{"id":25994,"date":"2014-01-05T22:12:42","date_gmt":"2014-01-06T04:12:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=25994"},"modified":"2016-02-20T11:14:06","modified_gmt":"2016-02-20T17:14:06","slug":"how-to-tell-a-movie-story-mr-stahr-will-see-you-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2014\/01\/05\/how-to-tell-a-movie-story-mr-stahr-will-see-you-now\/","title":{"rendered":"How to tell a movie story: Mr. Stahr will see you now"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

It is 1935. Mr. George Boxley is a prominent writer who has been brought to Hollywood. He is working with two other screenwriters on a story, but he feels angry and dissatisfied. His collaborators ruin his contributions, and when he writes solo he produces \u201cinteresting talk but nothing more.\u201d He has come to the head of production to complain, and beneath his annoyance lies a mild contempt for the movie craft.<\/p>\n

He has tried to adjust his standards to movies, he explains, by having his dialogue delivered while his characters are dueling. At the end of the scene one falls into a well and has to be hauled up again.<\/p>\n

The studio chief, Monroe Stahr, asks if Mr. Boxley would include such a scene in a book of his own.<\/p>\n

\u201cNaturally not.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019d consider it too cheap.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boxley replies: \u201cMovie standards are different.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you ever go to them?\u201d Stahr asks.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d confesses the parvenu screenwriter. \u201cAlmost never.\u201d He explains, defensively, that movies are full of things like duels and falling down wells \u201cand wearing strained facial expressions and talking incredible and unnatural dialogue.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSkip the dialogue for a minute,\u201d said Stahr. \u201cGranted your dialogue is more graceful than what these hacks can write\u2014that\u2019s why we brought you out here. But let\u2019s imagine something that isn\u2019t either bad dialogue or jumping down a well. Has your office got a stove in it that lights with a match?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI think it has,\u201d said Boxley stiffly, \u201c\u2014but I never use it.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mr. Boxley is about to get a tutorial in how to tell a movie story.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Behind the glitter<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

F. Scott Fitzgerald<\/em><\/p>\n

There have been novels about Hollywood as long as the movie industry has been there. Most have been either straightforward wish-fulfillment (girl\/boy from the sticks makes it big) or cautionary tales (boy\/girl fails or becomes depraved). The more ambitious \u201cHollywood novel\u201d has been more sour and sweeping. It presents itself as a harsh expos\u00e9 that makes a broad social comment on picture-makers, their public, and the society that spawns both.<\/p>\n

This serious Hollywood novel is largely a creature of the late 1930s. Wedding hard-boiled style to Depression-era realism, Nathanael West\u2019s Day of the Locust<\/em> (1938) and Horace McCoy\u2019s I Should Have Stayed Home<\/em> (1938) present stark, aggressively despairing accounts. In these books, Hollywood is America, only more so.<\/p>\n

Both West\u2019s and McCoy\u2019s books fared poorly in the market. The triumph was Budd Schulberg\u2019s What Makes Sammy Run?<\/em> (1941), which found in the rapacious Sammy Glick a prototype of the modern entertainment entrepreneur. Schulberg daringly emphasized the fact that Sammy was a Jew, creating a controversy that lasted for quite a while.<\/p>\n

The booming movie market of the war years, along with the fact that more novelists found themselves involved with the studios, made the 1940s something of a golden age of the Hollywood novel. The movie kingdom became the setting for dozens of murder mysteries, veiled memoirs, and satires\u2014some written by practicing screenwriters. (Among the most notable: Ben Hecht\u2019s offhand but heartfelt I Hate Actors!,<\/em> 1944). At a higher level of literary prestige, there were two 1948 titles from Englishmen, Evelyn Waugh\u2019s caustic The Loved One<\/em> and Aldous Huxley\u2019s Ape and Essence<\/em>, a novel written as a pseudo-screenplay. But none of these finished works won the enduring fame of an incomplete story published in the same year that Schulberg introduced Sammy Glick.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Built on the grand scale<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Irving Thalberg.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1939 F. Scott Fitzgerald had begun The Last Tycoon<\/em> (perhaps intending to call it The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western<\/em>). By then his brief screenwriting career was over, but he was fascinated by MGM’s boy wonder Irving Thalberg, \u201cone of the half-dozen men I have known who were built on the grand scale.\u201d Fitzgerald decided to center his plot on Monroe Stahr, a Thalberg-like producer.<\/p>\n

