Bertolt Brecht

Concerning the Film (1922)

In my opinion, the following obstacles stand in the way of a writers collaborating in the making of film scripts:

1. The film script is a kind of improvised script. The writer, coming from the outside, is not familiar with the needs and means of the various studios. No engineer designs a complex water works at random in the hope that one day he will find a firm urgently needing precisely this kind of plant.

2. The boys at the source are highly suspicious of the boys trying to get to the source. This aversion is shared by the boys who sit at the boys [sic!], and so on.

3. The competition between individual films resembles a race between coach horses, the greatest attention being paid to the purple mountings and the color of the nags. No poet could keep up with this pace.

4. If the movie industry thinks that Kitsch (cheap entertainment) tastes better than solid work, theirs is a venial sin engendered by an audience’s unlimited capacity to consume Kitsch—in this case the devil swallows flies—, as well as by those poets who equate quality with boredom, the “slighted” poets who perform in private. Yet the error of the poets who consider films to be Kitsch but write for the films is unpardonable. There are successful films which affect even the people who regard them as Kitsch; but there are no successful films written by people who regard them as Kitsch.

5. It would be a major step in the right direction if at least the distribution of artistically valuable film plots could be organized.

From Bertolt Brecht, Schriften zum Theater (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963), by permission of the publisher. Translation copyright 1972 by Stefan Brecht. Translated by Ulrich Weisstein.