Somebody told me that Hollywood motion pictures were in a rut; I was told that at a party a few days after I arrived here to sign a long-term contract with David O. Selznick. Well, in fifty years the movies have made a lot of ruts, but I don’t imagine any of us are still in the rut that was used ten or twenty or thirty years ago.
Somebody also said, in writing this article I should talk about Hollywood ruts because I was new to Hollywood and could see the ruts.
I’ll talk about that in a moment. Just now I should like to digress and say that some ship news reporters in New York took one look at my shape when I came down off the gangplank and started interviewing me on food. I told them my favorite dish was steak à la mode. They believed me and it made quite a story. So you see, when anybody asks me a question such as “Why don’t you tell Hollywood directors what they can learn from an English director?” I am likely as not to say anything that pops into my head.
I really haven’t been here long enough to discuss Hollywood with a profound assumption of authority—such a pretension would be repellent to me anyway. But when one is asked questions, it is only polite to answer them.
Hollywood has such infinite material resources for motion picture making, and such a tremendous supply of alert, keen, and thoroughly skilled technicians, that it might seem presumptuous at first to say Hollywood can learn anything from anybody.
But on second thought, the answer seems to be that Hollywood might learn from an English director about the same thing it could learn from a Swedish director, a French director, or a Russian director; it might learn to take an excursion off on a side rut that is thrilling and new to the American, but just an old rut to the foreigner. Now America is a fresh rut to me and a very exciting one at that.
A great deal has been said about factory-made pictures. This criticism is heard in England as well as America where mass production has become a fine art, so to speak. Certainly it is a fault when producers and directors get in a rut and repeat mistakes they shouldn’t make more than once. Habit is a useful servant of the mind, but a vicious master.
The pioneering age is still fresh in American tradition, its virtues honored, and handsomely requited. What is vital and important to American pictures is not mere ingenuity—a large native supply happily is available—but what is necessary is a new way of looking at old things.
Tradition has begun to bind American directors. A strange thing for a tradition-bound Englishman to say! But there are signs that some American movie makers are becoming too conventional, doing things simply because such action has proved successful in the past. A director from England, or Italy, or Rumania might have his own habit patterns, but they would be different from American trends of thought, and the chance that fresh and exciting pictures might result seems worth taking.
This is one thing that Hollywood can learn from an English director, but he can learn many things from Hollywood. To the student of motion picture making, Hollywood is a vast laboratory. A scientist may make important discoveries in a shed with a leaky roof—Mme. Curie did—but the efficiency worker is improved by better chemicals and more accurate instruments of measurement. This is what we get in Hollywood—the best cinema equipment in the world.
I find I can do things with cameras and lights and the manipulation of stage props that I often longed to do in England, but found myself hindered or even thwarted by cost of operation, lack of technical skill, the obstacle of tradition—a British one this time.
I am learning to do things every day that we wouldn’t even attempt in an English studio. It’s great fun.
Meanwhile, of course, I’m learning all those little geographical details that an experienced traveler cherishes in a new country. I’m learning how and when to watch a California sunset—that a tree-picked orange has a flavor all its own—that American drivers use the right side of the road. I am learning by experience what I already suspected, that people are pretty much alike in Elstree and in Hollywood, and that no matter where a good picture is made—everybody will want to see it.
But there is much yet to be learned. I used to say, ironically, if you will, that the ultimate in color pictures would be a drop of blood on a daisy petal, and that the perfect subject for a color drama would be an oyster, with a touch of green to indicate the oyster was bad—that being the drama.
Now that I am associated with a studio where some of the finest color pictures ever made have been produced, I am not so flippant about color. I am convinced that with early imperfections removed, it will prove the ultimate medium of cinematographic expression.
There are many more serious infirmities of the industry than the abuse of color. Typing is the real evil. If you have the same people, you have the same story. If a picture seems stale, it is because the same people keep moving through it in the same fashion.
Actors should be permitted to act. The success of fine character actors like Leslie Howard and Laurence Olivier should indicate the basis for enduring popularity.
“Old Ruts Are New Ruts” was originally published in the Hollywood Reporter 54, no. 28 (October 28, 1939, 9th Anniversary Issue).