My Far-Flung Correspondent Anath White in Los Angeles writes me: “Raymond Chandler wrote this wonderful piece for the Atlantic Monthly in March of 1948.”
Oscar Night in Hollywood,
by Raymond Chandler
I
Five or six years ago a distinguished writer-director (if I may be permitted
the epithet in connection with a Hollywood personage) was co-author of a
screen play nominated for an Academy Award. He was too nervous to attend the proceedings on the big night, so he was listening to a broadcast at home,
pacing the floor tensely, chewing his fingers, taking long breaths, scowling
and debating with himself in hoarse whispers whether to stick it out until
the Oscars were announced, or turn the damned radio off and read about it in
the papers the next morning.
Getting a little tired of all this artistic temperament in the home, his
wife suddenly came up with one of those awful remarks which achieve a wry
immortality in Hollywood: “For Pete’s sake, don’t take it so seriously,
darling. After all, Luise Rainer won it twice.”
To those who did not see the famous telephone scene in “The Great Ziegfeld,” or any of the subsequent versions of it which Miss Rainer played in other pictures, with and without telephone, this remark will lack punch. To others it will serve as well as anything to express that cynical despair with which Hollywood people regard their own highest distinction. It isn’t so much that the awards never go to fine achievements as that those fine achievements are not rewarded as such. They are rewarded as fine achievements in box-office hits. You can’t be an All-American on a losing team.
Technically, they are voted, but actually they are not decided by the use of
whatever artistic and critical wisdom Hollywood may happen to possess. They are ballyhooed, pushed, yelled, screamed, and in every way propagandized into the consciousness of the voters so incessantly, in the weeks before the final balloting, that everything except the golden aura of the box office is forgotten.
The Motion Picture Academy, at considerable expense and with great
efficiency, runs all the nominated pictures at its own theater, showing each
picture twice, once in the afternoon, once in the evening. A nominated
picture is one in connection with which any kind of work is nominated for an
award, not necessarily acting, directing, or writing; it may be a purely
technical matter such as set-dressing or sound work. This running of
pictures has the object of permitting the voters to look at films which they
may happen to have missed or to have partly forgotten. It is an attempt to
make them realize that pictures released early in the year, and since
overlaid with several thicknesses of battered celluloid, are still in the
running and that consideration of only those released a short time before
the end of the year is not quite just.
The effort is largely a waste. The people with votes don’t go to these
showings. They send their relatives, friends, or servants. They have had
enough of looking at pictures, and the voices of destiny are by no means
inaudible in the Hollywood air. They have a brassy tone, but they are more
than distinct.
All this is good democracy of a sort. We elect Congressmen and Presidents in much the same way, so why not actors, cameramen, writers, and all rest of
the people who have to do with the making of pictures? If we permit noise,
ballyhoo, and theater to influence us in the selection of the people who are
to run the country, why should we object to the same methods in the
selection of meritorious achievements in the film business? If we can
huckster a President into the White House, why cannot we huckster the
agonized Miss Joan Crawford or the hard and beautiful Miss Olivia de
Havilland into possession of one of those golden statuettes which express
the motion picture industry’s frantic desire to kiss itself on the back of
its neck?
The only answer I can think of is that the motion picture is an art. I say
this with a very small voice. It is an inconsiderable statement and has a
hard time not sounding a little ludicrous. Nevertheless it is a fact, not in
the least diminished by the further facts that its ethos is so far pretty
low and that its techniques are dominated by some pretty awful people.
If you think most motion pictures are bad, which they are (including the
foreign), find out from some initiate how they are made, and you will be
astonished that any of them could be good. Making a fine motion picture is
like painting “The Laughing Cavalier” in Macy’s basement, with a floorwalker
to mix your colors for you. Of course most motion pictures are bad. Why
wouldn’t they be? Apart from its own intrinsic handicaps of excessive cost,
hypercritical bluenosed censorship, and the lack of any single-minded
controlling force in the making, the motion picture is bad because 90 per
cent of its source material is tripe, and the other 10 per cent is a little
too virile and plain-spoken for the putty-minded clerics, the elderly
ingénues of the women’s clubs, and the tender guardians of that godawful
mixture of boredom and bad manners known more eloquently as the
Impressionable Age.
