcely
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more than four printed pages in length in its O. Henry form, it was the idea
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of a semi-polished outlaw gaily fastening himself upon the payroll of a bank
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that he designed subsequently to rob, that fired Armstrong. Structurally
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there is no more resemblance between the O. Henry fiction and the Armstrong
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comedy than there is between a chess board and a woman weeping. Do the
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learned judges of the new art deny that Armstrong created an enlivening
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drama? Do they deny that the mere record of Jimmy's job-taking in the bank,
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even without the details of its original fiction, was in essence a play?
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Would they deny this adaptation practice to the credentialed film director!
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Isn't the history of the acting drama and the printed fiction that inspires
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it a voluminous record of interchanges? Didn't the great romancer take
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largely from Montaigne? Doesn't Montaigne freely confess his own
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appropriations from multiple sources? Aren't we all creatures of just so
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many emotions? Isn't drama mere criss-crossed collisions of these, taking
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new forms with each fresh alignment? Isn't there in Shakespeare an entire
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gamut of masculine character, also a more or less complete feminine galaxy as
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it exists about us today?
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Do filmdom's decriers concede the necessity for the preservation of
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something like a unified whole in a spoken stage piece or a mute filmed one?
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Do these captious weeping willows know that if a film director produced
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verbatim the average scenario as detailed in, say, a five reel picture, the
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audience would consider the six-day Chinese drama a delightful tabloid in
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comparison? Do they know that one entire reel of one thousand feet of film
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may be interestingly devoted to the mere entrance of a single person into a
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room?
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I have not seen anywhere any claim of any manufacturer of films that he
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considers himself an artist or even a purveyor of art, or that he aspires or
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seeks to mold public taste in photoplays, nor do I believe he makes a
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practice to producing what he thinks the public thinks it wants. Considering
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the difficulties besetting his supply, I think the film manufacturer is doing
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in the short time of his existence, a great deal more than any publisher or
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theatrical manager of an equally brief existence did, not even excepting the
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early days of the French, German and English stage and literature, which
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reminds me that Shakespeare shows in all his work that he would have reveled
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in the magical volubility of the motion camera. Not a play of his but shows
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his flair for scenic embellishment and brilliant variety. What he would have
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done with his filmed battle scenes--a flash here of panoply, a shift to a
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portentous conference, a flash of helmeted couriers, all filigrees of his
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main current.
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The quarrel with close-ups by the present school of film decriers is
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without consideration. The close-up, which, by the way, is not new, is
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merely a director's emphasis of a phase of his play, an auxiliary he employs
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to insure the conveyance of a definite thought at a definite stage of the
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play. Reference to their abnormal size is as intelligent as the same
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criticism would be of the colossal bronze of Daniel Webster in Central Park,
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the Bartholdi Liberty Lady in New York bay, or the Sherman equestrian figure
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on the Plaza on Fifth Avenue, New York.
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Authorities agree that the stage production methods of Max Reinhardt are
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art. Are film directors, who write, create, adapt stage and camera plays
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less entitled to the term? Capellani, a Paragon associate director, filmed
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"Les Miserables." If photoplay critics think the people--the common people--
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are artistically obtuse, let them scan the royalty records of the Hugo
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fiction in films and note the millions who came, wondered and wept with
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Valjean and the other unfortunates of the imperishable tale.
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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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Dorothy Nutting
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July 1918
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PHOTOPLAY
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[from an article on Maurice Tourneur]...The cinema tried to beckon to
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him. He haunted the funny little theatres which soon sprang up, paying often
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as much as fifty centimes (ten cents) a ticket. This was a great
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extravagance for the young student at the Lycee Condorcet, and soon
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abandoned, for he obtained an engagement with the great tragedienne, Rejane,
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who was making a tour of the world, including Africa.
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"One unique engagement," says M. Tourneur, "Was at Dakar, on the
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northern edge of the Sahara in Algiers. We reached the town on a queer sort
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of boat, the engine of which was dying by inches. We were due at eight
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o'clock at night, and arrived at midnight exactly. Everyone was asleep and
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we would lose our evening's receipts. We were all truly dismayed! For we
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needed the money, so Madame Rejane, with all her adorable aplomb, merely
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attached bells to the necks of a few of the natives and turned them lose to
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announce the news of our arrival. Behold, in half an hour there we had an
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audience ten times larger than we would have had at eight!"
