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Title: That Marvel--The Movie
A Glance at Its Past, Its Promising Present and Its Significant
Future
Author: Edward S. Van Zile
Release Date: September 23, 2021 [eBook #66368]
Language: English
Produced by: D A Alexander, Barry Abrahamsen, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THAT MARVEL--THE MOVIE ***
[Illustration:
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That Marvel—The Movie
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That Marvel—The Movie
A Glance at Its Reckless Past, Its Promising
Present, and Its Significant Future
By
Edward S. Van Zile, Litt.D.
With an Introduction by
Will H. Hays
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York & London
The Knickerbocker Press
1923
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Copyright, 1923
by
Edward S Van Zile
[Illustration]
Made in the United States of America
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INTRODUCTION
TO grasp the past progress, the present significance and the future
possibilities of the motion picture; to express them with restraint and
yet with clarity; and to impress the mind of any reader with the logic,
as well as with the sincerity, of his viewpoint: these are a few of the
qualities in this book which make it interesting and important. Mr. Van
Zile visualizes the motion picture as more than an entertainment
feature; and if his prophecies of its future seem over-optimistic to
some, they need only to recall the flickering, crude apparitions of
twenty years ago and the total cinematic blankness before that.
If, in twenty years, the motion picture has advanced from an awkward toy
in a laboratory to the marvelous screen art and drama of to-day, who
shall say what are the limits of its progress and its power?
The other arts are old. Music was born with speech and architecture came
soon thereafter. Literature and sculpture were created when the first
primitive man hacked an image on a bit of rock or bone. Misty ages have
cradled their growth. The art of the screen is new, and yet in its
quarter of a century of life it has produced achievements as valuable in
affecting human thought, as notable as those many great plays and operas
and pictures have produced.
To the extent that it has grown so rapidly its importance is
intensified. It is better that we should learn to crawl before we walk,
and run before we fly.
As the representative of leading producers and distributors of American
films, I can say that in no industry or art will be found men and women
more earnest to progress in the right way. With a full sense of our
responsibilities, and an ardor toward perfection, we are at work to do
the best possible things for the motion picture and its world-wide
audience. Mr. Van Zile not only gives us a word of cheer, but he puts
into the public mind some thoughts about pictures which will pay for
their lodging.
WILL H. HAYS.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION. BY WILL H. HAYS v
I. —THE MOVIE’S NEW SIGNIFICANCE 1
II. —THE MOVIE AT ITS BIRTH 19
III. —THE MOVIE’S FIRST STEPS 33
IV. —THE MOVIE GOES TO THE BAD 45
V. —THE MOVIE DEVELOPS A CONSCIENCE 59
VI. —THE MOVIE AND THE LIBRARY 69
VII. —THE MOVIE’S APPETITE FOR PLOTS 81
VIII. —THE MOVIE AND THE CONTINUITY 93
WRITER
IX. —THE MOVIE IMPROVES ITS MORALS 103
X. —THE MOVIE MAKETH—WHAT KIND OF A 115
MAN?