The point is not whether there are bad motion pictures or even whether the
average motion picture is bad, but whether the motion picture is an artistic
medium of sufficient dignity and accomplishment to be treated with respect
by the people who control its destinies. Those who deride the motion picture
usually are satisfied that they have thrown the book at it by declaring it
to be a form of mass entertainment.
As if that meant anything. Greek drama, which is still considered quite
respectable by most intellectuals, was mass entertainment to the Athenian
freeman. So, within its economic and topographical limits, was the
Elizabethan drama. The great cathedrals of Europe, although not exactly
built to while away an afternoon, certainly had an aesthetic and spiritual
effect on the ordinary man. Today, if not always, the fugues and chorales of
Bach, the symphonies of Mozart, Borodin, and Brahms, the violin concertos of Vivaldi, the piano sonatas of Scarlatti, and a great deal of what was once
rather recondite music are mass entertainment by virtue of radio. Not all
fools love it, but not all fools love anything more literate than a comic
strip. It might reasonably be said that all art at some time and in some
manner becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is
forgotten.
The motion picture admittedly is faced with too large a mass; it must please
too many people and offend too few, the second of these restrictions being
infinitely more damaging to it artistically than the first. The people who
sneer at the motion picture as an art form are furthermore seldom willing to
consider it at its best. They insist upon judging it by the picture they saw
last week or yesterday; which is even more absurd (in view of the sheer
quantity of production) than to judge literature by last week’s
best-sellers, or the dramatic art by even the best of the current Broadway
hits. In a novel you can still say what you like, and the stage is free
almost to the point of obscenity, but the motion picture made in Hollywood,
if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations
of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any
distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium
bathroom. If it were merely a transplanted literary or dramatic art, it
certainly would not. The hucksters and the bluenoses would between them see to that.
But the motion picture is not a transplanted literary or dramatic art, any
more than it is a plastic art. It has elements of all these, but in its
essential structure it is much closer to music, in the sense that its finest
effects can be independent of precise meaning, that its transitions can be
more eloquent than its high-lit scenes, and that its dissolves and camera
movements, which cannot be censored, are often far more emotionally
effective than its plots, which can.
Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art
that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only
art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly
excel. In painting, music, and architecture we are not even second-rate by
comparison with the best work of the past. In sculpture we are just funny.
In prose literature we not only lack style but we lack the educational and
historical background to know what style is. Our fiction and drama are
adept, empty, often intriguing, and so mechanical that in another fifty
years at most they will be produced by machines with rows of push buttons.
We have no popular poetry in the grand style, merely delicate or witty or
bitter or obscure verses. Our novels are transient propaganda when they are
what is called “significant,” and bedtime reading when they are not.
But in the motion picture we possess an art medium whose glories are not all
behind us. It has already produced great work, and if, comparatively and
proportionately, far too little of that great work has been achieved in
Hollywood, I think that is all the more reason why in its annual tribal
dance of the stars and the big-shot producers Hollywood should contrive a
little quiet awareness of the fact. Of course it won’t. I’m just
daydreaming.
II
How business has always been a little overnoisy, overdressed, overbrash.
Actors are threatened people. Before films came along to make them rich they often had need of a desperate gaiety. Some of these qualities prolonged
beyond a strict necessity have passed into the Hollywood mores anproduced
that very exhausting thing, the Hollywood manner, which is a chronic case of
spurious excitement over absolutely nothing.
Nevertheless, and for once in a lifetime, I have to admit that Academy
Awards night is a good show and quite funny in spots, although I’ll admire
you if you can laugh at all of it. If you can go past those awful idiot
faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse
of the human intelligence; if you can stand the hailstorm of flash bulbs
popping at the poor patient actors who, like kings and queens, have never
the right to look bored; if you can glance out over this gathered assemblage
of what is supposed to be the elite of Hollywood and say to yourself without
a sinking feeling, “In these hands lie the destinies of the only original
art the modern world has conceived”; if you can laugh, and you probably
will, at the cast-off jokes from the comedians on the stage, stuff that
wasn’t good enough to use on their radio shows; if you can stand the fake
sentimentality and the platitudes of the officials and the mincing elocution
of the glamour queens (you ought to hear them with four martinis down the
hatch); if you can do all these things with grace and pleasure, and not have
a wild and forsaken horror at the thought that most of these people actually
take this shoddy performance seriously; and if you can then go out into the
night to see half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect the
golden ones from the mob in the free seats but not from that awful moaning
sound they give out, like destiny whistling through a hollow shell; if you
can do all these things and still feel next morning that the picture
business is worth the attention of one single intelligent, artistic mind,
then in the picture business you certainly belong, because this sort of
vulgarity is part of its inevitable price.
