The Academy Speaks

by JEAN HERSHOLT

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WITH tedious frequency thoughtful writers choose to portray the Hollywood motion picture as the booby-boy of the arts, the helpless tool of a band of clumsy Fagins. But there is really nothing wrong with the child that understanding won’t cure. Hollywood bristles with militant organizations formed to help the movie industry discipline its product. But discipline without long-range ideals can be no more than a sterile mechanism.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences came into being to give stature and constructive support to films and their makers. Among many other activities, the Academy confers a series of high awards for creative achievement. On Oscar Night the full membership of the Academy, in its nicest clothes, hands out twenty-six golden statuettes to the deserving — chosen by secret individual ballot of some two thousand professional members. You know about the Academy Awards only because they are newsworthy throughout the world, wherever people crave pictures. Thus the Academy has already firmly succeeded in establishing round the world the idea of creative incentive.

Along toward midnight, as the final Oscar goes to its last proud artist, the Academy withdraws into the wings. It exchanges its dress suit for a pair of boxing trunks. For now the annual uproar of healthy, loud free speech is about to commence.

The news wire services, the syndicates, the city desks, the picture services, the radio columnists and newsmen, the newsreels, the news magazines — the whole vanguard of world communication, with four hundred Hollywood special correspondents as outriders, has this evening covered the routine ceremony of the awards. A few writers, to be “different,” will inevitably opine that the ceremony has been cheap and gaudy. The meeting has in fact been decorous, amiable in tone, tense, and (if the truth must be confessed) sometimes a little slow in pace — like almost any cumbersome town meeting. Oscar Night, being a newsworthy event, can by its nature no longer be staged without concession to decent spectacle. For the presentation of the twenty-six little statues merely symbolizes the highest and widest public personal honor for creative accomplishment in all major branches of picturemaking. Stars and directors are the mainsprings of all dramatic entertainment, so their personalities receive a preponderance of public recognition and of press lines. The Academy makes not a featherweight of distinction in “ importance ” between achievement in one branch versus another. In the eyes of the picture industry, each award symbolizes an equal honor for an equally notable achievement of the year past. If there is any weighting of any award in relative “importance,” the public, through its astute spokesman, the press, does the weighting.

Those whose votes match the actual awards declare that at last the Oscars have found their proper destinations; those whose candidates have been disappointed cry “fraud,” “partisanship,” “intrigue.”

That no foreign film has yet won the “bestpicture” award here implies (to ulterior-motive seekers) that we must be anti-British, or at least anti-foreign. These critics overlook a special award made to Laurence Olivier for Henry V — an award made by the board before the ballot for “best picture” was known, so that if Henry V should fail in the general ballot (as it did by a small margin) the leading spirit of it would be certain of extraordinary recognition. They overlook an award made to Charles Laughton for his performance in The Private Life of Henry VIII; they ignore an award to George Bernard Shaw for the best screen play (Pygmalion). They overlook too the fact that six of the 1947 awards were voted to British nominees, and a special award went to an Italian film, Shoeshine.

I must flatly and officially deny the charge that there is discrimination against foreign films. For films (and other candidates) from abroad have repeatedly figured in the Academy’s nominations. Because the war crippled European picture-making, the 1940’s showed few foreign nominations. With the resumption of production, the 1947 nominees included three British pictures, one from France, one from Italy. It is hoped and expected that this year may bring forth not only more contenders from those nations, but newcomers from Sweden, Mexico, South America, and other lands. And when a film from whatever foreign source clearly tops the rest of the world, it will be honored by as competent a jury of sincere and proven craftsmen as is to be found on earth. Let excellence stem from where it will — the Academy will welcome excellence, for that is a basic function of the Academy.

Some critics have indicated that there is a tendency for Academy members to cast their ballots arbitrarily for the nominees because they worked for favored studios, rather than for the nominees as individuals. These critics have spread the misconception that the voters (all of whom work in studios) get bedazzled by glittering advertising campaigns put on by their studios in Hollywood trade papers, and then go and vote a straight ticket for the home lot. This is a false charge for three very plain reasons:—

1. The average Academy member is an intense and almost rebellious individualist, and he is answerable to no man or meal ticket for his private professional choice.

2. The Academy has some 2000 members. Fewer than 250 of them (12.5 per cent) are permanently identified with any given studio, the rest being freelances who may be employed by several studios during a given year. Numerical partisanship, under the qualifications for membership, is impossible.

3. Political partisanship (skulduggery) is next to impossible because, as a voting member, you fill out your certified ballot in private. You mail it (unsigned) to an impartial firm of public accountants. They make their reports for the first time by opening sealed envelopes, on the stage, on Oscar Night.

A further complaint declares that great performances in so-called flop pictures never get a nod in the Academy polls. If by flop is meant a box office failure, this is not true. Performances have never been judged by the jingle of the box office till. The weight of intrinsic merit which can make a great picture “big” at the national box office cannot be expected to avoid the craft sense of the Academy voter; his franchise, in fact, bases on his recognition of any such intrinsic merit.

