●PART ONE●
Dream Factories
Dream Factories: The Past
WITH HUMANS, IT GOES LIKE THIS:
The movies got it all wrong.
They were born. They learned to move. Then they learned to tell stories and jokes. Finally, they learned to talk.
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The stories in this section are about film, from the beginnings to (some other) circa 1970. There’s plenty of stuff here on grammar and orientation, on personalities and genres; all the stuff we love that the movies have done for the past 105 years.
Film was the first mass medium, one capable of taking a product to millions of people at the same time. (Music recording was first, but it took the product—mass-produced—to a few people at a time. Plays had large audiences, but someone seeing the same play in NYC and Cleveland is seeing two different plays; for that matter, someone seeing a matinee and an evening performance of the same play in the same theater with the same cast is seeing two different plays.) The movies—once past the Kinetoscope-card one-viewer-at-a-time penny-arcade version—showed the same thing every time to everyone who ever saw it, no matter where in the world. It was for forever (or as close to forever as celluloid nitrate stock could be), and because it was forever, it changed the way people looked at their transiently beautiful world. . . .
You’ll see in my introductions to the individual stories what I call the Waldrop/Sennett universal plot [hereafter, “W/S u-plot”]: Tom Oakheart, Teddy the Keystone Dog, Oil Can Harry, Pearl. You can illustrate almost anything in film with the likes of Teddy at the Throttle (1916). Buddy movies? Tom and Teddy. Romance? Tom, Pearl. Drama? That plot itself. Psychodrama? Why does Oil Can Harry want to saw Pearl into wet kindling when she won’t put out for him? Isn’t that counterproductive? And so on. (If you think this is outdated: the film-within-the-film in The Player, the one that’s always being pitched and talked about is the W/S u-plot: Tom Oakheart [Willis] with Teddy [his Land Rover] rescues Pearl [Julia Roberts] from the sawmill [gas chamber], where Oil Can Harry [The State of California] is killing her. Yes or no?)
These things are imprinted on you and me from childhood as surely as if we were baby ducks. The movies are as real (or more real) than the first grade or the SAT or your second car or ’Nam or whatever else we call life. They’re part of it; they’re escape from it. What I’m saying in all these stories is that they’re beside life; a place we went that’s better or worse than what we have here, now . . .
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Remember this while you’re reading these stories about the movies’ past: How real they are.
Reporters waited outside the theater where the world premier of The Robe (1953—the first movie using the Cinemascope screen) took place. It was over. Sam Goldwyn, always good for a mangled quote, came out.
“What was The Robe about, Mr. Goldwyn?” they asked him.
“It was about a guy with fourteen-foot lips,” he said, and got in his limo, and left.