Pillars of the Community

Rare is the literary dog who leaves Hollywood without biting the hand that fed him. Biographer (and onetime scenarist) Emil Ludwig bit hard in La Bataille, a Paris weekly. His article, The Seven Pillars of Hollywood, recently reached the U.S. Excerpts:

A small American state [Hollywood] is on the eve of revolution. . . . The causes . . . are those of every similar uprising: the men in high places are incompetent, their standards lower with each passing year. They rule with the power of wealth alone and push people of talent and knowledge to the wall. . . .

Hollywood is divided into seven categories.

Actors. The first and least reprehensible of these categories are the actors. Here we find nothing but amateurs. . . . Metamorphosis, the very essence of histrionic art, is utterly foreign to these actors. [They] do not realize that they are leading the brilliant but short lives of dazzling butterflies. . . . The few really great actors remaining in Hollywood--a Chaplin or a Garbo--fade ever further into the background. . . .

Musicians. Once they have sold themselves to Hollywood, talented composers turn out works of an entirely commonplace, inconsequential nature. ... Hollywood is strewn with the corpses of artists. . . . They died as traitors to their art.

Screenwriters, that is, scenarists . . . are slim, athletic, dress in loud sweaters, change mistresses even more often than they do studios, and do everything-possible to give the impression that they are wellsprings of creative imagination. Most of these writers suffer from depression: they compensate by only associating with those of their colleagues whose weekly salaries are the same as their own. It would be unthinkable for a two-thousand dollar a week man to be seen with a friend who earns only a thousand. . . .

Cameramen ... are the only group whose members have learned their trade.

Directors. [Most] began by selling films, if not shirts and suspenders. A few real artists such as Disney, Wallace or Wood constitute exceptions. . . .

Producers.... In no field of art, in no country . . . are questions of taste and talent passed upon by persons so totally lacking in culture, so bereft of knowledge and judgment as are the producers of Hollywood. . . . They have an extraordinary nose for what the public wants. So it is that they wax rich while contributing to the intellectual impoverishment of the nation.

Agents or middlemen . . . romp in circles, like porpoises on the high seas, around the big sharks. . . . They are, in a sense, the most honest of the lot, for they frankly admit that they would just as soon sell cars or pyramids. . . .

Of all American industries, motion pictures is the only one which rests not in the hands of experts, but in the charge of persons who have studied neither the theater, nor music, nor history, nor even European films.

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