Now, without hairsplitting as to whether any picture cost more than it returned, glance at the following list of great performances, in pictures of all grades of cost and of all grades of relative return. Some of these screen plays happened to be hits; some are mourned as flops because the public didn’t like their craftsmanship nearly as well as the Academy did. James Cagney Yankee Doodle Dandy

Ginger Rogers Kitty Foyle

Victor McLaglen The Informer

Norma Shearer The Divorcee

Clark Gable It Happened One Night

Janet Gaynor Seventh Heaven

George Arliss Disraeli

Helen Hayes The Sin of Madelon Claudet

Paul Muni The Story of Louis Pasteur

Spencer Tracy Captains Courageous

Vivian Leigh Gone With the Wind

Bing Crosby Going My Way

Ingrid Bergman Gaslight

Greer Garson Mrs. Miniver

Bette Davis Jezebel

Loretta Young The Farmer’s Daughter

The generous variety of that handful of examples should make the point that the Academy’s door is always wide to aesthetic performance, in whatever picture from whatever source, without reference to the film’s earnings. And just to countersink that point, let’s set down the list of all the top pictures the Academy poll has chosen since 1927: —

Wings

Sunrise

The Broadway Melody

All Quiet on the Western Front

Cimarron

Grand Hotel

Cavalcade

It Happened One Night Mutiny on the Bounty The Great Ziegfeld The Life of Emile Zola You Can’t Take It With You Gone With the Wind Rebecca

How Green Was My Valley

Mrs. Miniver

Casablanca

Going My Way

The Lost Weekend

The Best Years of Our Lives

Gentleman’s Agreement

In the variety of offering represented by that record, there is complete indication of the catholicity of professional judgment of the Academy, and its determination to try to seek out the brightest needle in the big haystack of each year’s production.

Over the years 1930-1946, the Academy conferred ninety-eight awards for scientific and technical achievement. The Academy does not forget the “forgotten man” in the lab who makes it increasingly easy for your optic nerve to telegraph from the screen to your brain.

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AFTER Oscar Night the Academy goes back to its year-round work. This work is manifold, quiet, ambitious, and effective. The Academy is an honorary association. The elder academies may look down their noses at it, but they may not impeach its ideals. Its avowed purposes aim high: to advance the arts and sciences of motion pictures, and to foster cooperation among the creative leadership of all branches of the industry for cultural, educational, and technological progress.

In addition to pointing with pride to the industry’s good pictures, the Academy is quietly assembling and enriching a collection of tools for the next generation of aspirants. One of its earliest projects was a Film Research Library. Today this library is the most extensive of its kind, and though it has some 3500 volumes touching every phase of the art and industry, it is far from complete. It is a good cell of interest and documentary aid to every student of motion pictures, and of the music that supercharges them.

These students are not confined to the working profession in Hollywood. The Academy coöperates increasingly with universities, colleges, and schools throughout America. From NYU to USC, from Dartmouth and Smith to Catholic University and Stephens, the inquiries for help roll in to Academy headquarters, week in, week out. The University of California at Los Angeles, in its new department of motion pictures, is compiling (for the benefit of advanced education in general) a strong modern text on picture technique — and the Academy is helping to mine and to organize, from the best professional sources, its essential information.

Because excellence in still photography is the germ of excellence in motion photography, the Academy sends forth each year an exhibition of the best work of the still photographers in the industry. This show tours the Americas, Europe, and Australia.

With the optimism of youth, the Academy has bitten off the monumental task of transferring to celluloid a unique collection of paper prints unearthed in the Library of Congress. Prior to 1912 the copyright law did not cover films. The pioneer movie-makers accordingly had their screen plays printed on photographic paper — thus making them copyrightable as printed photographs and deposited in rolls in Washington. Howard Walls, formerly of the Congressional Library, is steering this project, which will restore to mass visibility thousands of rolls comprising a priceless record of the first gropings of the art. Edwin S. Porter’s “first American photoplay,” The Life of an American Fireman, is there; so are nostalgic reels from Edison and Biograph; so are newsreels of McKinley’s assassination and Dewey’s return after Manila. All this old vein of pure metal is distinct from the Academy’s large library of current and recent screen classics, which is growing year by year, which is shown regularly to members in a series of special programs, and which is available to students presenting appropriate qualification. The Academy is drafting the best writers, producers, and cameramen from its own competent membership to make a series of documentary films explaining to an eager public the fascinating processes of motion picture production. The first subject is the historic place of the local theater in the community.

Major plans of the Academy are currently taking shape which aim at the root of better international, as well as national, understanding. The Academy hopes, through an international exchange of documentary films, to demonstrate, in the most graphic and persuasive medium of them all, “how the other fellow lives.” And by an annual International Film Conference, it plans to assemble the foremost craftsmen from round the world to report and discuss their aims and ideas and problems and discoveries, just like the doctors and the lawyers and the astronomers and the physicists and the philosophers.

I am truly glad that the people of the country who do a lot of its soberest and most cheerfully constructive thinking are now interesting themselves in our problems as well as in our pictures. Good ridicule is wholesome — and can be very funny reading. Let them criticize freely and severely — and remember that they will find at the heart of picture-making many professional picture-makers as sympathetic and critical as they. But first let them demand information, upon which to form their balanced judgment, or they lay themselves open to ridicule.

Our industry is one which presents a face to the public that first impresses the conservative as overpainted on the cheekbones; we are justly chided by calm people for living and working at high tension. But if one truly loves the art (or business or profession) of public entertainment, which is the task of helping to make our fellow men gayer, more relieved, more diverted — yes, or even better, if our fellow men be so inspired — one not only tolerates but demands the high light of show business, its color, its music, and its whipped-up cheer, its unquenchable ebullience and its honest tear — for these are the age-old commodities of our human calling, supplying the age-old demands of all peoples. The true friends of the theater — whom our screen has multiplied a millionfold in so few years — are our most potent allies. All we need is: more of the same.

When Oscar Night wheels round again, let the critic blink at the lights, wince at the crashing loud-speakers, envy the winsome winners, condole the gallant losers, and debate the result with informed personal vehemence. After all, the Academy’s Award party, like its work the other 364 days of the year, is really his party — the celebration of the genuinely stage-struck hundred million Americans who love the stage and screen for value received, and who propose to have a hand in their shaping.