"CYCLES" OF STORIES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21254, 6 August 1932, Page 11 (Supplement)

"CYCLES" OF STORIES

OLYMPIC GAMES SERIES FRESH ANGLES NEEDED Story difficulties are a commonplace in these trying day 6 when almost every plot is discovered to have a suspicious resemblance to about three thousand others,says a writer in an English journal. " Cycles " of stories still crop up every other week, chiefly owing to the paucity of fresh ideas. Bull-fighting, studio life and the Olympic -Games are the basic subjects of the latest cycles. Eddie Cantor. Robert Woolsev and Lew Ayres are all preparing to play the toreador (the first two in comedies and Lew Ayres in a melodrama), while no fewer than six " behind the scenes of Hollywood " pictures are now actually in production, and three different companies are preparing films based on the Olympic Games. There is, however, a silver lining to the growing cloud of " grouped " films. Tod Browning, famous as the director of "The Unholy Three" and other Lon .Chaney pictures, declares that the latest trend in film production is toward fresh methods of telling a story rather than new plot ideas. It is obviously impossible to keep up, a, constant supply of original stories, but. it .is quite within the bounds of possibility to make an old story look new by relating it from a fresh angle. This, of : course, is the secret of all good story telling. The reason for the failure of so many novels in film form is that, whereas the author had the knack of giving, his plot a fresh twist, the scenarists who '■ adapted " it for the handled it in exactly the same way as 'tfiey had handled a hundred more. Yet there are just as many methods of telling a story with the camera as there are of telling it with the pen. Let us hope that Hollywood gives up the futile pursuit of: imaginary popular " trends " in film 6tories,. and tries instead to find fresh'| methods of retailing the comparatively simply human plots which have been the basis of' most good pictures.