Glancing over the program of the Awards before the show starts, one is apt
to forget that this is really an actors’, directors’, and big-shot
producers’ rodeo. It is for the people who make pictures (they think), not
just for the people who work on them. But these gaudy characters are a
kindly bunch at heart; they know that a lot of small-fry characters in minor
technical jobs, such as cameramen, musicians, cutters, writers, soundmen,
and the inventors of new equipment, have to be given something to amuse them and make them feel mildly elated. So the performance was formerly divided into two parts, with an intermission. On the occasion I attended, however, one of the Masters of Ceremony (I forget which–there was a steady stream of them, like bus passengers) announced that there would be no intermission this year and that they would proceed immediately to the important part of the program. Let me repeat, the important part of the program.
Perverse fellow that I am, I found myself intrigued by the unimportant part
of the program also. I found my sympathies engaged by the lesser ingredients of picture-making, some of which have been enumerated above. I was intrigue by the efficiently quick on-and-off that was given to these minnows of the picture business; by their nervous attempts via the microphone to give most of the credit for their work to some stuffed shirt in a corner office; by the fact that technical developments which may mean many millions of dollars to the industry, and may on occasion influence the whole procedure of picture-making, are just not worth explaining to the audience at all; by the casual, cavalier treatment given to film-editing and to camera work, two of the essential arts of film-making, almost and sometimes quite equal to direction, and much more important than all but the very best acting;
intrigued most of all perhaps by the formal tribute which is invariably made
to the importance of the writer, without whom, my dear, dear friends,
nothing could be done at all, but who is for all that merely the climax of
the unimportant part of the program.
III
I am also intrigued by the voting. It was formerly done by all the members of all the various guilds, including the extras and bit players. Then it was realized that this gave too much voting power to rather unimportant groups, so the voting on various classes of awards was restricted to the guilds which were presumed to have some critical intelligence on the subject.
Evidently this did not work either, and the next change was to have the
nominating done by the specialist guilds, and the voting only by members of
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
It doesn’t really seem to make much difference how the voting is done. The
quality of the work is still only recognized in the context of success. A
superb job in a flop picture would get you nothing, a routine job in a
winner will be voted in. It is against this background of success-worship
that the voting is done, with the incidental music supplied by a stream of
advertising in the trade papers (which even intelligent people read in
Hollywood) designed to put all other pictures than those advertised out of
your head at balloting time.
The psychological effect is very great on minds conditioned to thinking of
merit solely in terms of box office and ballyhoo. The members of the Academy live in this atmosphere, and they are enormously suggestible people, as are all workers in Hollywood. If they are contracted to studios, they are made to feel that it is a matter of group patriotism to vote for the products of their own lot. They are informally advised not to waste their votes, not to plump for something that can’t win, especially something made on another lot.
I do not feel any profound conviction, for example, as to whether “The Best
Years of Our Lives” was even the best Hollywood motion picture of 1946. It
depends on what you mean by best. It had a first-class director, some fine
actors, and the most appealing sympathy gag in years. It probably had as
much all-around distinction as Hollywood is presently capable of. That it
had the kind of class and simple art possessed by Open City or the stalwart
and magnificent impact of Henry V only an idiot would claim. In a sense it
did not have art at all. It had that kind of sentimentality which is almost
but not quite humanity, and that kind of adeptness which is almost but not
quite style. And it had them in large doses, which always helps.