Stahr is a shrewd, intellectually gifted workaholic who is an expert in manipulating what is coming to be a new system of moviemaking. Brisk and efficient in the office, Stahr is occasionally cold and arrogant, but his primary trait is a remarkable sensitivity to the emotional temperature of each situation. He gains our sympathy because in private Stahr is sunk in melancholy, \u00a0longing for his dead wife and hoping to find another woman to love.<\/p>\n

When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he had completed less than half of The Last Tycoon<\/em>. His long-time friend, the critic Edmund Wilson, assembled an edition that was issued in 1941, with the finished portions supplemented by notes and a five-act outline. The book had a great impact. The New York Times<\/em> reviewer commented:<\/p>\n

Uncompleted though it is, one would be blind indeed not to see that it would have been Fitzgerald’s best novel and a very fine one. Even in this truncated form it not only makes absorbing reading; it is the best piece of creative writing that we have about one phase of American life\u2014Hollywood and the movies.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Matthew J. Bruccoli, who has brought out the authoritative edition, remarks:<\/p>\n

Even in its preliminary and incomplete condition, The Love of the Last Tycoon<\/em> is regarded as the best novel written about the movies. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Reading the book for my research on the 1940s, I became fascinated by its understanding of what we might call the Hollywood aesthetic.<\/p>\n

That understanding begins with a recognition of the production process.\u00a0Most Hollywood novels mention actual stars and directors, but The Last Tycoon<\/em> goes beyond name-dropping. It takes us into the offices, the editing rooms, and onto the set when Stahr must fire a director. These scenes have an authority that most novels lack, assisted by Fitzgerald\u2019s effort to present his mogul not as a monster but as a man of genuine, if sometimes dictatorial, charm, tact, and taste.<\/p>\n

Setting his novel in 1935, Fitzgerald also registers how studio organization shifted toward a central-producer system. Stahr deliberately avoids learning the details of camerawork, editing, and sound.<\/p>\n

He could have understood easily enough\u2014often he preferred not to, to preserve a sensual acceptance when he saw the scene unfold in the rushes. . . . His function was different from that of Griffith in the early days, who had been all things to every finished frame of film. <\/strong><\/p>\n

One of Fitzgerald\u2019s most cryptic notes indicates his recognition of different studio styles.<\/p>\n

The Warner Brothers narrative writing and the Metro dramatic, packed\u2014cut back and forth writing from Stahr.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This might be a reference to Warners\u2019 vivacious montage sequences, which were sometimes considered\u00a0 \u201cnarrative,\u201d while fully enacted scenes were called \u201cdramatic.\u201d The use of \u201ccut back and forth\u201d here exemplifies Fitzgerald\u2019s occasional use of movie slang in his notes, as when he gets his characters on the Super Chief passenger train<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In a very short transition or montage, I bring the whole party West on the chief.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like many intellectuals of his time, Fitzgerald was fascinated by the movies as an artistic medium. The standard version of film history was articulated in many books of the period, most notably Lewis Jacobs\u2019 Rise of the American Film<\/em> (1938). Fitzgerald dots his novel with commonplaces about the history of cinema.<\/p>\n

She was reputed to have been on the set the day Griffith invented the close-up!<\/strong><\/p>\n

[Stahr] prepared for the meeting [with the Writers Guild] by running off the Russian Revolutionary Films that he had in his film library at home. He also ran off \u201cDoctor Caligari\u201d and Salvador Dali\u2019s \u201cUn Chien Andalou,\u201d possibly suspecting that they had a bearing on the matter.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Astonishingly, Fitzgerald even considered calling his novel The Lumi\u00e8re Man.<\/em><\/p>\n

Most original, I think, is the episode I\u2019ve started to present to you. It\u2019s an exemplary scene, showing how good Stahr is at his job. He subtly steers Mr. Boxley, the East Coast litt\u00e9rateur, toward returning to the screenplay. But he also tutors Mr. Boxley, and us, in a deeper awareness of how classical Hollywood aimed to tell its stories.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Just making pictures<\/strong><\/p>\n

Imagine, Stahr tells Boxley, you\u2019re sitting in your office, tired out.<\/p>\n