XI. —THE MOVIE AND THE COMMITTEE ON 125
PUBLIC RELATIONS
XII. —THE MOVIE AS A PEDAGOGUE 135
XIII. —THE MOVIE INTERPRETING THE PAST 145
XIV. —THE MOVIE TAKES ON NEW FUNCTIONS 155
XV. —THE MOVIE AS A WORLD POWER 165
XVI. —THE MOVIE AND THE CENSOR 177
XVII. —THE MOVIE AS A WORLD-LANGUAGE 189
XVIII. —THE MOVIE AS THE HOPE OF 201
CIVILIZATION
APPENDIX A—STATISTICS SHOWING THE 215
SCOPE OF THE MOTION PICTURE
INDUSTRY
APPENDIX B—THE SCREEN AS A NEW LIFE 218
GIVER TO LITERARY CLASSICS
APPENDIX C—WHAT MASSACHUSETTS 221
THINKS OF MOTION PICTURE
CENSORSHIP
APPENDIX D—SIGNIFICANT DATES IN THE 222
EVOLUTION OF THE MOTION PICTURE
APPENDIX E—WHAT THE MOVIE HAS DONE 224
FOR A GREAT RAILROAD
APPENDIX F—FACTS AND FIGURES 225
SHOWING THAT THE SCREEN HAS
BECOME THE FIRST WORLD CONQUEROR
APPENDIX G—MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE 227
ON PUBLIC RELATIONS CO-OPERATING
WITH MOTION PICTURE PRODUCERS AND
DISTRIBUTORS OF AMERICA, INC.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
That Marvel—The Movie
CHAPTER I
THE MOVIE’S NEW SIGNIFICANCE
_Civilization in Peril—Leaders of Thought give Warning—Mankind Repeats
Old Errors—Needs a Universal Language—The Motion Picture the Only
Esperanto—Can the Screen Save the Race?—Why a History of the Movies is
of Crucial Importance._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I
THE MOVIE’S NEW SIGNIFICANCE
WITH striking unanimity contemporary writers dealing with the problems
vexing humanity to-day express amazement at the fact that the race has
learned so little from its variegated past, that age after age it
commits, under new conditions and with changes in terminology, ancient
blunders resulting, as they did aforetime, in the tragedies of war,
revolution, famine, epidemics and poverty. As of old, the four horsemen
of the Apocalypse periodically sally forth, to have their evil way with
men; more potent, through long practice, in their iconoclasm, as they
have proved in recent years, than they were in the days of our
ancestors. The individual, unless he be a moron, learns lessons from
experience, avoids committing errors that marred his past and may
become, eventually, worthy the name of a civilized, even a highly
civilized, being. But there are many experts in mob psychology who
despondently assert that, while the individual may demonstrate his
well-nigh infinite superiority to his jungle progenitors, the seeming
progress of the race as a whole has been merely illusory, that mankind
is inherently as savage to-day as it was countless centuries ago.
But why should not the race at large follow the course pursued by the
average individual and derive from its past errors a mandatory
enlightenment enabling it to avoid those recurrent retrogressions that
furnish the cynic with arguments against the proposition that mankind is
gradually ascending to a higher plane of civilization? Various answers
may be given to this query, but the one to which this chapter calls
attention is to the effect that to the vast majority of the human race
the story of mankind’s struggles and failures, triumphs and defeats,
attainment of high civilizations only to lose them again, is a sealed
book. The individual man can recall every detail of his experience of
life and can pursue a course of safety by aid of the lighthouse of his
past. If this prerogative of the individual could be magnified to
include all mankind might not the time come presently when no generation
would repeat the costly errors of preceding generations? Would not the
mass learn and profit by experience, as does the unit?
Now, is there any possible method whereby the human race can be induced
to go to school to its recorded past, to the end that our posterity may
establish eventually a civilization permanently safe from the internal
and external forces of disintegration that have destroyed so many mighty
civilizations founded by our forefathers? Is there any way by which men
in the mass may employ mass history in the same advantageous manner
adopted by individuals who use their “dead selves as stepping-stones to
higher things?” Lothrop Stoddard’s recent book, in which he demonstrates
most ably the disquieting fact that contemporary civilization is menaced
by many and grave perils, presents to a public that habitually resents
disturbance of its self-complacent optimism an array of startling data
making the above queries, to put it mildly, extremely pertinent. “Of the
countless tribes of men,” says Stoddard, “many have perished utterly
while others have stopped by the wayside, apparently incapable of going
forward, and have either vegetated or sunk into decadence. Man’s trail
is littered with the wrecks of dead civilizations and dotted with the
graves of promising peoples stricken by an untimely end.”
