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Reel 02 RELIGION is a delicate subject for a person in the limelight of the world to discuss," said Lillian Gish, folding her slender hands in her lap. " Patriotism is difficult enough, but one's religious beliefs are so much more sacred. Nobody will admit he can possibly be wrong, or that the other man can possibly be right. "But I have said that I believe the screen will bring all men to a common conception of one God and to a universal sense of international relation and duty. And I am prepared to discuss my ideas in the matter. Please follow me closely, and let me feel my way slowly." As she mobilized her thoughts for utterance I followed her closely and I watched her even more attentively. The way a woman says things is almost always more important than what she says. And women, when they talk, have many ways of revealing what lies within them. One taps the floor with her foot'; another tugs at her dress; one frowns; this one has nervous knees; that one simply exhales that mysterious color of individuality which we call personality. Most of them pose, one way or another. What secrets of sought effects could mirrors tell! Lillian Gish does none of these things. She sits very quietly always. When you look at her against the cushions, you see only a slim little white thing with incredible eyes. In fact, all you see is eyes! Great, gray windows through which her repressionÌs and withholdings look calmly and unhurriedly out upon the interesting panorama of life. She has no pose: she has only poise.

I watched alertly for that thing which comes stealing out of the presence of other great women-comes stealing across the room until it pervades your own soul with its subtle raiding power. The femininity, chaste and fragile, of Lillian Gish is the first thing that takes hold of you; but it is entirely different from the femininity that comes swirling across from other women until you rock a bit on your feet. Possibly if she but narrowed her gray eyes when she looked at you, you would feel that intangible thing that so many other women impart. But she never does. She seems to have no wish to take possession of you and fill you and hold you until you close your own eyes. All she has to give, she gives to her art. I believe it is more than any woman in the world has given since the Duse went to sleep in Pittsburgh to dream throughout all eternity of the poet who pilloried her heart.

The Gish has much to give to all men; she has nothing to give to one man sitting before her fireplace. And yet, she is not cold; for the fire that leaps across the darkened theater and burns you with her wrongs and fires you with her joys comes from no extinct volcano. She is riot cold; she is merely cool, and .the visible crater gives small hint of the molten secrets below.

She has this lava under absolute and unrelaxing control. She is wise, I think, in tending to that fire. When one man shall be privileged to warm his hands above that incalescence it may be that the rest of mankind will be robbed of some part of the slow the whole world partakes of today.

In only one external manifestation does Lillian Gish unconsciously betray the mighty tumult that exists within, the giant genius she keeps so securely tied down with, the gives of self-command: Whether she is lost in voicing her thoughts, an abstraction so enveloping and sexless that it makes you wonder as you watch it; or whether she sits in silence in her flying car and looks at the gardenias and the fountains in the gardens along the road; or whether she stands wearily but never impatiently while the cameraman shouts at the electricians on the sets where I watched her work so often; or whether she is waiting for a servant to fetch her favorite dish, a salad--no matter what she is doing, unless her right hand is otherwise occupied, she is forever pressing back' the cuticle of the thumb with its neighbor index finger! CAPABLE of a stillness that is almost cataleptic, she has talked to me for six hours and made no other movement but that. Sometimes the thoughts tumble out of her in a torrent; sometimes she feels her way carefully along the lane of speech. Now her words were groping little feet that reached out tentatively along the Sound of her delicate topic. And this is what she said: "They insisted that I could not make The White Sister and The Scarlet Letter, because they dealt with religious problems involving the love of s man and a maid. Indeed, far a long time Will Hays had forbidden the filming of Hawthorne's masterpiece. But I felt that, since nothing in the world is closer to humanity's heart than religion and love, some way could be found to tell these wonder stories inoffensively and beautifully on the screen. " So I told them--and I had my way. It has been one of the few things in my career which I venture to call a triumph, to have received lovely letters about these pictures from bishops of both Catholic and Protestant churches I have never read one' adverse criticism from dignitary or layman as to the way the subjects were handled. "So it is that I do not hesitate to speak my mind on what I think the films will contribute to mankind's religious future. Certainly none will underrate the mighty role they play in the world today, or deny that they are seriously coordinating the thoughts of all mankind.

