FILM STORIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 March 1939, Page 5

FILM STORIES

MANY TAKEN FROM NEWS CLIPPINGS. HOW THEMES ARE FOUND. Hollywood producers look to a vast variety of sources' for their screen stories, but observation shows that the majority of them is suggested by newspaper clippings. Seventy-five per cent of the themes and.minor episodes in the current crop of screen dramas is directly borrowed from newspaper recordings. And, contrary' to the general Impression that crime news is the major source, only 10 per cent of these is supplied by the police blotter. The list might run roughly somewhat as follows:—General News (including aviation, maritime disasters, divorce court proceedings, depression stories, earthquakes, storms and other natural catastrophies), 42 per cent Crime News 10 per cent Letters to Editor 4 per cent Editorial Columns 2 per cent Society News 3 per cent Political 2 per cent Sports 1 per cent Comic Strip 1 per cent These, generally speaking, are the proportiohal allotment for movie sources. More often than rarely, of course, pictures will have their plots reflecting a variety of these categories. Sometimes a collection of clippings will furnish a complete theme for a movie. More often, though, they supply bits—minor episodes, touches of realism. The Hollywood trade, these days, is only a step or so behind the newsreels. The front pages of a paper are hardly dry before the movies are busy reproducing them in dramatised form. Although, as recent film developments bear out, movie producers have begun to concern themselves with topical events*—with political and economical movements with the news behind the news with the history of history—nevertheless they still retain the neutral point of view. In this they differ from the newspaper. They shun the editorial point of View —presenting the facts objectively and permitting the audience to draw its own varied conclusions.