FILMS’ DEBT TO LITERATURE

Southland Times, Issue 23380, 11 December 1937, Page 14

FILMS’ DEBT TO LITERATURE

PLEA FOR LIBERAL RECOGNITION AUTHORS’ VIEWS VARY Sir Herbert Morgan, at the opening of The Sunday Times Book Exhibition, at Bournemouth, referred to the nlm industry’s debt to authors, and suggested that it might recognize that obligation by the endowment in some form or other of literature. The following comments on his suggestion were made by prominent writers:—

SIR HUGH WALPOLE: In many views the films do pay their debt to literature financially. They pay nobly for the rights of a book, and when they have made use of dead classics, from Shakespeare to the author or “Little Women,” I have been surprised at the earnestness of their desire to be accurate and close to the original. The trouble is, I think, that no one has yet discovered how to make writing important in the films. The cameraman, the actor, the director, are all far more important at the present han the writer, and the less dialogue a film has the more satisfactory, artistically, it is. So literature as literatuie, has a poor chance. FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG: I do not exactly know what Sir Herbert Morgan means by the “endowment of literature.” It cannot be denied that the film industry owes a deep debt to writers —not only because their creations are the principal material on which films are based, but also as compensation for the violence it has done to many works of art. . But I do not think the film industry has failed to acknowledge or pay that debt. Film rights have become an exceedingly valuable part of literary property, and the industry has frequently paid for them with characteristic lavishness. Nor yet am I greatly moved by Sir Herbert’s fear that contemporary writers may be induced to pander to the film-going public, to which, in a moderate degree, I myself belong. Good writers will never pander to anybody—not because they don t want to but simply because they can t. And I am all against a Prix. Goldwyn.” VALENTINE WILLIAMS: i take leave to doubt whether the film industry is aware of any debt owing to literature beyond that discharged when an author has pocketed his cheque for motion picture rights. In my opinion, authors would be content if, as a first instalment of what the films unquestionably owe to the creative mind, the industry would desist from corrupting the public taste with adulterated J roducts. , T - v -» “Unless the writer be a Kipling, says Sir Herbert Morgan, “he is often pushed out of sight behind the imposing figure of the scenario writer. True; but, what is worse, when the writer is a Kipling or a Galsworthy, he is no more immune than an obscure novelist, whose story has caught the fancy of a star, from having nis plot tortured into one of those motion picture plots pulled out of a filing cabinet, his setting changed, and his literary reputation undermined by the additional dialogue” contributed out of the gag-books by the studio hacks. The result is that millions of untutored minds receive their first impression of great writers from the machine-made fustian of the modern film studio.