" I spoke a while ago about that exquisite thing we call the rose. Many things have combined to produce it--soil; seed, water, sunlight, cultivation, and a carefully respected pedigree of previous beauty.

" So I believe that each religion will contribute its quota of excellence to the final, world-girdling Religion. From each, man will choose that which answers humanity's age-old universal cry for beauty and truth and peace and justice and consolation. A red rose is no more lovely than a white one. One creed is no more perfect than another, nor any worse. Who knows whether the spectrum of a million years hence will not permit another and more ravishing combination of color than any we have yet beheld? Who knows if we shall not develop yet another sense to add to the five we have today, and with that sense perceive beauties and truths in the universe we cannot even imagine now? "Who, then, shall say what religion, what comprehension of the Creator, is yet to know and embrace ?

FRANKLY, I believe that the first glimmer of this universal faith will come out of India, mother of so many of our mental processes, incubator of so much of mankind's present spiritual heritage, first guide to so much of what we know and think today. There the germ may start, gathering body and strength from every current faith as it slowly circles the world-disclosed at last to humanity by means of that infinitely greater moving picture art which is coming tomorrow, and capturing and holding at last the minds and hearts of all men everywhere.

"Long before this comes to pass, I think that patriotism, as we know and practice it today, will have succumbed before the logic of a finer world-understanding, and be replaced by an international sense of unity and justice and peace. When this has been achieved, it will not be so difficult for the idea of a common religion to find acceptance in minds already attuned to understanding and tolerance and friendship. Just as the thousand national flags of today will be merged in one banner that all humanity can serve under, so will the religions of today be amalgamated with the newer beliefs in one faith that. all men will comprehend and approve and practice.

"This may seem somewhat radical, coming from one who is supposed to know little outside her profession; but men and women all over the world are commencing to find fault with a mental and spiritual condition that would permit--indeed, encourage--the slaughter and misery and heartbreaks of the World War. I have thought about it because it has seemed to me inevitable that motion pictures will bring the changes I foresee, and because I believe that the pictures are the only means whereby these changes can be made.

"You see, I regard moving pictures as the third discovery of all time. The three things that more than any others have altered the affairs of mankind are these: documentation, money, and the motion picture,

"Documentation began when the first man arose from all fours and drew a rough outline of a buffalo on the walls of a Pyrenean cave. That was the first message transmitted without words. The next savage who saw that awkward drawing knew instantly what the rude artist meant. Steps in documentation now become easy to follow: pictures, clay figures, signs, hieroglyphics, writing, printing, telegraphy, and radio.This was the first, and up to then the most important, event in mankinds history.

"Next came money. It began when one primitive man saw something he wanted in the possession of` another and was not powerful enough to ravish him of it. He swapped something he had for the thing he desired. That introduced a tremendous thing into human relations, and it gave value to the things that were, and are, rarest on earth.

" The first money may have been chipped .flints or iron disks or hammered gold. It makes no difference. Man replaced brutality with cunning and began to buy the things he wanted instead of fighting over them. The development of bargaining, exchange, banking credit, and so on, become obvious, and their importance in the affairs of humanity self evident.

THE last great discovery is the motion picture and it is the greatest yet, for it is the only universal fact. Even documentation and money halt at the first frontier. The screen is a cloud on which the lightning of common understanding plays for all the world to see. " And believing these things as I do, you will easily see why I am bold enough to predict the things I do for the moving 'picture will in time destroy all boundary lines, eliminate all causes for dispute, and make one of all the world." Miss Gish looked inquiringly at me to see whether I had followed her as closely as she asked. I nodded. Then she said something that astonished me: "Another reason why I think the germ of this future world faith will come out of India is because of Cheiro." " Kiro? " I asked dazedly. I had no idea whether the word meant a sect, a man, r poem, or a town. I couldn't even spell it. She spelled it for me. "Yes, Cheiro," she continued. " Cheiro is a follower of the philosophy of the East, a student, a palmist. I don't mean he will have anything to do with the new religion, but he is symptomatic of the new trend in human thought. The earliest sciences are astrology and astronomy, and the Indian mystics have led the world in their study.

These men have transcended all the ordinary ranges of human thought. They peer into the future because of their introspective powers, because of their centuries of comparing the event with the prophecy, because of their knowledge of what human beings will do under given circumstances.

