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Maybe a silly question...
Topic Started: Jun 28 2008, 06:32 PM (360 Views)
OzRadio
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Balcony Gang
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I'm sitting here watching Keaton's "College" feature wondering what the actors are actually saying in all these scenes. Did silent films actually have scripts or are the actors just mouthing nonsense? Maybe this is common knowledge but I've never thought of it before.
Ryan
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KanSmiley
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Oz:

There are no silly questions just silly answers from grey pilgrim and Chandu.

I have a friend that has a large collection of scripts and there were apparently actual scripts even for silent films. He also has scripts from serials that have hand written notes on the pages from the actors and directors.

Kan
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intoxicated, adj.: When you feel sophisticated without being able to pronounce it.
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panzer the great & terrible
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Smiley's right: there were scripts. There are also tales of actors who said dirty things on camera and got busted by lipreaders, but I don't know how true they are.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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riddlerider
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Silent-film scripts (or scenarios, as was then the preferred term) indicated in a general sense what the actors were supposed to be saying, but they didn't include word-for-word dialogue exchanges. The dialogue intertitles were written out, although they weren't always adhered to after the fact: it was common for titles to be changed during the editing process.

Remember, silent-film actors were being coached by their director, who could give them fairly specific off-camera instructions on what to say. ("Okay, now tell the girl that her father is just been kidnapped by bandits and you're forming a posse to go after him.") In that sense, the silent-era director was much more responsible than the scenario writer for actual dialogue spoken by the actors.

Of course, experienced actors who were familiar with the general demands of their trade usually didn't have much trouble coming up with lines to speak. A quick reading of the scenario and some reminders from the director was often all they needed to be off and running.

A little lip-reading is pretty informative. As I recall, in the silent serial OFFICER 444, the title character played Ben Wilson isn't given a name; in the dialogue titles he's habitually referred to by the other characters as "444." But you can see that his long-time co-star, Neva Gerber, constantly addresses him as "Ben."

Joe Bonomo told me that he couldn't memorize dialogue to save his life and was totally dependent upon his directors to feed him lines of dialogue in his silent serials. That memory problem, more than anything else, truncated his career as an actor in talkies. Those of you who've seen SIGN OF THE WOLF know what I mean. Although he plays the sidekick to hero Rex Lease and appears in every one of the ten chapters, he doesn't have more than a dozen lines -- short ones -- in the whole serial. That wasn't an accident.

I've heard that in cases where a silent film was based on a popular play, the actors often memorized the play's dialogue and incorporated it into the film whenever the scenario demanded.

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Laughing Gravy
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As I watch silent films, sometimes I can "lipread" accurate dialog, while other times it looks as though the players are simply mouthing a shopping list or something. It probably ran the gamut.

I've always admired the Our Gang kids of the late 20s-early 30s period, who suddenly had to memorize dialog. Several of the kids were too young to read.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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