THOUGH the Hollywood movie seems to have hardened into a form and a way of seeing life and thinking about it that will never be essentially changed, I look for the following important events to occur in the motion-picture industry during the next century.
A device will soon be invented in Hollywood that will fulfill completely the producers’ desire to please every person in the movie-going public. The device will be shaped like a silo and worn over the face, and be designed for those people who sit in movies expecting to witness art. It will automatically remove from any movie photographic gloss, excess shadows, and smoothness, makeup from actors’ faces, the sound track and every third and fifth frame from the film in the interest of giving the movie cutting rhythm. It will jiggle the movie to give it more movement (also giving the acting a dance-like quality). To please those people who want complete fidelity to life it will put perspiration and flies on actors’ faces, dirt under their fingernails, wet the armpits of men’s shirts and scratch, flake and wear down the decor. It comes complete with the final amazing chase sequence from “Intolerance” and the scene from “The Birth of a Nation” in which the Little Sister decorates her ragged dress with wads of cotton, which it inserts whenever somebody is about to conduct an all-girl symphony. The gadget also does away with all audience noise.
Some other powers of the mask are that it gives each shot the quality through solidity of the stereoscope; it colors occasional shots red white and blue for those who go to the movies for political reasons; whenever there is a listing of film credits it changes the director’s name to von Stroheim, the title of the picture to “Greed,” and uses such actors’ names as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and W. C. Fields. The gadget will absolutely not show any shot in which Charles Winninger or Joan Fontaine appears and it comes complete with the Keaton two-reel comedy called “The Operator.” Though it is shaped like a silo it is made of plastic material, and carries on its outer surface a reproduction of the Mondrian painting, “Composition in Black, White and Red.” Thus the producers will keep free of all the worries that come from the comments of artists.
In a final, unbelievably patient, energetic effort to corner every possible bit of writing talent for the screen, the movies will start sending scouts through the grade schools looking for remarkable spellers, students who are good at parsing and penmanship, who are already taking historical novels out of the circulating library, and especially for those students who know an easy penny when they see one. These students will be put under contract with a starting wage of $30,000 a year, retroactive from the date of their birth; they will become Junior Members (later on, Intermediate Members) of the Screen Writers’ Guild; their parents will be talked into allowing them to go to the movies every night rather than just six out of the seven. Each will be given a 16 mm. version of “The Informer” to take home. At the age of 13 these students will be sent to New York to study Broadway play technique in order to acquire the basic elements of movie writing. Finally, when they are 17, they will be taken to Hollywood and put to work punctuating “Gallant Flicka, Distant Cousin of Flicka.”
The day will come when the movie public will not only refuse to see non-color movies but will find it very displeasing to look at the colors of the natural world. On that day a studio will issue the first Techniodor movie—the movie that gives off odors. If “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” had been made in Techniodor, the actual rancid cooking smells that you find in many tenements would have been projected from the screen. The first odor films, like the first sound films, will be faulty, and long after a particularly evil-smelling person has been got rid of in the movie his smell will still be apparent to the audience. The odors in the first films, like the color in the first technicolor movies, will be very strong and thick. They will dominate everything else about the film and lead to much misrepresentation: for instance, the most mild, well-mannered of heroines will seem to have been bathed in a violent dime-store perfume. The first studio owners will scour the country for sweet-smelling actors, and for people who are skilled in making odors, and for a time there will be 10 of this kind of expert to one of any other kind in Hollywood. There will be some revolutionary movie work done in achieving the best effects with odor, but by one means or another producers will be able to discourage these artists from carrying on their work. After Techniodor, work will go forward on Technitactile movies. The movie customer will then be issued a uniform like a diving suit. It will be synchronized with the screen, so that when an actor puts hand to forehead the suit will touch the customer’s forehead with what feels like a human hand.
In order to combat Television, a group of the trickiest promoters in Hollywood will manage to keep airplane-supply stores from handling television sets. Nobody, of course, would go to a movie if he could watch the Lux Theatre of the Air performed on his television set while flying about in his plane. But by the fall of ’62 the hold of these producers on supply stores will be considerably weakened. At that moment an exhibitor in Florence, Arizona, will discover a way to keep movies part of American life. He will install in his theatre an opium den, a Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks, a Soup Bar, and a library having the best textbooks on welding, calculus and how to use the T-square for laying out rafters. Institutions like the Home, the Scout Meeting and the juke box will quickly go underground in Florence, probably into a lower level of the theater. This theater owner, who will of course show only horror or crime films, has made certain innovations in this kind of film that will make them so painful, so shocking and horrible that movie fans won’t be able to afford to miss them. The screen in his theatre will be one that throws actual bullets and tear gas at his audience and when the customer enters the theater he will be given a tommy gun and a horsewhip with which to defend himself. Finally the manager (who will be quoted in Exhibitor’s Weekly as saying “Don’t bother with ‘Kill Me Daddy’ even with Humphrey Bogart in it. My customers spent most of their time in my library”) will hire gunmen, pickpockets, people made up as Zombies, mad doctors and apes to circulate through the theatre plundering, raping and generally making it unlikely that any television performance will keep a movie fan away from his theatre.
Work will soon start on the new Selznick movie, “Wait Until the Sun Shines Through,” in order that it be finished by the winter of 1952. It will not be a very unusual Selznick movie, being based, as so many of his films seem to be, on a recipe in Good Housekeeping, and having to do with the returning soldier’s problems in civilian life. It will take a little under a day to see, but it will have at least 40 of the better actresses in it, in addition to having Joseph Cotten and Robert Walker. The fact, though, that will make this a long-remembered film, will be that Michael Farris who has never acted any role before other than that of the drunk, will be cast for the first time as a non-drunk, the father of a girl played by Jennifer Jones. The idea of a perennial movie drunk playing the virtuous father of the girl who won the Academy Award for her acting of Bernadette will cause most religious movie goers to condemn the film. In order to keep on reaching everybody Mr. Selznick will remake this movie, using Lionel Barrymore instead of Michael Farris. This action also will show producers the folly in breaking a man out of his type.
After all of this has taken place there will be a brief uprising of the few remaining Hollywood haters, who will try to burn Hollywood to the ground. The group, mostly artists, will be led by three men who had tried unsuccessfully for 60 years to raise the money for the filming of a one-reel documentary. The uprising, though, will be put down without the loss of a single makeup kit. The instigators will be punished by being made to watch production on the latest Technicolor movie.
August 20, 1945