" Cheiro, who once merely devoted himself to foretelling individual and world affairs, has dedicated his life for decades to perfecting himself for fit association with that company of Indian seers and thinkers, and he feels that if he can help to bring humanity to a common plane of understanding, sympathy, and love, he will have achieved the single purpose of the Eastern philosophers.

"When such groups have labored and struggled and suffered through the ages simply to attain one goal, it is not unreasonable to believe that they will contribute importantly to the eventual solidarity of the world.

"Cheiro clearly foresaw the deaths of King Edward and of gitchener. And, whether I believe in his powers or not, you may be sure I felt very happy when he told me my mother would recover from her present illness: She has been helpless for a year. When one you love is desperately sick you grasp at any little thing that cheers you.

"He tells me, too, that all the years of my work in the films are leading to finer things, and that I shall make pictures far lovelier and more truthful than anything I have done. He bases this on my numbers and planets. But I should despair if I thought that all I have studied and tried to achieve were not indeed a preparation for greater interpretations on the screen." Miss Gish mused for a few minutes. Then she resumed along another tack:

"I said 'all' I have studied and tried to achieve.' I wonder if you, or the public that is unfamiliar with the making of a moving picture, have any idea what is required to -produce film that runs an hour or two in a theater? You buy a ticket at the box office, find a seat, and watch a picture for a little while. Then you get your hat and walk -out. In two hours you have witnessed something which may have taken us eight months and a million dollars to make."

"You have seen a woman walk across the screen, pause at a window, and turn to stare at a man coming through a door. It takes forty seconds to show you that scene--and it may have taken us forty hours to get it right. We may have done that one bit of acting a hundred times in rehearsal, and a dozen times before the camera; and that is only one of a thousand episodes in the play."

"Why didn't we get it right first and save the immense cost and labor? Why did we require ten electricians, two or three cameramen, a director and his assistant, continuity clerks, carpenters, an orchestra, dozens of lights, and hundreds of hours of repetition and rehearsals and tests?"

"There are many answers, but the principal one is enclosed in a word: technique. I cannot dwell too emphatically on the colossal importance of technique. It is something you acquire only through many years of back-straining, head splitting, heartbreaking toil. It is something you must learn and absorb. You cannot inherit it, nor can it come full born to your work."

"And having attained it at last, it is something that must be immediately and completely forgotten. If you are conscious for the most fleeting fraction of a split second that technique is required, the scene is spoiled and will have to be done again.

"If you haven't yet got it, the picture will show it; if you have it and know it, the camera will reveal it; if you are in perfect command of it and do not reveal that control, the scene will stand.

" Nobody can tell you what technique is, or there would be schools where you could learn it in s brief moment and then go to the camera fully equipped to act. Nobody can impart it by illustration--that is to say, by showing you how to hold your hand, or move your lips, or lift your eyes. Nobody can help you with it in any way whatsoever, because it is something that escapes words. It is the one thing in the world that I can think of without using words to think about it!

"But I can tell you something about its mystery and its manifestations by comparing the movies to the speaking stage. Incidentally, there is no more conflict between these forms of entertainment than there is between painting and writing, or between music and sculpture.

"On the stage you rehearse a scene until it is mechanically proximate to what the director and the actors and the author desire. You are, after all, primarily and to the last, working with words. You are just across the footlights, close to the audience; you can feel its response to what you say and how you say it; you and your hearers are in the same room; you appear to them the same size all the time; and, most important of all, you are uttering words-the author's message. The herald of this message is less important than that the message be interesting or instructive.

"For two thousand years the great minds of humanity have been busy writing messages for somebody to deliver across the orchestra pit. The messages have lived and the men who wrote them have lived--but most of the puppets who delivered that message have died and been forgotten by the next generation. This proves that the play is far more important than the player--on the speaking stage. There the characters are created by the author; their portrayal may or may not be fine: it is unimportant, since you may read the message by your fireside.