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But, to come back to America and the matter in hand, the art of this
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poet of the screen, his views are refreshingly different from that of most of
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the producers. For example:
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"There is an odious fallacy that a great many people still believe, in
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regard to the moving picture. It is almost as widespread as that the cinema
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is in its infancy. By that I mean the belief that we must give the public
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what it wants. To me, that is absurd. As absurd as if the fashion dictators
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should attempt to suit women's wishes in costumes. In reality, the opposite
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is the case, is it not? The fashion dictators say: 'Next year you shall look
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like umbrellas, ladies--but this year you shall be as a broomstick;' and the
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ladies obey like lambs and even enjoy their servitude! The public does not
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know what it wants until it sees it--how should it? So we must try over and
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over again, until we have discovered what it is they really do want to see."
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Another of the Tourneur antipathies is the remark that many people think
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must be true today because Shakespeare made it many hundred years ago, "The
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play's the thing." This idea M. Tourneur combats with all the force at his
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command.
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"I know there are few to agree with me," he said, "but I shall always
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assert that the play is NOT the thing. If it were true, one would merely
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read a play, and the acting, the beautiful presentation, the 'ensemble' as we
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say, would amount to nothing. Then, if the play were the thing, the lack of
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these, of the acting and good interpretation and ensemble would not spoil it.
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To me, neither the play, the acting, the star, the director, nor the
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presentation is the thing. It takes all of them.
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"Of course, I believe that the play, a classic such as 'The Blue Bird,'
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'A Doll's House' or 'Prunella' should not be changed. Nor should there be a
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dragged-in, illogical 'happy ending' to replace the author's conclusion. But
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I do believe that to make a play of this sort there must be the best acting,
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the best directing, and the best presentation available. And with the
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showing of it, good music. Any one of these elements missing, and your
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picture will not succeed.
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"I enjoyed making 'The Blue Bird,'" he went on thoughtfully. "But if I
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could have had another six months to work on it, I would have enjoyed it much
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more. Then, too, I cannot work so well with children. They are disturbing.
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Work at the studio should go along smoothly like the clock--but, children,
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ah! they cannot be regulated! However, this I must say, that little Tula
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Belle and Robin MacDougall, the two child actors in 'The Blue Bird' are
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exceptionally clever little players and will be heard of one day in the
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future."...
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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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May 18, 1918
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EXHIBITOR'S TRADE REVIEW
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Maurice Tourneur Asserts That Wartime Mental
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Reaction Is Creating Demand For Shorter Films
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Maurice Tourneur, the famous director, now at work on his initial
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independent picture, "Sporting Life," which is to be a companion picture to
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his very successful production, "The Whip," believes that the world war is
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creating a trend towards shorter picture dramas.
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"The movement, as I see it, is distinctly away from the full evening
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photoplay," declares Mr. Tourneur. "This is psychological in its cause. The
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world war, with its attendant excitement, sacrifice and worry is playing upon
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the nervous system of the world. Whether we know or realize it, the war has
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keyed up our nerves to a high pitch. We are keenly restless, high strung,
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unable to concentrate for any length of time upon anything but the world's
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tragedy.
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"This nervous reaction is reflecting itself in every walk of life.
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Short stories, requiring but fifteen minutes or so to read, were never so
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popular as now. Poetry, which is, after all, but the drama of life condensed
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into more or less beautiful particles, is tremendously popular, too. So it
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is coming to be with pictures.
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"I am, of course, a steady patron of the film houses. It is part of my
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business to watch the progress of my fellow workers. I have come to note a
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marked unrest in audiences when a drama runs longer than six reels--or six
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thousand feet. Six reels requires about an hour and a half for adequate
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presentation.
