What’s Wrong with the Movies? by Aleister Crowley in Vanity Fair, Jul 1917.

“O, purblind crew of miserable men, cannot you see that the only way to succeed in the movies, or in any art, is to get the men who really know how, to create new effects of art, and then to trust them implicitly? The worst author is better, as an author, than the best ‘producer’ or ‘director,’ however highly paid, unless he sticks to his business of visualizing, with sympathy and fidelity, the author’s conceptions and ideals.

The only good films, the only popular films, are those by living authors of repute, who have somehow been able to insist upon having their conceptions literally carried out, and not meddled with by a band of misguided and inartistic managers.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “SUPPOSE that I make up my mind that one of Charles Condor’s painted women on a fan lacks distinctness? Do I call in Zuloaga to put a new head on her? Zuloaga will paint me in a fine head, no doubt; but he is certain to throw out the rest of Condor’s picture. In the realm of painting I much prefer Gaugain to John Lavery, but I should not ask the former to pain a Samoan head on the shoulders of the portrait of ‘Lady Platagenet-Tudor’ by the latter. Consider the diffident reverence with which a great artist like Sir A. Quiller-Couch finished a novel by Stevenson–and always from the master’s notes.”
  2. “TO return to the question of the author. Who invented modern musical comedy? Gilbert and Sullivan. Gilbert insisted–made it a point in every contract or license–that his libretto was to have no cuts, no modifications, no gags; even his minutest stage directions were to be followed implicitly.–Take it or leave it. Most of his stuff is therefore as strong and sound and playable today as it ever was.”
  3. “MODERN opera is suffering in the same way. The only pains taken at the Metropolitan, let us say, is with the hiring of the singers; but they are not stunned, carried out themselves by the glory of witnessing a really artistic operatic creation. There is everywhere evident this same blind fatuity in the movies.”
  4. “And so, alas, it all came about. These two master minds could not foresee that everyone who had read Hugo’s great story would leave the theatre foaming at the mouth, raving for blood. Similarly with ‘Hedda Gabler.’ They had to improve on Ibsen’s great curtain, and bring in George Tesman to confront Brack, who faints on hearing the pistol shot, and asks, ‘Why should you faint at my wife’s death?’ with all the air of one who proposes an amusing riddle!”
  5. “But his successors have not his willpower. To-day every inartistic man in a movie production must needs have a finger in the artistic pie. Some of their suggestions may possibly be good, some bad; but the unity and coherence of the author’s conceptions are lost, and the outcome is a muddle. Ne sutor ultra crepidam. Too many cooks spoil the broth.”