But wrecks, whether they be of former civilizations or of vessels lost
upon fatal rocks and reefs, have their value for succeeding nations and
mariners. They serve to point warning fingers away from the shoals of
destruction toward the far-flung deeps where progress and safety are to
be found. It was with this thought in mind, we have no doubt, that Wells
and Van Loon gave to the reading public recently their absorbingly
interesting volumes dealing with the rise of man from the amœba to his
present status as lord of the earth. Both these authors have been
shocked and horrified by the race’s manifestation in recent years of its
tendency to revert at times to the murderous practices of its cave-man
progenitors. That an antidote against periodical returns upon mankind’s
part to the evil practices of the past might be found in the
popularization of histories telling a coherent story of our race’s ups
and downs was a thought that must have come to both Wells and Van Loon
when they essayed the stupendous tasks that they have so worthily
accomplished. But while the basic idea underlying their activities as
historians is sound—for mankind must take cognizance of its past errors
if it is to indulge in hope for the future—the depressing fact confronts
us that the printed book, no matter how great may be its apparent vogue,
reaches but a very small percentage of even the highly intelligent
public. No. If the evils afflicting mankind were to have been cured
through books the race would be free to-day from the major disorders
that threaten the health, if not the life, of existing civilization.
Upon this point, Frederick Palmer, in his interesting and inspiring
book, “The Folly of Nations,” says:
Our increasing library shelves are heavy with the records of all
human activities, colossal accumulations of historical and
scientific researches and the literature of imagination and
philosophy—but one who seeks works on how to keep the peace
finds that he has meagre references.... I have before me a list
of the books and pamphlets the Carnegie Endowment of
International Peace has published. If I have found little new in
them, or in any books on the subject, it is _because it may be
needless for me to search among their details for the great
truths I have seen in the vividness of gun flashes on the field
of battle_....
The sentence in italics above, in which Palmer asserts that the great
truths that have been revealed to him have come to him not from books
but from the vividness of gun flashes on the field of battle, brings us
to the crux of our argument, and will be used presently as a point of
departure for what may prove to be a constructive suggestion of some
value. If mankind is to be taught to follow the method employed by the
individual in using the errors of the past to ensure a better future
_the race must be enabled to visualize its past_. If it refuses to gain
enlightenment through books some other medium for making history the
savior of posterity must be found. And it has been found. The great
truths that were revealed by gun flashes to Frederick Palmer can find
their way to the hearts and minds of the masses of men if we are wise
and far-sighted enough to make full and intelligent use of a new medium
through which Man may gaze upon the mistakes and shortcomings of his
past, and, forewarned, avoid them in the future.
The race has found at last its universal language, its Esperanto not of
the ear and tongue but of the eye. The evolution of the motion picture,
developing in a few years from a toy kinetoscope to a Griffith
wonder-worker, has made possible, for the first time in the history of
humanity, an appeal to the heart and mind and soul of man that overcomes
the ancient handicap of the confusion of tongues. After many centuries
the check to human progress given at the Tower of Babel has come to an
end at the entrance to the motion-picture palace. It has been made
possible at last for history to reveal its secrets, and vouchsafe its
warnings, not to the comparatively few who read scholarly books, but to
the millions who, as democracy conquers the earth, have become masters
of the destiny of nations.
In a brilliant and impressive address delivered last July by Will H.
Hays at Boston, Mass., before the National Education Association, the
speaker presented facts and figures demonstrating the marvellous
progress made of late by the motion picture as a medium for instruction
in both schools and colleges. He said:
To reflect on the possibilities of the motion picture in
education is to regret that one’s school days were spent before
this great invention came to us as a poultice to heal the blows
of ignorance, but there is consolation in the fact that since
the advent of pictures the whole world, regardless of age, can
go to school.
“Regardless of age”—yes, and, also, regardless of race, language,
inherited or acquired prejudices, and the hot passions that result in
man’s inhumanity to man. In other words, the human race may now sit
before a screen and learn through the universal medium of the eye those
great truths that have been revealed to Frederick Palmer by the vivid
flashes of the battle-field.
