I WAS TALKING the other day with a Prominent Business Man who had just visited an eastern moving picture studio. He remarked that never in his life had he seen so much waste and inefficiency in a single day.

“Why, look here,” he began and, with such a pretty flow of words, told us how it could all be systematised. We forgot for a moment that this was an old, old story. When Prominent Business Men go through moving picture studios they always come out feeling very superior and contemptuous — because they imagine that turning strips of celiluloid into visible stories is as simple a matter as turning western cattle into eastern roast beef.

The real fallacy of the Business Man’s attitude lies, of course, in Laura La Plante’s eyes. When Laura has a cold — and Laura will take cold, even when she’s under a $200,000 contract — her eyes grow red and dim just like yours and mine, and the lids swell. You can hardly blame her, when she’s in this condition, for refusing to go before the camera. She imagines that, if she does, every inch of red-eyed film will lose her one admirer, one silver dollar, one rung on the ladder she’s been climbing for years.

“Fire her!” says the Business Man with a bold air. “Why, last week when my superintendent disobeyed an order . . .” But his superintendent was not the mainspring of a picture in which was tied up $200,000. In short, the moving picture is not a good profession for the efficiency bully. It is more often confronted with the human, the personal, the incalculable element than any other industry in the world.

But in one respect, there is much truth in the Business Man’s criticism of the movie. He wants to see centralisation and authority, and he sees none.

Is the responsibility with the producer? No — for he seems to be dependent on the director, who, in his turn, is apparently at the mercy of his story and his star. If in movie circles you mention a successful picture, David for example, you will hear the credit for its success claimed for the producer, the director, the star, the author, the continuity writer and Lord knows how many technical artisans who have aided in the triumph. Mention a failure and you will hear the blame heaped on each one of these in turn — and finally on the public itself for not being “intelligent” enough to like what they get.

Well, I am going to venture three opinions on the subject — three opinions that I think more and more people are coming to hold.

First — that the moving picture is a director’s business, and there never was a good picture or a bad picture for which the director was not entirely responsible.

Second — that with half a dozen exceptions, our directors are an utterly incompetent crew. Most of them entered the industry early and by accident, and the industry has outgrown them long ago.

Third — that any director worth the price of his puttees should average four commercial successes out of five attempts in every year.

Let me first discuss his responsibility. In most of the big companies the director can select his own stories — the scenario departments are only too glad when a director says, “I want to do this picture and I know I can.” The director who undertakes pictures he doesn’t believe in is merely a hack — some ex-barnstormer, who directed an illustrated song back in 1909 and is now hanging around Hollywood with nothing left except a megaphone.

The director chooses his cast, excepting the star, and he has control over the expenditure of the allotted money and over the writing and interpretation of the continuity. This is as it should be. Yet I have heard directors whining because they couldn’t find a story they wanted, and the whine had the true ring of incompetence. An author who whines for a plot at least has the excuse that his imagination has given out — the director has no excuse at all. The libraries are full of many million volumes ready to his hand.

In addition, directors sometimes complain of “incompetent actors”. This is merely pathetic, for it is the director’s business to make actors. On the spoken stage the director may justly cry that once rehearsals are over the acting is out of his power. But the movie director labours under no such disadvantage. He can make an actor go through a scene 20 times and then choose the best “take” for the assembled film.

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