A pretty stenographer that you\u2019ve seen before comes into the room and you watch her\u2014idly. She doesn\u2019t see you although you\u2019re very close to her. She takes off her gloves, opens her purse, and dumps it out on the table. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Stahr continues. From her change, the young woman picks out a nickel and puts it on the desk. She picks up a matchbox and then takes her black gloves to the stove. She puts them inside the stove and starts to light it, when the phone suddenly rings.<\/p>\n

The girl picks it up, says hello\u2014listens\u2014and says deliberately into the phone, \u201cI\u2019ve never owned a pair of black gloves in my life.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

The stenographer hangs up and kneels by the stove again.<\/p>\n

Just as she lights the match you glance around very suddenly and see that there\u2019s another man in the office, watching every move the girl makes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Stahr pauses.<\/p>\n

\u201cGo on,\u201d said Boxley smiling. “What happens?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d said Stahr. \u201cI was just making pictures.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Boxley feels he\u2019s been wrong-footed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just melodrama,\u201d he said.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cNot necessarily,\u201d said Stahr. \u201cIn any case nobody has moved violently or talked cheap dialogue or had any facial expression at all. There was only one bad line, and a writer like you could improve it. But you were interested.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Question time<\/strong><\/p>\n

Throughout the 1930s, critics like Otis Ferguson praised American studio pictures for their clean, straight storytelling. The primary concern of Fritz Lang, for instance, \u201cis with the rightness and immediacy of each fragment as it appears to you, makes its impression, leads you along with each incident of the story, and projects the imagination beyond into things to come.\u201d I think that Stahr\u2019s tutorial helps us understand how that blend of immediacy and flow, vivid moments and keen anticipation, works.<\/p>\n

For one thing, the gloves scene doesn\u2019t fit certain clich\u00e9s about Hollywood. It isn\u2019t spectacular; it\u2019s not a chase or a fight or a seduction or a slapstick episode. As Stahr points out, nobody is dueling or falling down a well.<\/p>\n

We often say that Hollywood movies emphasize plot (lots of action) over character (stereotyped, at that). But this scene doesn\u2019t have much action, and we don\u2019t know anything about the character. (We can\u2019t even be sure she\u2019s lying; maybe these gloves aren\u2019t hers.) What we have is plot and character fused in a situation<\/em>. The scene creates, out of mundane materials, a crisis.<\/p>\n

We say that Hollywood films grab us through emotion. Do we feel strong passions here? Well, not so much. We say that Hollywood films make us identify with the characters. Are we identifying with the young woman, or the magically unseen Boxley, or the man suddenly revealed watching the whole thing? Not really. The paramount emotion, as Stahr points out, is that diffuse, low-level one we call interest<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What does grab us, I think you\u2019ll agree, are the questions<\/em> that are implicit in the action. Why does the woman leave a nickel on the desk? Why does she start to burn the gloves? Why does she deny owning black gloves? Why is the man watching her? And what will happen next?<\/p>\n

No\u00ebl Carroll has developed a theory of narrative he calls \u201cerotetic.\u201d Telling a story, he suggests, creates a controlled cascade of questions. Sometimes they pile up, as here; sometimes a question is answered but the answer raises another question. Stahr\u2019s lesson supports Carroll\u2019s idea that in any art, narration is a matter of asking, postponing, and answering questions. Erotetic principles, Stahr suggests, are more central to Hollywood storytelling than obvious appeals like spectacle and gags.<\/p>\n

Another narrative theorist, Meir Sternberg, has proposed that the \u201cmaster effects\u201d aroused by stories are curiosity, surprise, and suspense. Curiosity is a matter of wondering about what led up to the actions we\u2019re seeing now. What has impelled our stenographer to burn these gloves? Surprise comes from revealing a gap in the telling\u2019s continuity. This occurs when Stahr\u2019s \u201cpan shot\u201d (\u201cyou glance around very suddenly\u201d) reveals a man in the office watching her efforts. If curiosity involves the past, and surprise punctuates the present, suspense points us forward: What will happen next? Stahr\u2019s anecdote breaks off just as we learn that the man is watching. Will he prevent her from burning the gloves? More generally, how will he figure in the plot to come? Sternberg\u2019s three cognitive attitudes, which he considers fundamental to narrative engagement, are neatly wrapped up in Stahr\u2019s toy example.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Every writer knows that coming up with a grabby scene is easy. The problem is paying everything off. So admittedly, Stahr has dodged the work of figuring out the whole plot. Nonetheless, his example should clarify one notion of Hollywood storytelling. Relatively easy to shoot (Mr. Boxley, close to the woman but mysteriously unseen, is obviously the camera), but demanding skill in pacing and performance, the scene shows, I think, the unpretentious power of that clean storytelling that Ferguson and his peers celebrated.<\/p>\n

