Hawks on Early Sound Cinema

"I wrote all the story and all the dialogue for The Dawn Patrol… I didn’t tell them I had never made a talking picture. They didn’t find out till I was about a month into it. And I used to get notes saying that I had a chance to make a good scene and I blew it. Because the dialogue was very understated, very natural—it wasn’t stage dialogue. And I think I had forty letters from the front office saying I missed things. Picture came out, made more money than any that year. And made a couple of fellows who were head of studios very angry with me because they said, “Now people are going to try to do that kind of dialogue and they won’t know how to do it.” But they began to switch over and then they used the understated dialogue for many years until Kazan made that picture where people got really emotional and started acting. I’ve forgotten the name of it. And then people started getting melodramatic again."

-The Men Who Made the Movies, 1973


Faulkner, Hawks and Steve Fisher