HOLLYWOOD

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 312, 24 March 1928, Page 23

HOLLYWOOD

Too Many Johnny-Know-Alls in the Studios

iir are men in Holly- “*■ wood capable of preventing ridiculous errors , i but they are never permitted to do any advising. There are too many little Johnny-Know-Alls in the studios: magnates who think they know everything and would never deign to ask advice o 1 anyone who really knows.** Iris Barry, the ‘'Daily Mail's’* special investigator in Hollywood, here presents an aspect that must have appealed to every New Zealander at some time or other. TT is rather astonishing to find Mr. Will Hays, whose business it is to issue edicts and to preserve the fair reputation of American filmdom, publishing, just recently, an article in which he calmly claims that Hollywood is the one place in the world where films can best be made. He seeks to prove this statement by adducing that if, for example, a director wishes to include a scene of English life in his picture he has only to ring up a sort of universal provider in the town in order to secure an expert adviser on English matters who .will immediately take charge of and perfect the English scenes. Weep or Laugh! Mr. Hays ought to be informed that in England. sensitive people weep and humorous people laugh loud and long at Hollywood’s attempts to depict English life. He should hear what we thought of that inimitable part of “The Hark Angel” (otherwise a delightful film) in which English people were

shown fox-hunting in June and, at the hunt supper afterwards, eating boar’s head and pelting one another with bread. He might learn that hardly a week passes but hundreds of filmgoers in every English town and village are disgusted with the idiotic travesties of English society which Hollywood pictures present to them. And what is most extraordinary of all, though Hollywood has imported, regardless of cost, English actors and German directors, it is making the most ridiculous use of them. No prophetic gifts are needed to foresee that within two years many English actors and German directors may be back in Europe again making pictures in England, Germany and France which will snatch from Hollywood half the screen time of European cinemas and rob it of £12,000,000 anual profit. Places all over the world can be discovered in Hollywood studios. At Universal City one part of the 600 acres of ground there has been converted ipto a stormy, snow-covered bit of the English cliffs, where Paul Leni, the German director, is making a film based on “L'Homme Qui Rit” of Victor Hugo— At the Fox studios Frank Borzage is directing Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in scenes in a Neapolitan street, complete with family washing hanging out to dry, fishing nets, and barrows of melon. The same company has just finished a New York street scene, through which over a hundred taxis and cars raced, and an enormous crowd of supers streamed past in the pouring rain; this for a picture not yet titled, with many scenes laid in Germany as well as New York.