Places and Persons

...Very frequently, at regular intervals, the grand opening of a new film spectacle affords fresh proof that the separate men and women engaged in making motion pictures possess, as individual characters, an appeal to the masses which staggers the imagination...

...There a reproduction has been made of the Times building, of the pavement in front of it, of the subway entrance...

...In such happy abstractions—red rose in blonde curls, orange juice and oysters for lunch, Notre Dame de Paris in Times Square— Hollywood presents itself, fragmentary, remote, indifferent to our opinion...

...The idolatry which goes to them is of a very particular quality, immensely personal in its direction: either as wish-fulfilment or as erotic symbol, their personal existence is the object of a vast passion...

...Hundreds of persons of both sexes, facing the sunlight of a California morning in those enchanted hills, can begin the day with the astonishing reflection that the night just over has multiplied their existence in a thousand different dreams...

...The persons who seem so fragmentary and unreal on these stages, repeating moments of imagined life in front of the machines, receive very large sums every week in salary, and even larger quantities of letters from the great outside...

...Gentlemen with large fortunes invest money in this house of toys and derive profit from it...

...The visitor blessed by ignorance (and thus untroubled by detail) must feel in its make-believe streets the violence and morbidity, the vast intensity and childlike hysteria, of America itself: forever building and destroying, working through this chaos of fragments to some sort of narrative unity so that gentlemen with large fortunes may derive profit, and so that girls and boys who were anonymous yesterday may be adored today and forgotten—so it goes—tomorrow...

...Hollywood expects visitors not only to "know the name," but to know a wealth of detail about the person who bears the name...

...Yet all these fragments, the scraps of architecture and the tatters of character, are eventually composed into a unified work of art, a narrative in pictures...

...in those cases admiration for an achievement was part of the idolatry...

...Yesterday they were obscure children...

...A lady lunching by herself with a red rose stuck in her blonde curls, is similarly vague of dress...

...but at the second story, where the camera's ceiling is reached, the building ceases to exist...

...In Hollywood it is not the achievement (however considerable) which is adored: it is the person of the artist...

...Certainly many fan letters are letters of love: but does the love which is so genuine to the writers of such letters impress itself at all on the receivers...

...After my own few puzzled (and fascinated) glances at its reality, I was curious enough to read some of the things written about it...

...Girls and boys, many of them in their early twenties, are known by name and by sight to an inconceivable number of people...

...152 THE COMMONWEAL June ii, 1930 The director (a woman) who was with us said to the man at the dry tank: "I am going to wreck a boat tonight...

...The consciousness of such fame is what gives Hollywood its infinite confidence, its entirely special and unduplicated quality...

...Every detail is perfect...

...My own lack of knowledge of the films was so complete that it must have seemed unreal to those who live their whole lives in and about celluloid...

...I asked a friend who receives thousands of such letters what they meant to her...

...and the most beloved of the film players appear to be not those who act, but those who simply are...

...Those fortunate enough to form a continuous part of that temporary mind die and are reborn with it...

...everybody wears his name like a banner...

...The magic is in the starved fancy of a people whose aesthetic life is so impoverished that it can find in the prettiness of these photographed faces all beauty, all romance...

...I don't have time, and there are too many of them...

...Opposite Times Square stands the lower part of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris...

...Hollywood breathes in the interest, the curiosity, of a colossal proportion of the people now living in this country...

...seriously, doggedly, they are done over and over again until the mind refuses to believe that they can ever be funny in a photograph...

...A street in the studio area begins at New York's Times Square...

...Nothing else in the United States has quite such universal appeal to the imagination, and Hollywood knows it...

...it only seems chaotic to the ignorant stranger...

...Part of the charm of the place is this assurance it possesses: it has the confidence of great fame and of a mysterious, almost universal desirability...

...These fan magazines are, of course, undisguised expressions of the romanticism which surrounds the films, but nobody interested in the civilization of the United States could afford not to examine them...

...tomorrow they will be forgotten...

...Enquiry elicits the information from my friends that the costume is that of a "native...

...If film stars read these magazines—and no doubt they do—how can they bear the responsibility of their own existence...

...The boy looked angry and dug the bullet out of the wall behind him...

...Further along there is a Mississippi river boat in a dry tank...

...The gladiators of ancient Rome, the toreros of modern Spain, are inadequate comparisons...

...But strange and disturbing as the fan magazines are, they are more intelligent than the material sometimes written to "expose" or to ridicule Hollywood (generally by disgruntled film people or visiting Englishmen...

...To assure itself that the mechanism of reproduction has not lied—that this beauty does exist somewhere in an unamiable life—the mob pushes and quarrels and strains in the streets, waiting for a sign, an affirmation...