The governing board of the Academy is at great pains to protect the honesty
and the secrecy of the voting. It is done by anonymous numbered ballots, and
the ballots are sent, not to any agency of the motion picture industry, but
to a well-known firm of public accountants. The results, in sealed
envelopes, are borne by an emissary of the firm right onto the stage of the
theater where the Awards be made, and there for the first time, one at a
time, they are made known. Surely precaution would go no further. No one
could possibly have known in advance any of these results, not even in
Hollywood where every agent learns the closely guarded secrets of the
studios with no apparent trouble. If there are secrets in Hollywood, which I
sometimes doubt, this voting ought to be one of them.
IV
As for a deeper kind of honesty, I think it is about time for the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to use a little of it up by declaring in a
forthright manner that foreign pictures are outside competition and will
remain so until they face the same economic situation and the same
strangling censorship that Hollywood faces. It is all very well to say how
clever and artistic the French are, how true to life, what subtle actors
they have, what an honest sense of the earth, what forthrightness in dealing
the bawdy side of life. The French can afford these things, we cannot. To
the Italians they are permitted, to us they are denied. Even the English
possess a freedom we lack. How much did Brief Encounter cost? It would have cost at least a million and a half in Hollywood; in order to get that money
back, and the distribution costs on top of the negative costs, it would have
had to contain innumerable crowd-pleasing ingredients, the very lack of
which is what makes it a good picture.
Since the Academy is not an international tribunal of film art it should
stop pretending to be one. If foreign pictures have no practical chance
whatsoever of winning a major award they should not be nominated. At the
very beginning of the performance in 1947 a special Oscar was awarded to
Laurence Olivier for “Henry V,”, although it was among those nominated as best picture of the year. There could be no more obvious way of saying it was not going to win. A couple of minor technical awards and a couple of minor writing awards were also given to foreign pictures, but nothing that ran
into important coin, just side meat. Whether these awards were deserved is
beside the point, which is that they were minor awards and were intended to
be minor awards, and that there was no possibility whatsoever of any
foreign-made picture winning a major award.
To outsiders it might appear that something devious went on here. To those
who know Hollywood, all that went on was the secure knowledge and awareness that the Oscars exist for and by Hollywood, their purpose is to maintain the supremacy of Hollywood, their standards and problems are the standards and problems of Hollywood, and their phoniness is the phoniness of Hollywood. But the Academy cannot, without appearing ridiculous, maintain a pose of internationalism by tossing a few minor baubles to the foreigners while carefully keeping all the top-drawer jewelry for itself. As a writer I resent that writing awards should be among these baubles, and as a member of the Motion Picture Academy I resent its trying to put itself in a position which its annual performance before the public shows it quite unfit to occupy.
If the actors and actresses like the silly show, and I’m not sure at all the
best of them do, they at least know how to look elegant in a strong light,
and how to make with the wide-eyed and oh, so humble little speeches as if
they believed them. If the big producers like it, and I’m quite sure they do
because it contains the only ingredients they really understand–promotion
values and the additional grosses that go with them–the producers at least
know what they are fighting for. But if the quiet, earnest, and slightly
cynical people who really make motion pictures like it, and I’m quite sure
they don’t, well, after all, it comes only once a year, and it’s no worse
than a lot of the sleazy vaudeville they have to push out of the way to get
their work done.
Of course that’s not quite the point either. The head of a large studio once
said privately that in his candid opinion the motion picture business was 25
per cent honest business and the other 75 per cent pure conniving. He didn’t say anything about art, although he may have heard of it.
But that is the real point, isn’t it?–whether these annual Awards,
regardless of the grotesque ritual which accompanies them, really represent
anything at all of artistic importance to the motion picture medium,
anything clear and honest that remains after the lights are dimmed, the
minks are put away, and the aspirin is swallowed? I don’t think they do. I
think they are just theater and not even good theater. As for the personal
prestige that goes with winning an Oscar, it may with luck last long enough
for your agent to get your contract rewritten and your price jacked up
another notch. But over the years and in the hearts of men of good will? I
hardly think so.
Once upon a time a once very successful Hollywood lady decided (or was
forced) to sell her lovely furnishings at auction, together with her lovely
home. On the day before she moved out she was showing a party of her friends through the house for a private view. One of them noticed that the lady was using her two golden Oscars as doorstops. It seemed they were just about the right weight, and she had sort of forgotten they were gold.
