The Image (22 page)

Yet movie-makers themselves, driven by the needs of the movie form (as the
Digest
editors are driven by the needs of their form), inevitably treat the novel itself as nothing but the wrapping paper and string of “literary embellishment.” This must be removed to reveal a quintessence, a story line.
Thus the multiplying kinds of images—from the printed page to the photograph to the movie to radio and television, to the comic book and back again—make our literary-dramatic experience a limbo. In that limbo there are no forms but only the ghosts of other forms.

T
HE MOVIES
were, of course, the first of the new alternative visual forms for narrative literature which were to come with the Graphic Revolution. Motion pictures became commercially important only around 1910. By 1917
Publishers’ Weekly
was writing about “cinema novels.” In the 1920’s studios were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for film rights to novels. In 1931 Cheney’s
Economic Survey of the Book Industry
reported that the incredible prices for screen rights had brought on some severe cases of a new occupational disease known as “ ‘novelist’s nystagmus,’ caused by keeping one eye on the typewriter and the other on Hollywood. The result has been a feverish production of certain books of ‘a certain type.’ ” In the following years the changing economics of the movie industry made the disease more prevalent than ever. After World War II the cost of movie making became so high that most producers instead of owning studios began to lease facilities. It then became easier to produce a movie on credit. Between 1945 and 1960 there came into being over a hundred new firms of independent producers buying novels for the films.

By 1946 M-G-M had established a contest for novelists which paid the winner $125,000. Twentieth Century-Fox gave Grace Metalious $265,000 to write a sequel to her
Peyton Place
(1956), the box-office success made from her novel that sold eight million copies. The sequel was to be called
Return to Peyton Place
.

When the high price paid for movie rights itself had a publicity value (“It must be good if they paid so much!”), even
the business transaction became an elaborately contrived pseudo-event (like the concluding of contracts by movie stars and sports celebrities), with photographs of the signing of the contract, interviews of author, producer, etc. Here was a new kind of advance testimonial whose authenticity actually depended on the fact that big money was paid by the movie producer—the person giving the testimonial.

In
Publishers’ Weekly
, the magazine of the book trade, the column “Books into Films” became a regular feature in 1944. By November 15, 1952, the author of the column, Paul S. Nathan, found the title too confining. “Film rights,” he explained, “after all, are only one kind of subsidiary rights; there is really no reason why publishers, editors, booksellers, and other interested parties should be more concerned with books being sold to the movies than with books acquired by the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, or by
Omnibook
for digest, or by the Broadway theater for adaptation.” He added that the advances paid by Hollywood were beginning to be overshadowed by those of the paperback reprint houses; and that television only within the last six years had become “a bigger, more voracious market for subsidiary rights than the movies.” Having discarded the more general title, “Books into Money,” Nathan renamed his column “Rights and Permissions,” and it has remained one of the most widely read features in the magazine.

It became an axiom of the book trade that booksellers were more apt to be interested in a book, and more inclined to stock it and to push its sale, if the movie rights had already been sold for a substantial sum. This was assurance that the book itself would be profitable. Here are a couple of sample items from
Publishers’ Weekly
for a single issue (December 12, 1960).

In order to stir interest in the sale of movie rights to a book, the book need not yet have been written. Nor even need the supposed writer of the non-existent book himself be an author.

In this world of the shadows of shadows, the very concept of literary authorship dissolves and disappears. William Wyler’s presentation of
Ben Hur
opened on Broadway in 1959 with high-priced reserved seats, a printed program, and all the familiar paraphernalia of the movie spectacular. The detailed printed program listed everybody from Sam Zimbalist, the producer, to Joan Bridge who was Color Consultant for Costumes, and Gabriella Borzelli, the hair stylist. But it nowhere listed the name of Lew Wallace, the author.

Since both Lew Wallace and his copyright had long since expired, there was nobody to protest. When the author is still alive, however, he sometimes objects that his work has been “adapted” out of existence. This has led to a number of lawsuits, which authors have seldom won. One of the most memorable and most ironic occurred in 1931 when Theodore Dreiser sought a court injunction to prevent a New York theater
from presenting the Paramount movie of his
American Tragedy
. The movie (based both on the novel and on a stage play adapted from the novel), according to Dreiser, had reduced his work from a subtle exploration of how a whole society can be responsible for one young man’s crime to a “tabloid murder story.” Dreiser lost his case.