THE vocal actress will be toldby her intuition, her experience, her director, her critics, her friends, that she has given a great performance. She has no way of knowing, since she has nothing to check up by. And she is given something we in the films can never receive--applause. I think applause must be very wonderful -and a dreadful test of one's equilibrium. " To act greatly or to sing gloriously and then, -night after night for years, to stand and listen to the bravos and cheers--that must be very beautiful, and very dangerous. It is inspiring, a splendid reward for fine work, which we of the pictures can never know. Without this deafening and visible sign of the world's approval and acclaim, we-must, indeed, be buoyed up in our obscure studios and exhausting labors by something beyond mere financial compensation.You may call this reason for carrying on what you please: for me to name it were not modest. "But applause is perilous if it tends to distort the actress' sense of values. I mean, that once I called on a woman who was regarded in her day as the greatest soprano the world had ever known, and the first thing she showed me was a huge pile of scrapbooks containing laudatory notices of the ovations she had been accorded during all her triumphant years.Vanity is a factor destructive to great performance. " On the screen all this is different. The camera-is not pitiless, because that implies it can be pitiful--and it can't. It is hideously impersonal in its fidelity to the thing you have given it. There you are--and there the camera shows you. No-director or critics or friends or applause or conceit can change the situation. You either are good or you are bad--there. is no middle ground. It is the most truthful, the most discouraging, the most inspiring critic in the world.

"Then, too, we have no great creative writers for the screen, because writers deal with the very things we cannot use - words! If you will think that over for a moment you will be appalled by its significance.

Try, for instance, to imagine telling a roomful of guests, each speaking a different language, the story of The Three Musketeers without opening your mouth!

" We get a story, either an original one or one of the classics of the stage or of literature, and after we read it we have to do all over what the author did in the first place with his wonderful tool --words. We have to create it again with no tool at all to work with. .We have to create it in a brand-new way, a way for which we have no precedent, no tradition, no guide--a way hedged about with innumerable limitations and difficulties and enormous expense and newness.

" It has never been done before --how shall it be done? We have to tell the story without saying a word. But it is worse than that, if you can imagine it, because we are forced at the present stage of our development to make the plot apparent; we have to make the message transparent; we have to pack the film with subtitles instead of subtleties to interpret our interpretation!
JUST now the audiences cannot comprehend and do not want suggestion. It tires their deductive faculties; it ceases to be entertainment and becomes a marital chore. They must have the obvious. And in showing the obvious we become mere pawns in the plot, not great characters conveying human emotions in a great way.

"This is where technique becomes priceless. You will understand this better when you watch us work in my next picture. Now, I can only hint at what I mean when I say that in making one brief scene I may have to employ three or four different kinds of acting--a different technique every moment.

" For example, say the scene has me standing at an ironing-board and I am shown to the theateraudience as across a room. To show that I am tired, I pass my hand across my brow, my lips are weary, my eyes dulled by fatigue, my whole body is expressive of exhaustion.

"Then there is the same scene with the camera showing only the ironing-board and my body from the waist up; followed by a close-up showing my face alone.

" Each of these may be repeated a hundred times until the director and I are satisfied, and even then the 'rushes,' as we call the tests shown in the projection room the next day, may so displease us that we go back and spend another day of sixteen hours' ceaseless work, and another day, and another, until we achieve the effect we want, and then pick out the 'rushÌ to be incorporated in the finished film.

"To show me full length across the room, the camera is about twenty feet from me, and at that distance I am almost, gymnastic in my technique, my actions: I make quite sweeping the gesture of passing my hand across my forehead.

The lips are drawn down to what would be a ludicrous degree if you could see a close-up of them. My eyelids go far beyond what they would in real life if I were really fatigued; and my whole body droops and contracts at least an inch inside its normal measurements.

" In the medium shot--still timing each movement to the ten feet I Bow stand from the lens, and remembering to forget the effect this will produce on the immensely magnified picture you will see on the screen--I reduce the angle and arc and tempo of the hand moving toward and across my brow; I restrain the lips to a less graphic portrayal of weariness; I cut in half the curtaining of my eyes and begin to elongate their focus; and I convey bodily exhaustion by a more limited collapse of the torso. and shoulders.

"In the close-up-that deadly test of technique photographed at six feet--I employ a radically different demonstration of the idea I am striving to put across. The hand now begins to take part in the picture of fatigue; the cords on its back, the quiver of the fingers, the arching of the knuckles, the distressed searching of the tips for relief to the throbbing forehead, the laxity of the wrist--all these step into the character.

