"Newman, Kim - The Pierce-Arrow Stalled, And..." - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim)

Tears welled in Leigh's eyes and the music swelled. She was too thin to be
really beautiful. Her face was expressive and angular rather than plumply
lovely the way Mabel Normand or Mary Miles Minter had been. Still, she was
radiant. And she had a voice. Roscoe felt uninvited tears in his own eyes.

Gable strode away from Tara, orange skies outlining him. Movies were in
colour now, too. They roared and they blazed. Roscoe missed Nickelodeons,
gingham dresses, candy canes. He missed being young and a star too.
'How shall I fight on without you?' Leigh asked, 'what about the War?'
Turning, flashing the famous grin, Gable said, 'frankly my dear, I don't
give a fuck.'
All around, the audience cheered. The commotion was so loud that the
closing narration was inaudible. Roscoe, skilled from years in silent
pictures, tried to read Leigh's lips, but the camera pulled away and she
turned into a black silhouette.

Afterword
I write about film for the same reason Arthur C. Clarke writes about space
exploration: as a writer of non-fiction, I've spent a great deal of time
thinking about the cinema, and ideas just come along by association. I've
also written quite a few alternate histories; and, dealing with 20th
Century America, the cinema often comes to mind. This story throws a small
pebble into the past and watches ripples spread ...
In the real world, Roscoe made it to that party, Virgie died the same way
upstairs rather than in the lobby, blame was unjustly accorded though a
jury later acquitted Arbuckle, Hays took the job as 'Czar of the Rushes',
Shirley Temple replaced Mae West as a Top Box Office attraction in 1933,
John Dillinger (probably) saw the end of Manhattan Melodrama, Father
Coughlin's call for War with Mexico was ignored, Jimmy Stewart got work in
the movies, Hauptmann was executed for other crimes, Welles' dream project
was Citizen Kane and David O. Selznick made Gone with the Wind. The
Arbuckle case affected the evolution of an art form and entertainment
industry, though the real clamp-down did not come until nearly ten years
afterwards.
The Hays Code, and the mindset that created and enforced it, was not an
unambiguously bad thing, as scores of outstanding films made under its
strictures show, but there was a notable hobbling of certain types of
movie. Compare the freshness and sensuality of a pre-code film like the
1932 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with the stifling obfuscations of the 1941
remake, which would desperately like to be steamily sophisticated but just
comes across as stodgy and silly. There certainly were personalities
(Louise Brooks is a good example) for whom there was no space for in
thirties films; I'd exchange the entire filmography of Marie Dressler (a
major star at the time) for just one more Brooks vehicle on a par with
Pandora's Box. Imagine Apocalypse Now redone in accordance with the Hays
Code ('Saigon, heck!'), but balance that by wondering how To Have and Have
Not could be any better freed from censor restrictions (when they turned
down the ending of Hemingway's novel, Howard Hawks asked the censors to
suggest a finish they would approve of). If Roscoe had missed the party,
movies might not have been better but they would have been different.