In the movie world the distilling of novels into films, as Van Nostrand observes, has become a series of standard processes. In Hollywood jargon these include the making of a “treatment” (a narrative based on a synopsis), the development of a “continuity” (translating the treatment into movie scenes), and the concocting of a “shooting script.” This is finally elaborated by “cross-cutting” (showing alternate shots of different scenes), by the “gimmick” or “switcheroo” (suddenly cutting to another scene and revealing new facts to heighten suspense), by the “yak” (a funny surprise), and the “bleeder” (a pathetic surprise). A comparable set of transformations takes place whenever a novel, a stage play, or a movie is adapted into a television show. Such multiplication of the media into which a dramatic notion can be cast inevitably divorces the content from literary form.

Compared with the twentieth-century movie adaptations of novels, John Dryden’s “adaptations” or Thomas Bowdler’s “family” versions of Shakespeare look like literal transcription. The very notion of literary art—“the word one with the thing”—disappears from the popular mind. Each embodiment then competes with all others for the kudos of being the “original.” Out of this competition, by the law of pseudo-events, the winner in the viewer’s consciousness is the embodiment most remote from the naive, spontaneous product of an author.

O
UT OF
the Graphic Revolution came still another phenomenon dissolving the traditional forms of dramatic literature.
This was the “star system.” It would have been unthinkable without the invention of photography and motion pictures, without the many new means for reproducing stories and faces and images.

“Stars” were the celebrities of the entertainment world. Like other celebrities they were to be distinguished by their well-knownness more than by any other quality. In them, as in other celebrities, fame and notoriety were thoroughly confused. Their hallmark was simply and primarily their prominence in popular consciousness, and it made very little difference how this publicity was secured. They could become well known either by flaunting morality (Mary Pickford) or by flouting it (Mae West). As a species of celebrities, stars, too, were spawned in the world of pseudo-events. And they, too, were fertile of other pseudo-events. It is not surprising, then, that movie stars became our celebrities par excellence. In 1940 about 300 correspondents were assigned to Hollywood, which was the largest single source of news (an estimated 100,000 words a day) in the United States outside of Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Although not born with the movies, the star system emerged within the first decade or so of the commercial life of the motion pictures, and under appropriately pseudo-eventful auspices. Early in 1908 an issue of
Moving Picture World
carried an advertisement showing a photograph of the beautiful movie actress Florence Lawrence, over the word “Imp,” and reading as follows:

This advertisement was purporting to answer a story in the St. Louis newspapers which had said that Florence Lawrence, known to nickelodeon fans as the “Biograph girl” (she made films for the Biograph film company), had been killed in a streetcar accident. In his advertisement Carl Laemmle meant to imply that the newspaper story had been concocted by his competitors, the film trust, to prevent the public from learning that Miss Lawrence had left Biograph for Laemmle’s company and that in the future she would be lending her fame and face and figure to his productions. Actually Laemmle had planted the original newspaper story himself, for publicity purposes. The whole episode, including Laemmle’s advertised “reply,” was only his characteristic way of announcing that Miss Lawrence, then the most popular personality in films, was now his property.

This was not the only such stunt that the ingenious Laemmle used to discredit his competitors and to advertise his own products. It was true that the big General Film Company, sometimes disparagingly called “the trust,” for whom Miss Lawrence had worked, had refused to give out the names of actors. This was both because General Film were trying to standardize film manufacture (keeping it uncluttered by individual personalities) and because they foresaw that if individual actors became famous and known by name, the actors would command higher pay. Among some early movie companies this practice had become a strict rule. But the nickelodeon public insisted on individualizing their favorites, and gave them such names as the “Biograph girl,” the
“little girl with the golden curls,” etc. Independent movie-makers like Laemmle, seeing a competitive advantage, and realizing that the public did not like its actors kept anonymous, then began strenuously publicizing their own actors. Incidentally, they were able to lure over to their own studios from the larger companies the actors and actresses who wanted both more publicity and more money. Geraldine Farrar (followed by Mary Garden) signed with Samuel Goldwyn at $10,000 a week. Movie stars became gilded idols. Their salaries soon were the biggest single item in a film budget.

The star system, as Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer explain in their excellent pictorial history of the movies, was thus in a sense created by the public itself: by movie-goers who would not be satisfied by anonymous idols. They demanded that their idols be named—and be apotheosized by expensive publicity. In a word, that they be made into celebrities with the characteristics described in an earlier chapter. What movie-goers wanted in a star was not a strong character, but a definable, publicizable personality: a figure with some physical idiosyncrasy or personal mannerism which could become a nationally advertised trademark. Among these were John Bunny’s jovial bulk, Mary Pickford’s golden curls and winsome smile, Douglas Fairbanks’ waxed mustache and energetic leap, Maurice Costello’s urbanity, Charlie Chaplin’s bowed legs and cane, and Clara Kimball Young’s calf eyes. Acting ability and symmetry of face or figure became less important than the capacity to be made into a trademark.