Dreams, you say? Generalities? A vision that begets nothing but vain
hopes? Suppose, then, that we make a concrete suggestion that, should it
arouse interest and create discussion, might result eventually in giving
to what you call “airy nothings” a “local habitation and a name.” The
insuperable obstacle that has prevented heretofore the establishment
somewhere upon earth of a university designed for the educational needs
of the race at large has been linguistic. In a polyglot world a great
central station for the dissemination of knowledge was impossible so
long as that knowledge could be inculcated only by means of the written
or spoken word. But to-day, as Mr. Hays points out in the address quoted
above, instruction is given, from our primary schools up to our
universities, through the method of visualization; and, furthermore,
repeated tests have shown that students prepared for examinations by aid
of pictures obtain higher marks than examinees whose coaching was
confined to the media of books and lectures. It is almost impossible to
exaggerate the significance of the above in connection with the dream we
have taken the liberty to dream. A world university, a fountain of all
acquired knowledge for the race at large, became practicable the moment
the linguistic problem was solved by the Esperanto of the Eye. No longer
was the vision of a race finding, as do individuals, strength and wisdom
for meeting the perils of the future by contemplating the mistakes of
the past a vague, shadowy mockery, destined to vanish with a return to
common-sense. On the contrary, common-sense had become suddenly
associated with a project that had left the realm of the abstract to
enter the domain of the concrete. For what, in the name of common-sense,
could make so impressive an appeal to the practical man of affairs as
the perfecting of a method whereby the recurrent set-backs to progress
that peoples, and mankind at large, inflict upon themselves can be
reduced to a minimum or, perhaps, rendered permanently obsolete?
Let us suppose that what we will call, tentatively, our Lighthouse of
the Past had found its Rockefeller or Carnegie, that several hundred
million dollars were available for the establishment of a world centre
of enlightenment wherein all the peoples of the earth could study what
man has done in his dual character of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is it not
certain that the evil influence of the latter would lose its grip
eventually upon a race that is so strangely compounded of the god-like
and the diabolical? Seeing is believing. Show mankind both the glories
and the horrors of the past, let each tribe, nation, race ponder its own
achievements and its own failures, reveal to the pilgrim students
flocking to our lighthouse from every corner of the earth both the
microscopic and the telescopic aspects of history, to the end that they
may return to their respective native lands inspired and eloquent
advocates of a better world, and, lo, the problems seemingly insoluble
to us to-day will be solved through a mass enlightenment that, before
the advent of the screen, was beyond the wildest dreams of the most
optimistic visionaries.
And where, you ask, shall our Mecca for the pilgrims of progress be
located? For many reasons, there is but one country to-day available for
the project briefly outlined above, and that is the United States.
Geographical, historical, diplomatic, financial, educational and racial
factors interwoven in the enterprise combine to make ours the only land
in which this Lighthouse of the Past, this university of universities,
could stand a fair chance of functioning successfully. Somewhere in our
country there is an ideal location contiguous to one of our great cities
adapted by man and nature to the needs of our experiment in racial
regeneration. Where this location may be is a question to be answered in
the future. Upon this site, however, when it has been chosen, can not
you who have read the foregoing, and have begun, perhaps, to dream my
dream, picture a vast group of buildings, both beautiful and
utilitarian, within which all that mankind has done of good or evil
shall be revealed, year after year, generation after generation, to the
critical but hopeful eyes of the race at large? Give full rein to your
imagination in this connection! Here shall be shown to our Mecca’s
pilgrims all of Man’s achievements in the realms of science, art,
government, industry, commerce, social betterment. Here shall be
revealed, also, the blunders, the failures, the tragedies that were the
price paid for these achievements.
Here may you visualize the epic tale of Man’s rise from protoplasm to
power, from an amœba to ruler of the earth. Here may a Chinaman study
the past of his people through forty centuries of weal and woe; the
modern Greek glory in the splendors of ancient Athens or appraise his
compatriots’ achievements of yesterday; the Norseman, the Slav, the
Teuton, the Celt, the Anglo-Saxon, the Latin, the Jap, the Arab, the
East Indian learn from the screen what his race, or nation, or tribe has
done for or against—and they have all done both—the cause of advancing
civilization. There shall radiate, if our dream comes true, from this
great centre where all knowledge is visualized a light that shall grow
ever brighter, as the generations come and go, routing the errors of
ignorance and racial prejudice and making possible that for which the
great hearted of the race have so long striven in vain, namely, the
brotherhood of man.
