TOOLS
Writing with a fountain pen employs a physical action and rhythm different from typing. How can the change be without effect?
I do most of my writing on a typewriter. The current page is in the machine; the stack of blank paper is to my left, and the just-typed page to my right. When I finish typing a page, I place it, faceup, upon the pile to my right; and, so, am looking at the typewriter page and its predecessor at the same time. One page is in my hand, another is before my eyes, and I am continually engaged (consciously or not) in the piece’s development.
When one finishes typing a computer page, it goes away. The new technology, to a debatable but inevitable extent, must influence composition.
There was no greater or more versatile American director than Howard Hawks: Scarface, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep. In 1955 he directed Land of the Pharaohs, the worst piece of trash ever perpetrated. What happened? CinemaScope.
It was Hawks’s first CinemaScope picture. ’Scope doubled the height-to-width ratio of the screen. It was the New Toy ’neath the filmmakers’ Xmas tree; but even the best (Hawks), thrilled at the new possibilities, were baffled by its demands. They were like the stage director enlisted to create pageants. Even when Hollywood made good movies, they never could enthrall us at the Oscars. The Oscars were, essentially, the halftime pageant. Ten Dallas Cowgirls were cute, ran their reasoning, so, as one had to fill the field, wouldn’t five hundred be cuter?
Land of the Pharaohs, produced and directed by one of the greatest of storytellers, begins with hours of Egyptians Marching in Triumphant Procession. In “real life” one would take the gas pipe rather than look out the window to see such a sight, but there Hawks was, his talent unseated by the requirements of the new toy.
He went to Egypt (or Spain, or Fresno, or wherever he shot it), and what did he find there? Sand.
Sand is not interesting. Ah, but he was telling a story of the construction of those Necro-McMansions of Old in the sand. That might be interesting. And indeed it might, but rather than thinking about holding the audience’s interest through the unfolding of that story, he was chained to the requirements of a tool.
It cost a mint to go to Egypt. Once there, one would not say, “I have to make the sand interesting,”I but “Let’s begin with a sequence of showing how powerful Pharaoh was.” How? We’ll show how many legions of soldiers and slaves he had. How? We’ll hire them, and film them. Endlessly. Walking on the sand. Lots of them. Like limitless Dallas Cowgirls.
The enormous cost of early CinemaScope would not have been justified by staying in North Hollywood to remake The Maltese Falcon. The outlay could only make sense for the photography of Sweeping Natural Majesty. But sweeping natural majesty, though it might do for a travelogue, has no place in drama. If Barbara has just discovered her spouse is cheating on her, she is not paying attention to the stark grandeur of the adjacent Atlantic Shore.
Early ’Scope was exploited to film landscapes (or, as the old film quip had it, a snake or a train). Attention given to the squeaky wheel (the location, and the creation of crowd scenes to fill it) was not and could not be given to the plot.
Further, early ’Scope (Land of, etc.) filmed close-ups by sticking the actor dead center in the middle of the screen. As if his portrait were painted in the middle of the dining room table. Both leaving a lot of dead space on either side.
We are all seducible by novelty. Aren’t we spending our waking hours “just having to check this…”? The CinemaScope technology was so dazzling that Hawks didn’t stop to evaluate it. He might have done so by asking how CinemaScope could have been used to better Scarface. (Answer: It could not.)
Hawks was crippled not only by the machine but by his hats. He was wearing two of ’em. It’s the director’s job to muscle from the producer as much budget and distance as he can. Hawks was both director and producer. Who do you like in a fair fight?
The film credits three writers, one of whom was William Faulkner. I don’t know how Faulkner would have spoken at lunch, but I suspect his two Jewish TeammatesII were all about “This’ll kill ’em…” But it did not. The technology killed the movie, as where our Purse is, there our Heart shall be.
The Committee is a tool in movies as in government, devouring the greatest share of the organization’s resources. It might seem to exist as a Counsel of the Wise, but it is actually a mechanism for the apportionment of blame.
The factor common to bad Studio-era films and our current drivel seems, obviously, to be fear. Less obviously, but perhaps more usefully, it may be said to be the Committee.
Progenitors and the founders die off, but their vision and accomplishments live on, discernible in the dead husks of the bureaucracies their success engendered.
But the Committee, like kudzu and houseguests, will not die. It attracts ever more adherents possessing no distinction other than devotion to membership-at-any-cost. It carries and transmits the age-old immutable lessons of bureaucratic survival. It will name them anew in each new generation, of course, just as all toothpaste is labeled new and improved.
All toothpaste is some variation on baking soda and mint. One can as effectively brush the teeth with salt. The fortunes spent on its constant, insistent rebranding as New must indicate that it’s unchanged.
It’s the dramatist’s job to call attention to the screamingly obvious. Why has it avoided scrutiny? Because it has been repressed. It would not require the enormous energy of repression unless it were screamingly obvious. The repression thus is a diagnostic tool.
The formation of the Committee, like most human behavior, is an autonomic production of the sympathetic nervous system or some such thing. The Committee springs to life, and, that life being human, strives to explain to itself why it is here. The urge to share responsibility, and the fear of both error and censure, are inevitable and ineradicable components of communal life. So far, so good, but fear makes wretched storytellers.