...The bullet hit a can on the table...

...The crowd's hypnosis is extended in varying degree to most people who come within reach of the sorcery of film photography...

...These juxtapositions are like a painting by Chirico, they are a bewilderment of familiar associations...

...The boy (whose name was Richard Arlen) looked just as angry the second time as he did the first, and the bullet landed in almost exactly the same place...

...I had seen very few movies in the past seven or eight years, and the names of most of their players and writers were unknown to me...

...I went through several "fan magazines"—productions almost as strange as the city of fantasy they describe...

...The profusion of energies at this place, the resistlessness of self-assertion there, make much comment upon it rather footling...

...If John Doe and Lucy Roe, stars of the film, have doubts of immorality, there is the phenomenon of a thousand letters a day to repersuade them...

...and two of them, a writer and a film star, were my mystagogues...

...snobismus about Hollywood is like snobismus about the weather or the seasons...

...In the studio lunchroom there is an influx of youths and maidens in costumes of exotic character but no particular geographic significance...

...It is not necessary, in the studio, for a native to be native to anything in particular...

...The fact is that the place is a phenomenon too profoundly natural for such treatment: those who are content merely to laugh at it are ignoring its power, its charm and its immense psychological significance...

...It is clear that the magic, whatever it is, must be in the minds of those who so push and quarrel and strain, and not in the bodies of those who go by in evening clothes...

...It becomes necessary at each return to the United States to learn all over again its songs and fancies, the particular expression of its temporary mind...

...The most remarkable acting could never evoke this particular kind of enthusiasm...

...today they are adored...

...Above that point there is only the flat blue of the California sky...

...At this point the camera stopped grinding, there was a momentary resumption of the attitudes of ordinary life, and then the scene was photographed all over again...

...The impression of artificiality and remoteness is overwhelming:' the whole place might have been born in the imagination of a feverish child, so sharp and loud and brightly colored is it, so full of sounds and shapes which mean nothing without commentary...

...The person who can feel this special quality most keenly may possibly be the one who brings to Hollywood, as I did, an almost total ignorance...

...Thus the nervous admission on my part that I "knew the name" was inadequate tribute to the names I heard in Hollywood...

...It so happened that various people I once had known elsewhere, in other incarnations, are now part of the film world...

...It was clear from her reply that in the aggregate they meant a great deal, but that no effort of imaginative comprehension had been made to perceive, even occasionally, the individual lives from which such love emanates...

...For it is not only the strangest, the most exciting spectacle in the United States, but one of the most important: it is the aesthetic capital, and in some ways the emotional capital, of the country...

...On another stage comedy grimaces are being repeated in front of a director...

...Her conclusion was characteristic of Hollywood: "Anyway," she said, wrinkling her exquisite nose, "I don't think about it much...

...Any such material I have seen is lamentably superficial, supercilious and absurd...

...The chaos is therefore not a chaos...

...But the persuasion of the world of fantasy is such that one always wishes ardently to comprehend it without explanation...

...I wondered often if the people who appear in the films, and whose astonishing fortunes the films have made, understand this adoration...

...I want four waves...

...King Canute must have been far less confident...

...The costume might be either Spanish or Japanese, depending upon which part of it is under examination...

...At these grand openings excited mobs of men and women wait in the streets for hours, push and quarrel and strain at police lines, to catch one glimpse of an idol passing by...

...In most cases even the statement that I knew the name was false, the stumbling endeavor of a stranger in a strange land to conceal his inferiority and his ignorance...

...Such a visitor must often feel, as I felt, that he walks in a world too odd, too sealed in its oddity, to bear any relation to the world outside...

...So it is with the hard, bright surfaces of Hollywood...

...There is no more remarkable spectacle in the United States, to my mind, than the sight of these mobs in the streets of Hollywood, drinking some mysterious increase of life, some exquisite high pleasure, out of the glimpsing of a stranger's passage...

...In one such magazine I saw a letter from a woman who said that she believed in Miss Greta Garbo as she believed in God...

...On one of the stages a boy in a blue shirt stood by a table and allowed a sharpshooter to shoot at him...

...they can understand only with effort the uninformed state of a person whose experience has been interrupted...

...Pleasant as it would be to photograph various scenes of one's life over again, surely it would be better if they varied a little...

...The terrifying nature of such faith ought, I felt, to keep Miss Garbo awake at nights...

...If Richard Roe sometimes questions the value of the fictions he produces for the movie factory, he has only to look at his bank-book and be answered...

...A man might know the first canto of the Inferno by heart, follow every step of Professor Einstein's reasoning, be able to compose a fugue in five minutes, hold in his memory the bearable residue of all the world's history, and still fail to perceive the quality of Alice in Wonderland...