Peter Milne

“ And yet, when he comes to employ the arc in his work, the exact line he desires immediately stands out in bold relief from the others and the director sets to work upon it.
Thus the greatest directors of today are the men who have run the greatest gamut of emotional experience. To converse with D. W. Griffith is to instantly realize that here is a man who has suffered, sacrificed, lost, loved, triumphed. His brain is a storehouse of emotional experience, his own particular arc contains so many points upon it that a dozen times a dozen alphabets would not suffice to represent them all. ”

“ So, instead of a creator the motion picture director really finds himself in the same position occupied by the man who sets out to translate a book from one language into another. The work has already been created and lies before him needing only his deft touch to recreate it through a different medium than type. Recreate seems to be the proper word. Deprived of the privilege of calling himself a creator, a director can at last call himself a recreator. ”

“ So it is in the production of the ever-popular rapid-fire, thrill serial that the matter of tempo is of the utmost importance to the director. If he takes a little too long in picturizing a certain sequence, where does he stand? He can't resort to the practice of the feature director, that is cutting out a few scenes here and there that he may have included for their pictorial quality or for their atmosphere. He can't do this because he has excluded those scenes in the first place. Every foot of his film is given over to plot and action interest. ”

“ I know of no branch of a director's job that is more fascinating than getting color and atmosphere into the settings—thinking out bits of 'business,' little flashes of life which, though only on the screen for a few moments, can give an air of reality to an entire sequence of scenes, that would perhaps otherwise be lacking. ”

“ So many directors become so satiated in their work that they lose the value of their pictures. They have gone over their stories in every scene from the scenario all through the process of directing and in the cutting room where they are confronted with the difficult task of bringing their pictures down to the required length they are inclined to cut out valuable story material. They know their stories so well that they forget an audience only sees them once, that an audience as a rule is in total ignorance of the story until it begins on the screen. ”

“ To work in the Ince school of directing is, indeed, the luckiest thing that can befall a director. Instead of making him an insignificant employe, merely carrying out the work mapped out by the man higher up, it teaches him thoroughly all branches of picture directing so that when he strikes out for himself he is far better able to approach the excellence achieved by his former superior than he would be without such schooling. ”

“ Even when a director follows a continuity closely without having had a hand in its construction he often realizes where detail will help the completed picture due to some peculiarity of setting and location, and so he may inject it of his own accord.
Detail is, without doubt, an element that often distinguishes good pictures from bad. A superfluity of story detail is a bad thing. If a director permits himself to wander off the main track and introduce irrelevant details believing that they have interest in themselves alone, he soon finds trouble getting back to the main track again. ”

“ To teach the craft through the printed page is as impossible of accomplishment as instructing a steeple-jack in his trade through correspondence school. “A director must be born, not made.” This old adage, adapted to our present situation, is of a necessity partially false, inasmuch as at the time of the present day directors' initial birthdays there was no such thing as motion picture production. ”

“ The fact that the average director refers to his continuity or rather somebody else's continuity to guide him is no reflection on his own ability. It produces proper balance in the work of picture making and the director knows it. He knows too that the art of picture making is no exception to the old rule that two heads are better than one. ”

“ He seems to have realized that a picture laid in a mystic locale, a locale strange to nearly everyone who frequents picture theatres, a locale enriched in poetry, fiction and song, as a land of uncanny magic, that such a picture demanded a slow, steady tempo. ”

“ It is too much to ask that every motion picture director be an art director besides. A man might be perfect as a dramatic director and still be utterly lacking with respect to composition. But if the director cannot be versed in both the arts there should be, and doubtless will be in time, an art director working along with the dramatic director on every scene, interior or exterior. ”

“ Some men become great generals through long years of study and application to the science of war. Another man just steps in and is able to converse with them on even terms because he is an instinctive general. In the motion picture producing art every director who has created a position for himself has either acquired the dramatic sense through years of study or else has it ingrained in him so deeply that he couldn't lose it even if his job were cleaning streets. ”

“ The question of tempo simmers down, therefore, to the question of how skilled the director of the picture is in securing desired effects on the screen. Tempo is so thoroughly a part of a director's manifold duties, a part of almost each and every one, that is, that it is extremely difficult to disassociate it from any of them. In dealing with it, it is impossible to go thoroughly into the subject without saying something on pictorial and dramatic detail, about the ability of the players themselves and about the camera and its master. ”

“ Because tragedy and spectacle has been handled in the one, and tragedy in the other, with the discriminating eye of an artist. Because each presents its director as able in creating an illusion on the screen so complete as to dissolve the theatre walls into a part of the picture itself. ”

“ If he himself has suffered, if he is a close student of human nature and can reflect the human things on the screen then he automatically becomes a successful director—I might almost say a true artist.”
Mr. Neilan hasn't bothered to list his own abilities which are manifold. His moods run the range of human emotions. He can transport an audience with the quiet beauty and sincere pathos of his work as he did in the best Mary Pickford picture ever made, “Stella Maris,” or he can become positively Goldbergian in his creations and rival Mack Sennett as he did in “Dinty.” ”