Let me transpose two sentences from a timely book from which I have
already quoted. Says Frederick Palmer on the last page of his
enlightening volume “The Folly of Nations”: “The world of to-day thinks
through its eyes looking at the screen. Where are our millionaires who
seek worthy objects for their benefactions?” And, from another recently
published book, “The Salvaging of Civilization,” by H. G. Wells, can be
most aptly quoted the following pertinent excerpt:
It has become clear that the task of bringing about that
consolidated world state which is necessary to prevent the
decline and decay of mankind is not primarily one for the
diplomatists and lawyers and politicians at all. It is an
educational one. It is a moral based on an intellectual
reconstruction. The task immediately before mankind is to find
release from the contentions, loyalties and hostilities of the
past, which make collective world-wide action impossible at the
present time, in a world-wide common vision of the histories and
destines of the race. On that basis, and on that alone, can a
world control be organized and maintained. The effort demanded
from mankind, therefore, is primarily and essentially a bold
reconstruction of the outlook upon life of hundreds of millions
of minds.
During the past eight years the human race has undergone the bloodiest
ordeal of the ages and, succeeding it, the bitterest disappointment that
mankind has yet been forced to endure. A confusion of tongues that made
European diplomacy helpless at a great crisis rendered a world war
inevitable and the lack of a common medium of enlightenment at
Versailles postponed indefinitely the establishment of permanent peace
upon earth. Had Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando been
obliged every morning at the Peace Conference to spend several hours,
before tackling the affairs of a disordered world, in front of a screen
upon which was depicted before their keen eyes the immediate tragic past
and the deplorable present of the nations of the earth the final outcome
of their deliberations might have been of greater value to the cause of
civilization than it has proved to be. Had the Esperanto of the Eye been
adopted as the official language at Versailles could not the Conference
have avoided a repetition of the fatal errors that crept into its
verdicts as an evil heritage from its century-old predecessor, the
Conference of Vienna? Did not Wilson and Lloyd George fail to take
advantage of a new medium of enlightenment that was denied a hundred
years ago to Metternich and Talleyrand? Is it not even possible that had
the cinema played an enlightening part at Versailles that which is of
real value in the basic idea underlying the League of Nations might be
exercising greater potency in a quarrelsome world to-day than it appears
to be?
These queries and conjectures are put forward not for the purpose of
stimulating further controversy regarding the details of what I have
called above “the bitterest disappointment that mankind has yet been
forced to endure,” namely, the Versailles Peace Conference. They are
thrown out merely to emphasize the comprehensive fact, recognized by
Palmer, Stoddard, Wells, and many other able contemporary writers, that
mankind, if it is to make use of the errors of the past to avoid the
pitfalls of the future, must find a way to get great truths into the
mind of the race at large not through the lurid flashes of the
battlefield but by means of a universal language. There is, and for an
indefinite future there can be, but one such medium of expression,
namely, the Esperanto of the Eye. Through it, and through it alone, can
Wells, and those who believe with him that civilization may yet be
salvaged, further that “world-wide common vision of the histories and
destinies of the race” that has become of late the one great hope
mankind can to-day reasonably cherish.
A Lighthouse of the Past, a university of universities, a fountain of
all revealed knowledge inculcated through a medium understood of all
men, a Mecca for the pilgrims of peace and progress from all corners of
the earth, forever adapting itself to the growing needs of mankind for
enlightenment, sending forth, year after year, its polyglot graduates to
carry its teachings, warnings, promises to every tribe and nation on the
planet—is it not a consummation to be devoutly wished, a dream worth
every sacrifice to bring within the purview of reality? If your answer
to this query, dear reader, is in the affirmative, the chances seem to
be that you will find the following chapters of this book worthy of your
earnest consideration.
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CHAPTER II
THE MOVIE AT ITS BIRTH
_Muybridge’s Trotting Horses—Edison’s Kinetoscope—The Problem Eastman
Solved—The Movie as a Universal Language—A Toy for Children that Became
a World Power—The Men Who Rocked the Cradle of a New Hope for the Race._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II
THE MOVIE AT ITS BIRTH
FOR countless ages Man watched the birds in flight, realized his own
motor handicaps, and relegated his hope of flying to a life which he
might eventually lead in the world of spirits. An insect or an angel
might have wings but the lord of the earth was by nature debarred from
the air. Then somebody somewhere invented a kite, and for another series
of centuries Man played with a toy whose ultimate significance he failed
to grasp. He had not as yet sensed the picturesque truth that the
world’s most potential inventions have come to us, by a process of
evolution, from children’s playthings. The laboratory had its beginnings
in the nursery. The cave-man’s children taught him progress.
