Consider the relationship of Hollywood and Broadway. In the twenties, the two were sharply differentiated, movies being produced f...or the masses of the hinterland, theatre for an upper-class New York audience. The theatre was High Culture, mostly of the Academic variety (Theatre Guild) but with some spark of Avant-garde fire (the "little" or "experimental" theatre movement). The movies were definitely Mass Culture, mostly very bad but with some leaven of Avant-gardism (Griffiths, Stroheim) and Folk Art (Chaplin and other comedians). With the sound film, Broadway and Hollywood drew closer together. Plays are now produced mainly to sell the movie rights, with many being directly financed by the film companies. The merger has standardized the theatre to such an extent that even the early Theatre Guild seems vital in retrospect, while hardly a trace of the "experimental" theatre is left. And what have the movies gained? They are more sophisticated, the acting is subtler, the sets in better taste. But they too have become standardized: they are never as awful as they often were in the old days, but they are never as good either. They are better entertainment and worse art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the movie woman's world is designed to remind us that a woman may live in a mansion, an apartment, or a yurt, but it's all the... same thing because what she really lives in is the body of a woman, and that body is allowed to occupy space only according to the dictates of polite society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical fi...eld of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I were twenty or thirty years younger, I would start afresh in this field with the certainty of accomplishing much. But I shoul...d have to learn from the bottom up, forgetting the theatre entirely and concentrating on the special medium of this new art. My mistake, and that of many others, lay in employing "theatrical" techniques despite every effort to avoid them. Here is something quite, quite fresh, a penetrating form of visual poetry, an untried exponent of the human soul. Alas, I am too old for it!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I stopped reading movie magazines in the beauty parlor a couple of years ago because I could not accommodate any more information ...about something called the Lennon Sisters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times whe...n this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The society girl meets more dangers than the girl on the stage. There is more danger at a tango tea than in the theatre. The actor... is less dangerous than the dancing master.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This youngest of the arts is also the most heavily burdened with memory. Cinema is a time machine. Movies preserve the past, while... theatres--no matter how devoted to the classics, to old plays--can only "modernize." Movies resurrect the beautiful dead; present, intact, vanished or ruined environments; embody without irony styles and fashions that seem funny today.... Films age (being objects) as no theatre event does (being always new).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »