ACROSS THE FOOTLIGHTS

Taranaki Daily News, 13 April 1935, Page 20 (Supplement)

ACROSS THE FOOTLIGHTS

CONCENTRATION ON “SHORTS”

A concentrated drive towards Bigger and Better Pictures is being made this year by all leading directors and producers. Miss C. A. Lejeune of the London Observer agrees with them only in their statement that to make room for their big films there will have to be reductions in the length of those that might be billed on the same programme. The double-feature programme has been for years a menace to entertainment, says Miss Lejeune. It is manifestly impossible for the studios, even of England and America combined, to produce four new pictures a week of sound entertainment quality. At least half of them are bound to be mere programme fill-ups, dragged out to five or six reels simply to scramble into the second-feature class. I am convinced that the production of good shorts is one of the first big problems which the industry will have to tackle. Indeed, if studios do not attack it voluntarily, the coming of colour, stereoscopy, and television will force it upon them. Under almost any system now in practice, colour-work, not to mention stereoscopy and television, is expensive, and the two-reeler is the obvious field for experiment. I anticipate that not so very long from now a single feature and a number of all-colour shorts will form the standard programme. And the sooner the studios get into training the better for everybody concerned. Contrary to the general belief of our studio executives, there is an art in making short pictures and it is to be learnt and practised just like the art of short story writing. The ideal plan, and the plan that will ultimately have to be adopted in British studios, is for every production company to have its own shorts department, which can work independently of the main production unite without being charged up with excessive studio overheads and exorbitant salaries to stars and technicians. Such a department would train its own directors, its own writers, and its own camera-men, and it is more than likely that it would also in time evolve its own comedians and its own dramatic. stars. The organised production of shorts not ias a by-product of feature production, but Bis a skilled job in itself, would,

WHAT THE FILM FUTURE MAY HOLD

1 am sure, have some remarkable results. It is a mere economic convention to regard every idea that occurs in a studio as a sixreel idea. Half the feature films we see, and sometimes deplore, would have made admirable twoi-reelers, I can imagine a Hulbert short, or a WallsLynn two-reeler, that would raise the roof. I can picture Alfred Hitchcock as the two-reel melodramatist par excellence.

It is frequently forgotten that Chaplin, the only really great comedian who has ever emerged from the movies, made his reputation in two-reel comedies, and that Walt Disney built up a world-wide reputation on five-minute cartoons. I may be pessimistic, but I doubt whether Chaplin, as a modern feature comedian, would ever have had the option taken up on his contract, and I am sure that the general publ : could not endure six consecutive reels of Disney.

In an age when the short radio turn, and the short story in daily journalism, is a commonplace o’ popular entertainment, it is obviously the worst possible showmanship to neglect the short motion picture. Smaller and better pictures may not sound a very ambitious slogan, but it is an eminently practical one at the moment. For the company that controls the best shorts in these days of flux and transition may very easily find itself the kingpin of the industry. Obviously what the cinema needs is to get back to the old standard of a feature and several shorts, varying from one to three reels as the content warrants. But before this can be done there will have to be a radical revision of the quality of shorts, which have been steadily deteriorating since the adoption of th* double-feature system. In the old days we had short- comedies, short dramas, short thrillers, short romances, short Westerns, as well as short cartoons and travel pictures, and many of them were excellent. Most of the stars and directors who have amounted to anything got their initial training in two-reelers. But the modern shorts, with a few honourable exceptions, are minor monstrosities. I sometimes wonder who cares about them least—the people who make them, the people who show them, or the people who see them.