Transcribe
Translate
Centauri, issue 4, Summer 1945
Page 18
More information
digital collection
archival collection guide
transcription tips
Page 18 Pro and Con * * * * * There are a few primary problems to getting a scenario into a producer's hands that Harry Warner didn't touch on when suggesting an attempt to put a science-fiction story on the screen in short form. First, no studio will touch --even open the envelope-- of a story submitted from the outside. You must have an agent, one who already has access to the studios and knows someone in the story bureaus.Secondly, therefore, you have to interest an agent in the science-fiction scenario, a difficult problem in itself no doubt. Securing screen rights to a story might be no simple matter, particularly if the author writes for a living. Getting the same from a magazine depends upon whether the publishing company purchased all rights, as many of them do,and how much of a cut they'd want from the proceedings. After that my knowledge of the subject vanishes. Someone closer to Hollywood will have to tell you how to go about getting it into production. Selling the short in the theaters is no problem. Short subjects are more or less forced down the exhibitors' throats, depending on the film company selling the product. Some sell shorts along with the feature, others don't. --- With which, I bow out. ---- Bob Tucker * * * * * I'm afraid I haven't much that's helpful to suggest on Warner's film idea. Shorts are a good notion for an opening wedge; but few people see shorts, fewer still remember them, and the industry looks on them as stepchildren. I'd like to see shorts assume the status of the short story or at least of the one-act play---but that's another campaign. The main thing you're up against is the Producer Mind, which says the public doesn't want stf; and when you point out that the very few stfilms so far made include a high percentage of successes, he doesn't hear you. But time's on our side. The war has made rockets an understandable concept to the popular mind---understandable is not perhaps the word, when you consider the "robot rocket bombs" that are neither robots nor bombs, but at least the public no longer shies away from rockets as a crackpot notion. And there's been a good bit of campaigning on the prelude-to-space-flight idea---Pendray had a piece in COLLIER'S and Ley, bless him, keeps showing up everywhere---I just found him in the ROSICRUCIAN DIGEST! (The Rosicrucians seem to endorse space flight.) And pretty soon some bright boy is going to realize that the public is now at least preconditioned to accept some fairly stiff doses of stf. Of course stflims when they come won't please us. Hollywood, used to catering to vast mass-average tastes, never pleases specialized fans; look at either supernatural-fantasy or mystery-detection, and see how greatly the filmform varies from what fans delight in. But it'll be something---and stf is so inherently photogenic a medium that it might well be something wonderful. ----Anthony Poucher
Saving...
prev
next
Page 18 Pro and Con * * * * * There are a few primary problems to getting a scenario into a producer's hands that Harry Warner didn't touch on when suggesting an attempt to put a science-fiction story on the screen in short form. First, no studio will touch --even open the envelope-- of a story submitted from the outside. You must have an agent, one who already has access to the studios and knows someone in the story bureaus.Secondly, therefore, you have to interest an agent in the science-fiction scenario, a difficult problem in itself no doubt. Securing screen rights to a story might be no simple matter, particularly if the author writes for a living. Getting the same from a magazine depends upon whether the publishing company purchased all rights, as many of them do,and how much of a cut they'd want from the proceedings. After that my knowledge of the subject vanishes. Someone closer to Hollywood will have to tell you how to go about getting it into production. Selling the short in the theaters is no problem. Short subjects are more or less forced down the exhibitors' throats, depending on the film company selling the product. Some sell shorts along with the feature, others don't. --- With which, I bow out. ---- Bob Tucker * * * * * I'm afraid I haven't much that's helpful to suggest on Warner's film idea. Shorts are a good notion for an opening wedge; but few people see shorts, fewer still remember them, and the industry looks on them as stepchildren. I'd like to see shorts assume the status of the short story or at least of the one-act play---but that's another campaign. The main thing you're up against is the Producer Mind, which says the public doesn't want stf; and when you point out that the very few stfilms so far made include a high percentage of successes, he doesn't hear you. But time's on our side. The war has made rockets an understandable concept to the popular mind---understandable is not perhaps the word, when you consider the "robot rocket bombs" that are neither robots nor bombs, but at least the public no longer shies away from rockets as a crackpot notion. And there's been a good bit of campaigning on the prelude-to-space-flight idea---Pendray had a piece in COLLIER'S and Ley, bless him, keeps showing up everywhere---I just found him in the ROSICRUCIAN DIGEST! (The Rosicrucians seem to endorse space flight.) And pretty soon some bright boy is going to realize that the public is now at least preconditioned to accept some fairly stiff doses of stf. Of course stflims when they come won't please us. Hollywood, used to catering to vast mass-average tastes, never pleases specialized fans; look at either supernatural-fantasy or mystery-detection, and see how greatly the filmform varies from what fans delight in. But it'll be something---and stf is so inherently photogenic a medium that it might well be something wonderful. ----Anthony Poucher
Hevelin Fanzines
sidebar