Through suggestions from the kite, the Wright brothers made air
navigation possible. From another toy, Edison’s kinetoscope, has come
the cinematograph. And even its inventor, possessing, though he does,
the creative imagination, failed to realize until recent years the
startling possibilities imbedded in the plaything with which he
entertained the cosmopolitan throngs that flocked to the World’s Fair at
Chicago in 1893.
When Edison recently made a visit to the General Electric Company’s
plant at Schenectady, N.Y., to recall old memories and to forecast the
future possibilities of electrical devices, he found there still
standing two insignificant old sheds by the river bank, the modest plant
of the original Edison Machine Works of 1886. In amazing contrast to
this relic of the past there stretched away in every direction factory
after factory, covering an area of 523 acres, and vouchsafing to the
Wizard of Menlo Park a concrete manifestation of the fact that in this
age of progress even the wildest dream may eventually come true. But the
contrast between Edison’s work-shop of 1886 and the General Electric
plant of to-day, astounding as it is, is, in its outward aspects, a
local phenomenon. To visualize it, you must go to Schenectady, N.Y. The
difference between Edison’s kinetoscope of thirty years ago and the
moving picture of the moment can be appreciated, on the other hand, by a
mere effort of the memory and the imagination combined. The kinetoscope
has been relegated to the attic but the moving picture has acquired as
its domain not merely the earth but the starry heavens and the realms of
space. Eventually the very outer edge of the physical universe is
destined to be screened.
Before recounting presently the amazing and romantic story of the
evolution of the motion picture from a plaything to a medium unrivalled
for the promulgation of both good and evil, a Frankenstein created by
Man’s ingenuity that must be given a soul to make it safe for the world,
it may be well to pause at the outset to answer the query, frequently
put to the writer, as to why what seems to be merely a popular form of
amusement should be taken seriously as a factor in the struggle modern
civilization is undergoing to save itself from destruction. Perhaps no
better answer to this question can be given than is furnished by certain
facts and figures presented by Will H. Hays to the National Education
Association in session at Boston, Mass., in July, 1922, in the following
illuminating words:
In a little over fifteen years the motion picture has grown from
a naked idea until to-day it is the principal amusement of
millions. It has become one of the greatest industries in
America, having an investment of $1,250,000,000, with
$75,000,000 paid annually in salaries and wages, and
$520,000,000 taken in annually for admissions. In the United
States, in the big cities and in those ample-shaded towns and
villages which comprise America, there are perhaps fifteen
thousand motion picture theatres and in those theatres more than
seven million seats. Taking into account at least two
performances a day, and applying the collected statistics, we
estimate that every seven days between Maine and California,
fifty million men, women and children look for an hour or two at
the motion picture screen.
Nothing further need be said in regard to the importance of the general
subject we have under consideration. A medium for expression which makes
its imprint weekly upon the minds of approximately one half of our
population is worthy of the closest study by the people of this country.
Its origin, its early growth, its present status and its future as a
universal language, destined, perhaps, to be the greatest civilizing
medium the race has known, are topics the timely importance of which can
hardly be overrated. To paraphrase an old political truism, as goes the
screen so goes the country—and, possibly, the race at large.