The intellectuals who throughout the 1930s and 1940s derided Hollywood as simple-minded and uncreative didn\u2019t really drill down into the specifics of how the storytelling system worked. Fitzgerald did, perhaps because as a novelist he could observe and appreciate the craft of it\u2014even if he couldn\u2019t actually succeed at it himself. The Last Tycoon<\/em> is a nuanced tribute to Hollywood as an aggressive business that need not necessarily suffocate richness of personality. It\u2019s also a modest tribute to the power of a storytelling model that is only apparently obvious.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was the nickel for?\u201d asked Boxley evasively.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d said Stahr. Suddenly he laughed. \u201cOh yes\u2014the nickel was for the movies.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019ve drawn my quotations of Fitzgerald\u2019s working drafts from both Edmund Wilson\u2019s 1941 edition of The Last Tycoon<\/em><\/a> and from Matthew J. Bruccoli\u2019s 1993 edition of The Love of the Last Tycoon: The Authorized Text<\/em><\/a>. Each version contains many intriguing jottings that aren\u2019t included in the other one. Quotations from the main text come from Bruccoli\u2019s edition, except that I\u2019ve corrected Fitzgerald\u2019s misspelling of \u201cnickel.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been guided by Anthony Slide\u2019s excellent bibliographical survey, The Hollywood Novel: A Critical Guide to Over 1200 Works<\/em><\/a> (McFarland, 1995). See also Budd Wilson Schuberg\u2019s portmanteau review, \u201cLiterature of the Film: The Hollywood Novel,\u201d Films<\/em> 1, 2 (Spring 1940), 68-78.<\/p>\n

Janet Staiger explains how Thalberg, a prototype of the central-producer system during the 1920s, was gradually embracing the newer division of labor, that of the producer-unit system, in the early 1930s. See her chapter 25 in the book she wrote with Kristin and me, The Classical Hollywood System: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

No\u00ebl Carroll\u2019s theory of erotetic narration is explained in several of his publications;\u00a0 a convenient one is The Philosophy of Horror<\/em><\/a>, chapter 3. For Meir Sternberg\u2019s account of curiosity, suspense, and surprise, see his \u201cTelling in Time\u201d series in Poetics Today<\/em><\/a> (Winter 1990, Fall 1992, and Spring 2006).<\/p>\n

J. Donald Adams\u2019 review of The Last Tycoon<\/em><\/a> is in The New York Times<\/em> (9 November 1941). \u00a0My quotation from Otis Ferguson comes from \u201cFritz Lang and Company,\u201d The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson<\/em>, ed. Robert Wilson (Temple University Press, 1971), 372.<\/p>\n

An earlier entry on Ferguson<\/a> further develops his ideas about the clean contours of Hollywood storytelling.<\/p>\n

Elia Kazan\u2019s film of The Last Tycoon<\/em> includes the Boxley scene. Apart from adding unnecessary lines, it\u2019s an exercise in ham, with other characters watching Boxley’s discomfiture and a smug Stahr (Robert De Niro) dashing about the room and pantomiming the action. Kazan’s Stahr burlesques the story situation he invokes, whereas I take the novel’s scene as a playful but sincere object lesson.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Stahr shows Boxley the black gloves in Kazan’s Last Tycoon<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DB here: It is 1935. Mr. George Boxley is a prominent writer who has been brought to Hollywood. He is working with two other screenwriters on a story, but he feels angry and dissatisfied. His collaborators ruin his contributions, and when he writes solo he produces \u201cinteresting talk but nothing more.\u201d He has come to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,40,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hollywood-aesthetic-traditions","category-hollywood-the-business","category-narrative-strategies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25994"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33411,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25994\/revisions\/33411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}