"The lips can now tell their story by the faintest suggestion of twitch at their corners and their hint of compression. The eyes carry their message of dullness and despair by merely lengthening their focus on an imaginary point beside and far beyond the whirling camera--in addition to the actual dullness I try to draw up from my soul to blur the retina and iris with. And my head replaces the pictured fatigue of my whole body by moving s fraction of an inch to one side and then being jerked back to motion lessness, the while the eyes pile up the drama of utter weariness.

"On the screen the audience sees all this cumulative effect in a few seconds. never guessing that if they were given a close-up of the woman they first saw across the room they would get the startling effect of caricature; never guessing that if they saw the close-up head, where the eyes may actually be ten feet apart, as far away as the first incident, they would see a blank face suggesting nothing so much as imbecility; never dreaming, as they watch the picture. of that woman standing at an ironing board that they have witnessed, oh, so casually, the operation of a technique it has taken her fourteen years of only the Lord knows how many maddening, exhausting days and sleepless nights to begin to perfect!

" And I am still in despair when I watch my own pictures! It is my advised opinion that the most important things in motion-picture acting are the eyes and timing-the former by far the most important thing in our world, and the second merely another name for the mountain of experience I call technique.

"I do my best with both, and sometimes I say to myself: 'At last, the ideal effect!' Then I see it in the projection room--and I could weep at the inadequacy of what have done, the poor, paltry, unworthy thing I have told the camera!

" And here is another thought-musing over that instrument's veracious indifference brings it to me: You may deceive the camera for a while; you may suppress the thing you are and reveal what you would like the world to think you are. But some day you will forget the mask over your soul, and the lens will reach right down inside of you and expose what occult secrets you are hiding from the world. If they are decent and clean you have nothing to fear. If they aren't-well, presently you will disappear from the pictures.

THAT is another difference between the speaking stage' and our silent one. A great actress from the former may have a terrific love affair, even a scandal against convention and, more important, against morality and decency; she may even have a series of them; and it seems only to add fire and drama to her work. She can rush from her lover's arms and portray a virginal Juliet that will daze the world. " But if one among us who really aspire to genuine greatness on the screen violates. the code, does the things that simply aren't done, you may be very positive that the camera will discover it and proclaim it to the world. Whether she continues in the films thereafter depends altogether on what roles she wishes to play. "As far as rrreat`actine in rnn;cerned;. I sometimes wonder if I shall ever act a scene which, when I see it in the test room, will permit me to murmur, 'Good!' I doubt it: "I hope not--for I believe that that day will mark the passing of Lillian Gish; that self-acceptance of my work will indicate that I have touched the top of my capacity, that I have nothing more of beauty to bring to the screen. " If that day comes, I shall walk out of the studio for the last time. "IN my progress through the movie colony of Hollywood," I observed, "I have not seen many evidences of such dissatisfaction. It seems to me that many of the actors and actresses are pretty well persuaded that they have spoken the last word in their profession."

"No," Miss Gish rebuked me gently; "I think you judge them hastily. I believe that every man and woman on the lots scattered between Culver City, Hollywood, Burbank, Los Angeles, and Universal City is earnest and honest."

She paused a moment - and I thought of something the many, many meetings we later had confirmed: I have never heard Lillian Gish say an unkind thing about anybody.

She hurries to protect the repute of her world and all who walk therein.

If you murmur a word about the scandals that are

synonymous with Hollywood, she is Autteringly eager to deprecate them, even if she does not know the men and women involved.

I tried her out along this front, putting her to what I regard-as the supreme test: I asked her about Aimee Semple McPherson--and she actually says the woman is doing good!

I think Miss Gish knows fewer actors and actresses in the movies than anybody else in the business.

And I have met no one so prompt in generous comment about them.

" Oh, Miss Mabel Normand," she will say, if you suggest the celebrated affairs in which that incomparable comedienne has been mentioned. "Oh, that poor girl must be pursued by an evil genius. She hasn't an unkind thought in her head. It just happens that she is always around when the gun goes off!"

" Do you know Miss Normand? " I asked.

" No; I have met her, but I do not know her. But I know she is all right-a wonderful actress, a fine woman, and a real friend to anyone in need."

Last modified on: Friday, August 8, 1997.