Briefly the early history of the cinematograph is in substance as
follows: By the revolutionary achievement of the Frenchman Daguerre, who
discovered a method whereby sunlight could be made to fix a permanent
image of an object upon a sensitized surface, a door was opened showing
the way to the marvellous triumphs that the last century has vouchsafed
to the camera. But impasse after impasse checked the progress of the
pioneers of photography. When Daguerre began his historic career as the
first photographer, an exposure of six hours—more than twenty thousand
seconds—was required to obtain a permanent impression of the object
photographed. Instantaneous photography seemed at that time as remote a
possibility as photography in colors appeared to be but a short time
ago. But the time came when Chemistry, the mother of modern marvels,
solved the problem confronting the early photographers. The laboratory
found a surface so sensitive to light that it could take and retain a
picture perfect in detail in less than one thousandth part of a second—a
feat which in Daguerre’s time would have required an exposure twenty
million times as long. How important in connection with the eventual
advent of the motion picture was Man’s mastery of the time-element in
photography is tersely explained by Frederick A. Talbot, an authority on
the early history of the cinematograph, as follows:
The wonderful achievement of instantaneous photography assumed
at first a scientific rather than a commercial value. Many a
“snap-shot” is taken which does not betray whether the plate has
been exposed for six hours or only one-thousandth of a second;
but, on the other hand, a “snap-shot” of a quickly moving object
may seize upon and fix an interesting characteristic motion. It
was this fact which led certain ingenious minds to perceive in
instantaneous photography a valuable means of analyzing motion.
If a single photograph reproduced the exact posture of a moving
object at any given instant of time, they argued that a series
of such photographs, if taken in sufficiently rapid succession,
would form a complete record of the whole cycle of movements
involved, for instance in the jump of a horse or the flap of a
bird’s wing.
Thomas A. Edison, in an interview given to Mr. Hugh Weir and recently
published in _McClure’s Magazine_, enlightens us regarding Mr. Talbot’s
proposition. Asked what first suggested to him the idea of the
motion-picture camera, Mr. Edison said:
The phonograph. I had been working for several years on
experiments for recording and reproducing sound, and the thought
occurred to me that it should be possible to devise an apparatus
to do for the eye what the phonograph was designed to do for the
ear. It was in 1887 that I began my investigations, and
photography, compared with what it is to-day, was in a decidedly
crude state of development. Pictures were made by “wet” plates,
operated by involved mechanism. The modern dry films were
unheard of. I had only one fact to guide me at all. This was the
principle of optics, technically called “the persistence of
vision,” which proves that the sensation of light lingers in the
brain for anywhere from one-tenth to one-twentieth part of a
second after the light has disappeared from the sight of the
eye.
In other words, the fact that the human eye is a photographic camera
possessing memory may eventually save civilization from the cataclysm of
which contemporary prophets warn us, _in that it has made possible a
medium of communication for the race at large denied to us by the
tongue_.
Posterity will owe a great debt of gratitude to Thomas A. Edison for
various revolutionary inventions but it begins to be apparent to
optimistic observers that perhaps his chief claim to the thanks of
mankind will be due to the initial impetus he gave to the motion
picture, vouchsafing to a bewildered race the universal language of the
eye, by which, possibly, the brotherhood of man may eventually function
to overcome the evils that have darkened our past. Says Edison: “I do
not believe that any other single agency of progress has the
possibilities for a great and permanent good to humanity that I can see
in the motion picture. And these possibilities are only beginning to be
touched.”
Will it not repay us, then, to examine the “possibilities” to which Mr.
Edison refers, to the end that we may take the screen more seriously
than heretofore, may regard motion picture theatres more attentively and
hopefully as being, perhaps, civilization’s one best bet? Unless,
however, we get a somewhat comprehensive view of the variegated past of
the movies “the permanent good to humanity” that they can accomplish
will not be apparent to us. Let us, therefore, get on with our story.
The early history of the cinematograph presents a study in international
rivalry. The United States, England and France wrote names on the scroll
of fame upon which the scientists and promoters who rendered motion
pictures possible make their bid for immortality. Edison and Eastman,
Americans, Daguerre and the Messrs. Lumière and Sons, Frenchmen, and
Muybridge and Robert Paul, Englishmen, are the leading names among the
_dramatis personæ_ who took part in the first act of a drama that began
as an amusement for children but which now promises to develop into a
miracle-play regenerating the human race.
Scientific technicalities have no place in a book designed to tell the
story of the movies from what is called in newspaper circles “the human
interest standpoint,” but it is necessary to apportion credit here for
what the three nations above mentioned did respectively toward solving
the initial problems confronting the pioneers who raised photography
from a tortoise to a bird, giving it pinions that defy time and space.
