Chapter XXIIDIRECTORIAL CONVENTIONS
In which the business of slamming directors in general is freely indulged.—Directors have created an array of utterly false conventions by their constant use of them.—A plea for them to stop.—A particular plea for them to stop picking on tobacco
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXII
Most of the chapters in this book, when dealing specifically with the work of directors, have been keyed in the general tone of praise. The reader might thus absorb the idea that it is thought no room for improvement in the youngest of the arts exists. However, most of the men mentioned in former chapters have consistently worthy records but in case the idea prevails that I believe the millennium in pictures has long since been attained, I hereby dedicate this chapter to a general slamming of every director in the production art. The awful conventions that every director seems to have adopted as his own (the best directors and the worst in one degree or another) are one of the eyesores of modern picture productions.
The little slips in technicalities such as showing a cigar just lighted in one scene and burned to a butt in the next and the paradoxical fact that John exits from one interior wearing a brown derby and enters another wearing a black derby—these little slips which are themselves conventions of oversight, can be left to the motion picture fans who constantly write the papers calling attention to them.
There are more real conventions that, little though they are, have long since become a terrible bore to those who view pictures through eyes at all critical, simply because directors on a whole seem to have adopted these conventions as if they were actually real and part of life. I mean such little things as the ever-presentwall safe in the library setting and the childish and idiotic little dresses with which telephones are clothed. I am not of the socially elect but no friend of mine maintains a wall safe in his library, a safe which, with one good firm wrench properly applied, would leave a gaping cavity in the wall. Neither am I accustomed to visiting ladies' boudoirs but I am firmly convinced that dressing a telephone as a doll is something that simply isn't done in the best regulated families. It is simply and impurely a trick of the “movies.”
And no more natural is it for every man to keep a pistol in the top drawer of his desk. I once conducted a surreptitious investigation of the top drawers of various of my friends and could have acquired a miscellaneous collection of everything from old Overholt to scissors without including in it a pistol.
Mention these foolish little conventions to a director and he will enjoy a hearty laugh over them with you. But the very next day he will return to his work of producing a picture and use every oneof these tricks and a whole lot more with never so much as a thought. Fortunately, however, the pistol in the drawer trick has so often been laughed at and down on the screen that most directors are fighting clear of it.
Another convention which seems to grate against people of taste is the habit of directors permitting their property man to pile a breakfast table with dozens of varieties of knives, forks and spoons. The morning breakfast of the newlyweds usually appears on the screen as a parade of fine silverware.
Directors, without number, also choose to ignore the common conventions of gentlemen until, ignoring them to such an extent, they have created an opposite set of conventions to those that actually exist in all social circles of life, the poorest and the richest. Specifically, directors forget to tell their actors to rise when a lady sits at a table and often are at a loss as to the proper thing for a gentleman to do with his hat when talking to a lady.
Then there are the horrible directorial conventions regarding college life. A motion picture college is full of snobs, its dormitories are made up of rooms wall-papered with pennants and peopled with thirty-five year old actors in bulky sweaters who never stir without a pipe with a tremendous bowl and a mandolin or some stringed instrument.
There are, too, the tiresome conventions of the small town with the inevitable and unrealistic rubes. In fact, here the director has taken a figure created for burlesque shows and meant only for burlesque shows and impossible farce comedies and adopted it as a real person, an actual inhabitant of a real small town.
There are, too, the wearisome conventions of western mining camp life as shown on the motion picture screen. Perhaps censor boards and writers have contributed in producing these conventions; chief of which is the fact that every dance hall queen is virtue personified, a Pollyanna in spangles, but they are conventions and unreal ones, nevertheless.
There is the unreal mother of the films. The convention is that if she is a fond and loving mother shemust sit and knit and sit and knit and occasionally wipe away a tear or two. And if she is not represented thus, as fond and motherly, she must be represented as an impossible social climber or a freak feminist on a par with the suffragettes of burlesque shows ten years ago. Normal mothers reach the screen once in a hundred times.
It is granted again that screen writers and censor boards have assisted considerably in building up these false conventions, but the director is the lucky fellow that has it in his power to change them. Let him go about his task gradually if he so wishes, but let him go about it.
Only recently I had cause to give complaint to the practice of directors in identifying cigarettes solely with villains. Some of the screen villains have actually been permitted to reach the point in their careers when the mere manner of toying with a cigarette signifies some specific course of villainy. Their actions with cigarettes are as plain as the old-fashioned moustachioed villain's actions when he strode upon the stage and pronounced “Curses!”
Such a convention is altogether too dangerous besides being funny. The reformers have already begun to associate the cigarette with villainy. And if the directors, through their villains, allow them to go that way, we will soon see the departure of cigarettes from our midst altogether, even as the lamented drink has departed—or is supposed to have departed.
I, for one, am going to blame the directors for such a state of affairs. When a cigarette-legger approachesme in future years and whispers, “I know where you can get a package of your favorite brand for two dollars,” I'm going to hit him and curse the director and his conventions that he wouldn't change even when I thus warned him.