Chapter 3: I Was Never A Gadget Man
[Pare Lorentz:] I never was a gadget man, [I use] a penny so I can open up a flip-top beer can. I didn’t go into the physics, the light and contrast such as [photographer Edward] Steichen did in his youth. But, I was interested in the form, and sufficiently [so] that in time, the best of the Hollywood directors spoke tolerantly of me, and in time became very good friends.
Well, when I was appointed staff critic at Vanity Fair in 1931, I had an interview in which they asked us, I just said, “I am a critic and that’s all I am!” I never fell in love with a lady in a picture, your movies or any other way, and the banality amused me.
Well, last year a teacher in a high school had one of these telephone conversations and the children looked at The River and then they asked me questions by telephone. And they said, how could I keep the tension in the film? Which pleased me, 30 years, odd years, afterwards that they thought [of] tension. I just said, “Like any good writer, you cut out anything that bores you.”
I was employed by William Randolph Hearst under the editor, Bill Curley, of the New York Evening Journal in 1931. When the New York World failed, Hearst for a while tried to make the Journal more or less a literary newspaper instead of a sensational newspaper or to combine both. He hired Gilbert Seldes, he hired John Anderson as the dramatic critic and I was hired as movie critic. I did something that aroused great dismay. I wrote a two paragraph letter saying I would accept the job with one proviso, that I would never review a movie in which Marion Davies appeared, unless I felt like it. They said they couldn’t sign it, but that well, and I wouldn’t sign a contract because Mr. Hearst had more money than I did and all his men that signed contracts always got fired in time.