Storytellers and Entertainers

I want to introduce one more way of thinking about movies, and because I'm borrowing terms from art history, I'll be using terms that may evolve in time.

You assemble people together, have them sit down, then you tell them a story, in the dark, by a flickering light. You want to hold their attention, so you keep them in suspense, and make them keep asking, "What happens next?" This is what movies and campfires have in common.

Most great filmmakers are great storytellers who are good at putting it all together on film.

When movies became feature-length, in the 30's, your typical Hollywood director was a loud, heavy-drinking tough guy. He was good at bossing people around and getting them to do what he wanted.

And he was good at telling stories.

I'm thinking of John Ford, William Wellman, Victor Fleming and, later, John Huston. I remember a quote from someone describing John Huston before he came to Hollywood as "just a guy who was good to go out drinking with." Most directors made terrible movies (as they do today), but a handful matched that storytelling talent to a vision and... the rest is history.

Then there were another bunch of directors in the 30's: sound came in, and the studio bosses wanted pictures that appealed to women and pictures for people too poor (it was the Depression after all) to see live theatre shows, whether it be vaudeville or legitimate theatre. The bosses hired a lot of theatre people and vaudvillians and put them to work and they made many, many bad movies. But one special guy came out of this: Busby Berkeley.
Berkeley made great movies with amazing camera movements that had never been done before, but he just was not interested in telling stories. And the funny thing is, nobody cared. He made movies that were advertised as "all singing, all dancing" but they really were the avant garde cinema of the early sound era: surreal and weird and it's amazing that they were so popular.

Tomorrow: the Impressionists.