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"I had a curious example of this nervous reaction presented to me the
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other night when I once again witnessed 'The Birth of a Nation.' This
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beautiful drama--a classic of the screen--did not seem overlong when first
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presented, but the audience of today reflects the war-time reaction. A man
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who sat just ahead of me remarked to a friend, 'It's beautiful--but just a
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little too long.'
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"For my part, I do not intend to run my productions over six reels, or
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seven at the very most, for the duration of the war. We must meet conditions
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as they are.
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"It is part of our duty as purveyors of entertainment to the great
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majority, to see to it that the public gets wholesome, optimistic and, if
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possible, amusing entertainment. It is up to the screen to sustain the
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spirits of the nation. Let us keep away from the morbid and gruesome and
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throw the tremendous power of the photoplay into the civilized world's war
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for democracy.
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"Another interesting reaction I have noted in wartime audiences,"
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continues Mr. Tourneur, "is the steadily growing spiritual note. We are all
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turning more and more to religious support in these grim days. You can
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observe this in the way audiences respond to the spiritual element in
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pictures. People are coming to think profoundly of the problems of life."
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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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June 22, 1918
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MOVING PICTURE WORLD
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Maurice Tourneur, who has just launched his own producing organization,
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is a firm believer in the big opportunities now offered the independent film
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maker.
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"The star system of today is fast proving its fallacy," declares Mr.
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Tourneur. "Consider the problem of the producer with a chain of stars. He
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must manufacture films regularly, using these stars at systematic intervals,
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in order to succeed. It is natural that the stars are allotted certain roles
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to which they have shown themselves fitted. From two and three to twenty
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stars must be fitted, and there is not time to study a player's
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possibilities.
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"Thus these stars come to get stereotyped stories, providing them with
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essentially the same characters. This is dangerous from many angles. Except
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in rare instances film fans tend to lose interest in stars who keep on
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playing upon the same string. Screen patrons come to be familiar with the
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stories and they know just what is likely to happen in their working out, so
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that all novelty is gone. All this spells the ultimate eclipse of the star
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in question.
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"Today the star has no substantial hold upon his or her following.
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A series of three bad pictures can send a star sliding downward rapidly,
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while one or two unusual vehicles will pull a star back into popularity.
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This has been demonstrated a dozen times this year. This all goes to show
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the insecurity--steadily growing--of the star system.
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"Don't think that the stars do not realize all this themselves! Note
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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
|
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of stories, the casting of pictures and the building of sets is had daily.
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But wonderful pictures from large organizations are very much the exception.
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Big organizations can maintain a certain average quality of production, but
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they cannot create the real masterpieces that mark progress in the march of
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|
the photoplay.
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Pictures, the kind that mean something to the industry, are the works of
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individuals who are solely responsible for all phases of production. The big
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achievements of Griffith, the late George Loane Tucker, Neilan, Ingram and
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|
others of prominence in the producing field embody the execution of the
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creative ideas of individuals and not the dictatorial conglomerations of
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large organizations. These men are allowed--in fact, they demand--free rein.
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In this manner only can pictures reach a higher average of merit. A review
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|
of film history clearly proves this.
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|
Organizations which endeavor to relieve the director of all the most
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important responsibilities of his job are blocking the path of progress.
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|
Such organizations may turn out a fair average product and keep the standard
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|
of production where it is today. They will never be conducive to progress.
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|
The motion picture cannot stay where it is. If it does not progress, it must
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|
stagnate.
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|
On the shoulders of the director should rest the full responsibilities
|
|
of a production. To relieve him of any of these responsibilities and to
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|
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.
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|
If allowed to continue the motion picture both from artistic and financial
|
|
standpoints will promptly start on its downward path in public favor.
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|
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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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October 14, 1923
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NEW YORK TELEGRAPH
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American Public Wants Types, Not Facts,
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Says Film Director
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Los Angeles, Oct. 8.--The American public demands "types," It has a
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standardized conception of the farmer, the banker, the Western sheriff, and
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scores of other characters, a conception which it will not allow facts to
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|
alter.
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|
So Maurice Tourneur told Samuel Guard, of the American Farm Bureau
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Federation, in an open letter this week, when Guard challenged the screen
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|
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
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|
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)
|
|
*****************************************************************************
|
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|