Crossroads: To Mold the Higher Tastes or Pander to the Lowest
Norman Corwin, Author, Dramatist
It is clear from both sides in Hollywood that new blood is needed, but not wanted. The desire is there, but the consummation is only devoutly to be wished, and nothing more.
Now this situation is enough to pique the curiosity of anyone. How does it happen? Are the young men without portfolio so different from the Ins who man the Establishment? Is each exotic to the other? On both sides there is acknowledged talent; both want to make good and profitable products. Yet there are obviously deep differences. A big one is in the degree of artistic security. The entrenched industry, having access to banks and millions, is nevertheless too often artistically insecure, whereas the young film maker, often hard put to raise the cost of raw stock and camera, is at least free to shoot what is on his mind and in his heart, and thus, in a lonely and melancholy way, he is relatively secure in his art.
One might think the Establishment would be confident, even arrogant, in its own powers, but even in its heyday it was timid about material. Hollywood has mostly preferred that some other medium initiate, test, and prove out its artistic resources; that somebody else take the risks and pains of conception and trial, be it the stage with the hit play, the publisher with the best-selling novel, the magazine serial with the giant circulation to build up titles, or the celebrity marinated in publicity (whether Sinatra up from radio, or the Beatles up from England, or an ex-queen from Iran).
The caution was, and is, understandable. Nobody wants to lose his shirt, least of all a shirt with corporate studs. But the fear of failure can be more crippling than failure itself. There is at least one incumbent major studio executive head of a rich and powerful film company, whose terror of failure is so crippling that only the safe, routine, pretested, undistinguished, competent, journeyman picture may be made in his plant.
To get back to the young film maker: as against the company, he has no qualms about trying something new. As a rule he couldn't dream of buying a hit play or a best seller; he couldn't afford Audrey Hepburn's stand-in. He is unencumbered by stockholders, a board of directors, or any of the disorders of corporate metabolism. His wife may object to his cashing in an insurance policy to cover lab costs but he is saddled with no idle sound stages that add to his overhead; he has no backlog of unproduced screenplays in which he has invested a fortune; and he is beyond the purview of the Legion of Decency. If his leading actress catches pneumonia or his male star is caught in a dope raid, it is no irrecoverable disaster. He will never need to peddle his old pictures to the late late show, or sell off his back lot to Zeckendorf.
Small wonder, then, that he creates new, different, arresting films. He had better, if he is to assert himself at all. Nor is every young film maker an unsung genius. Some of them are genuine hacks, and the fact that they are young and not profitably employed does not necessarily make them splendid and wise. If a man is to be an artist worthy of the name, it behooves him to sail on a fresh tack. He can afford to.
The Establishment admits that it will have little to do with the young men. On the other hand, the industry should not forget that its senior craftsmen, even though they may not admit young men to their ranks, do admit their ideas and influence. Orson Welles was just such a young man when he made "Citizen Kane"; no one can deny its effect on subsequent films. Eisenstein was twenty-five when he made "Potemkin", Chaplin was twenty-four when he captivated his first audience; Griffith was in his twenties when he first hit.
Pictures like "The Hustler," "Hud," "Tom Jones," and "A Hard Day's Night" represent a cross-fertilization of ideas and styles and philosophies of film—in them are glimmerings of all the young forebears, the experiments with hand-held cameras and bold cutting and diffused focus and piercing depth and overcranking and undercranking and whole new domains of story-telling. There is interaction between the young Outs and the old Ins, whether acknowledged or not.
But while the young film maker looks up to the seat of the mighty with envy and often with admiration, he no doubt regards its economy with amazement. For there the Establishment seems slowest of all to learn. To this day it clings, almost poignantly, to legends and traditions of the past. The star system is slavishly honored and employed, in spite of some of the most titanic disasters since the sinking of the ship of the same name.
The young film maker surely is aware that the day in which a star was a guarantee of box office returns is over. He is aware that if a film has no story or lacks a formidable premise, the producer is in trouble. He is aware that Yul Brynner will not, by the magic of his name and talent alone, make a hit of "Flight to Ashiya"; that even John Wayne, for so long a box office champion, and John Houseman, master director, could not combine to make a winner when the story was not there. The young film maker knows all this, but I'm not sure the Establishment quite believes it.
Finally, any consideration of the young film maker and his contemporaries must take into account the audience, which is, after all, the ultimate arbiter of what succeeds commercially. One may well ask whether the American audience would support the young film men, if they exposed their work. If the young Outs, instead of being denied even rudimentary distribution as of now, were to have their work broadly exposed, would many of the public show up? Or come back for more?
The answer to this, as to any imponderable of our culture, lies in the broadest configurations of society. If the instruments of artistic communication, the movie studios, theatres, transmitters are in the hands of timid or venal men, if mediocrity and a low mean are deliberate because they also are profitable and a way of life; if "Beverly Hillbillies" is eternal while "East Side, West Side" dies like a pedigreed dog; if monster and nudie movies are to be seen every night of the week in all of our key cities, while the "Spirit of America,'' and "Robert Frost," and a hundred other serious and wellmade films can't get a play date; if telephone and disk jockeys flourish while good music and drama are exiled to the remotest wave lengths of FM and the ghettos of educational radio, if one and the same mammoth corporation is to own a network, a recording company, "My Fair Lady," and the New York Yankees, while no young film maker can get past one of its secretaries to sell it a film like "Dream of Wild Horses," or Carson Davidson's "Variations on an Italian Theme"; if the Beatles take ten million dollars out of the United States while the symphony orchestras of the land scrabble for support, then something is wrong at the base of the pyramid, and not alone at the top. And there is very small hope that the young film maker will ever climb higher on the totem pole, unless our culture is strengthened to the point where he is looked upon as an honorable and useful artist, instead of an oddball.
The late, great Walter Paepcke, founder of the Institute under whose roof we meet, was partial to this sentence of Plato: "What is honored in a country will be cultivated there." The task is progressive—to cultivate that which is worthy of honor, and then to honor it.
Education can help, of course, but we can't wait for Summerhill and Harvard and the Aspen Institute and the Federation of Film Societies to do it all. It is the option, if not the duty, of mass communications to lead more than to follow to mold higher tastes rather than pander to the lowest.
YOUNGEST OF THE ARTS, and alone of the arts pervaded by big-business motivations, the film industry reflects the inherent conflicts between the eternal ideal of the creative individual to self-expression and the mundane scrutinization of balance sheets. Deployed between the two camps, the cinema audience freely hands out advice to both. Here, in excerpts from the Aspen Film Conference, all sides present their cases.
From:http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen2/youngOuts.html
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