"I had graduated from the D.W Griffith school of film
making and intended to go the Master one better as regards film realism. In
real cities, not corners of them designed by Cedric Gibbons or Richard Days,
but in real tree-bordered boulevards, with real street-cars, buses and
automobiles, through real winding alleys, with real dirt and foulness, in the
gutters as well as in real castles and palaces. I was going to people my scenes
with real men, women and children, as we meet them every day in real life, in
bad as well as in good taste, clean and dirty, faultless and ragged, but
without exaggeration, without modification, and without the then currently popular
concessions to the conventions of the stage and screen. I was going to film
stories which would be believable, life-like, even if I had to make them
realistic to the Nth degree. I intended to show men and women as they are all
over the world, none of them perfect, with their good and bad qualities, their
noble and idealistic sides and their jealous, vicious, mean and greedy sides. I
was not going to compromise.
I felt that after the last war, the motion picture going
public had tired of the cinematographic 'chocolate eclairs' which had been
stuffed down their throats, and which had in a large degree figuratively ruined
their stomachs with this overdose of saccharine in pictures. Now, I felt, they
were ready for a large bowl of plebeian but honest 'corned beef and cabbage'. I
felt that they had become weary of insipid Pollyanna stories with their
peroxide-blonde, doll-like heroines, steeped in eternal virginity, and their
hairless flat-chested sterile heroes, who were as lily-white as the heroines. I
thought they could no longer bear to see the stock villains, dyed-in-the-wool,
100 per cent black, armed with a moustache, mortgage and riding crop.
I believed audiences were ready to witness real drama and
real tragedy, as it happens every day in every land; real love and real hatred
of real men and women who were proud of their passions. I felt that the time
was ripe to present screen stories about men and women who defied with written
and unwritten codes, and who took the consequences of their defiance gallantly,
like many people do in real life. People who defied prejudice and jealousies,
conventions and the social mores of a hypocritical society, who fought for
their passions, conquered them or were conquered by them.
I knew that everything could be done with film, the only medium
with which one could reproduce life as it really was. I knew also that an entertainment
that mirrored life would be more entertaining than one which distorted it. The
sky was the limit! Whatever a man could dream of, I could and would reproduce
it in my films. I was going to metamorphose those 'movies' into art – a composite
of all arts. Fight for it! And die for it, if need be!
Well, fight I did...and die...I almost did, too!"
Originally an extract from an unpublished article by Erich von Stroheim, this was later reproduced in the published Greed shooting script in 1972.