“ But in the rank and file of directors whose work appears with regularity on the screen there are many capable and skilled men—each one, perhaps, merely waiting the chance or opportunity to step into the limelight with a pictorial masterpiece.
Most of these directors are noted as “specialty men.” One can do comedy-drama well, another excels at straight romance, a third has a particular turn for handling the intricacies of farce. These men are skilled artists but not great artists. ”

“ No matter what peculiar terms and words are used in a story, it is the emotional content of it that counts as of greatest importance. Therefore the director with the most complete groundwork of emotional experience is the man most properly equipped to rise above his fellows. This groundwork of experience takes the shape of an emotional arc, an arc that includes on its line points representing each human emotion of life, reduced to specific and commonplace fundamentals. The more points of emotion upon the director's arc, the better craftsman he is. ”

“ Chapter XIV Tempo is such an intricate subject that the more that is said of it, the more it obtrudes itself on the matter of directing. If a director isn't careful, watching the progress of the various episodes of his picture and measuring their importance and actual length in his mind's eye, he is liable to have too much material on hand when he comes to the task of “cutting” his picture.
The cutting and the editing of a picture present together one of the most difficult processes through which it goes before reaching the public. ”

“ A slight slowing down in tempo may throw an entire comedy sequence out of gear, so to speak, and irreparably weaken its effect on the screen. Too much speed in the wrong place often has the same more or less disastrous results.
“A player can spoil a dramatic or comedy effect by taking too much time to walk out of a room or going out of it too quickly. He can spoil it by allowing the expression of his face to change too quickly or too slowly. These instances are practical examples of what tempo means. A director has to watch his players constantly in order to prevent such slips. ”

“ A man such as Ingram will always have an opportunity. He may have to fight for it but it's bound to come.
Mr. Ingram's remarks about building settings, so that people who frequent such places in real life will instantly recognize them, opens an interesting field of comment. Even if a director labors painstakingly to achieve the proper atmosphere there are always some crabs in the audience who are bound to take exception. If they can't find something to criticise in the setting they criticise the way the extras play their parts. ”

“ And when a director proceeds to translate a work of his own from type to picture form he is filling both positions. However, the fact that he is creating in one of his capacities, doesn't mean that he is creating in the other as well. ”

“ Ingram continues: “Whether a scene is being made of a beach-comber's shanty, an underworld basement saloon, a pool-hall, a ship's cabin, a shoe factory or a smart restaurant, not only should the aim be to convince the audience, but enough study should be given the subject, in each case, to convince the habitues of any of these places that they are in familiar surroundings. ”

“ On top of these qualities, invaluable from whatever angle of business or art that they are approached is Mr. Ince's thorough knowledge of making pictures. This knowledge is not confined to one department of production, nor does he specialize in a single department of production. He is conversant with every department and is able to consider each one in its proper light, to value it properly, particularly with its relation to the others. ”

“ Incidentally the serial director's job is an exceedingly difficult one. Often in the two reels allowed him he must tell as much if not more story than is usually told in the five reel feature. He must constantly keep the action going at a break-neck speed. He can seldom let a player stand still for the short space of a half minute. Everyone is constantly on the move. The plot and the action demand it. The characters of the story must be characterized by plot and action. There is no space for the human touches and the characterization by little details. Not in a motion picture serial. ”

“ Readers will probably recall that this accomplishment has also been set down as the scenario writer's fundamental groundwork of learning. Thus the writer and the director have much in common. And this is one reason why so many scenario writers have become successful directors.
It may readily be seen that this picture sense, this ability of visualization, is constantly being used by the director. When he first reads his script he is visualizing it every moment of the way. To himself he says, “Scene one will look like this, scene two will follow like this.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ If anyone seeks an actual demonstration of what the lack of attention to tempo means to a picture, let him go to see one of the various cheap slapstick comedies so 125often produced. He can find them by steering clear of the theatres that show the well known comedy brands produced by the leading producers. When he finds one of the others he will immediately know it because he will see the familiar old chase scenes done in rank, amateurish style. The people in the chase will go fast in one scene and slow in the next. The director didn't know how to achieve the effect he wanted. ”

“ Incidentally the task that confronts the actor-director is extraordinarily difficult. He not only is obliged to face the lights in makeup and drop his own personality in the role he is playing but he must also be able to see his own work from behind the camera, to retain his perspective from this angle of the production as well as from the acting angle. ”

“ The writer would have a holy horror of having on his mind a happily married family man, who tossed up his business and his bank account to sleep on a park bench, and who tossed up his wife and children to enter upon one illicit love affair after another, just to complete his arc of emotional experience, because it has been stated here that the fullest arc produces the best results.
Such experiences must come naturally. The great director is a born artist. The born artist is a natural vagabond and nine-hundred and ninety-nine people of a thousand are not natural vagabonds. ”