FILM “SURGEON’S” TRIP

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 104, 26 January 1935, Page 6

FILM “SURGEON’S” TRIP

Miss Vicki Baum to Tour New Zealand MORALITY REGULATIONS Dominion Special Service. Auckland, January 24. “It is far easier to write a novel than a film scenario,” said Miss Vicki Baum, authoress of “Grand Hotel” and other' novels, who arrived by the Monterey on a holiday visit to the Dominion. 'She was accompanied by her brother and will collect material for magazine and newspaper articles on certain aspects of New Zealand life. “A book comes as the result of perhaps mouths of thought,” said Miss Baum. “You sit down and write and if you are lucky it sells, but throughout it is your own. With a film it is far different. You are perhaps one of 70 people engaged in creating a story whose whole value lies in its selling power. New characters are suddenly introduced. The plot is altered. Scenes are dropped and others included, till by the time it is finished it is hard to recognise the original story and its people.” Actually before leaving Hollywood Miss Baum was engaged by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation as “film surgeon.” Films that were unsatisfactory had to be analysed, their weak points discovered and extensive corrections made. This work was extremely difficult, but in it there was the satisfaction of having revived a “sick film” aud made it strong and attractive. Many Morality Regulations. Scenario writing had been made most complicated recently by the voluminous morality regulations. There were pages of what must be done and still more of what must not appear. Murders had to be conducted according to rules and domestic and social relationships had to be watched most closely lest they offended the censor. The result was that it was hard to get any real dramatic highlights. Speaking of her own method of writing Miss Baum said that her stories had resulted from most intensive and hard work. She believed in writing even when she did not feel so disposed. It w T as better, she thought, to write several pages of poor standard and rewrite them later on than to give up. Her story, “Grand Hotel,” had been an interesting study. She was intensely interested in people and had conceived the idea of the life story of a poor clerk. Later there came the idea of putting him in the familiar background of a large hotel and crowding the whole story into the space of a single day and night. When it came to stage production she was confronted with the task of introducing an abnormally large number of characters, and there' came the brilliant idea of letting each of them appear in telephone boxes, revealing their intimate domestic problems at the outset. This method had proved highly successful both in the play and in the film. Miss Baum’s Varied Career. Miss Baum was born in Vienna and wont to Germany as a young girl. While there she met and married Richard Leit, a conductor, aud with him she travelled ail over the Continent. She remained in Berlin till three years ago, when she went to Hollywood, where she has remained ever since, having taken out American naturalisation papers. “I prefer America to Germany today,” she said. “It is a question of freedom. I visited Russia some years ago and found that personal freedom was more or less non-existent. Life there is completely one-sided.” Her visit to the Dominion will be spent in a study of natural history, of which she is extremely fond, and in observing certain aspects of native life. After motoring through the two islands she will return to Auckland to sail by the Monterey on its return journey.