To change the metaphor, Daguerre, a Frenchman, rocked the cradle of
photography, Muybridge, an Englishman, taught it to run, and Edison, an
American, gave it wings. Behold here, at last, a triple alliance that is
changing the face not merely of a continent but of a planet. The
mountains were in labor and brought forth not a little mouse but a
marvellous creature whose dynamics for both good and evil can not be
over-estimated.
The claim that England can put forward for furnishing first aid to the
movies bears the date 1872 and is summarized as follows by Mr. Edison:
An Englishman of the name of Muybridge, who was an enthusiast on
two subjects—cameras and race horses—was visiting, at his
California farm, Senator Leland Stanford, who was also something
of a “crank” on the subject of blooded trotters. During the
visit the merits of a certain horse, owned by the Senator, came
under discussion, Stanford contending for one fact, and his
guest arguing for another. To settle the dispute Muybridge
conceived an ingenious plan.
Along one side of the private race-course on the farm he placed
a row of twenty-four cameras. Attached to the shutter of each,
he fastened a long thread, which in turn was carried across the
track, and then, to make sure of obtaining sharp exposures, he
erected a white screen opposite to serve as a reflector. When
all was in readiness the race horse was turned loose down the
track.
As it dashed past the rows of cameras the various threads were
snapped, and a series of photographs, establishing each
successive point in the “action” of the horse, were
automatically registered. When they were developed they revealed
for the first time a complete photographic record of the
minutest details of a horse in actual motion, and Muybridge had
the satisfaction of using them to win his argument.
He would have laid the pictures away in his private collection,
but someone suggested trying the effect on a Zoetrope (akin to
the Kinetoscope) apparatus. The result was so startling that it
created something of a public sensation. But, except as a
novelty, there was little practical benefit gained. To have made
an actual motion picture, lasting even for the space of a single
minute, at the rate of twelve exposures per second, the minimum
for steady illusion, would have required, under the plan of
Muybridge, seven hundred and twenty different cameras.
Half a century has passed since that historic day when Muybridge
demonstrated that he had a better eye for trotting horses than Senator
Stanford and put California on the map as a prominent centre of motion
picture progress, a position which that State has most brilliantly
maintained. During the fifty years from 1872 to 1922, the period from
Muybridge to Griffith, the scientific problems confronting the pioneer
inventors of the cinematograph, and they were many and difficult, were
solved; and from the crude pictures of a trotting horse in motion were
evolved the screen marvels of to-day. The high lights of that crucial
half century in the development of the movies, a development that is not
only interesting in itself but full of encouragement to the optimist who
believes that the new and universal language of the eye may be employed
to warn the race against repeating the errors of the past, will be
considered in the following chapters of this book.
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CHAPTER III
THE MOVIE’S FIRST STEPS
_The Movie Learns to Walk—George Eastman’s Great Achievement—The
Kinetoscope Goes to England—John W. Paul Throws Motion Pictures on a
Screen—London “Bobbies” See the First Movie Ever Shown—America, England
and France the Triple Alliance of the Screen._
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CHAPTER III
THE MOVIE’S FIRST STEPS
NO story of the evolution of the motion picture from an experiment in
photography to a factor in the daily lives of millions of people would
be complete without a passing reference to the impetus given by George
Eastman, of Rochester, N.Y., to what was at the outset a toy for
children—destined eventually to challenge the untried resources of the
laboratory. Thomas A. Edison says: “Without George Eastman I don’t know
what the result would have been in the history of the motion picture.”
For a long time after Muybridge had demonstrated the possibility of
photographing objects in motion any real advance in what was practically
a new art was impeded by the weight, fragility and general inadequacy of
the glass plates employed in camera work. Gelatine, transparent paper,
and other substitutes for glass, were tried in vain. How Eastman finally
solved the problem by the use of celluloid is explained tersely and
clearly by F. A. Talbot as follows:
In the early part of 1889 experiments were being made to
discover a varnish to take the place of gelatine sheets. One of
his chemists drew Mr. Eastman’s attention to a thick solution of
gun-cotton in wood alcohol. It was tested to prove its
suitability to take the place of the gelatine, but was found
wanting in practical efficiency. However, Mr. Eastman recognized
the solution as one which might prove to be the film base for
which he had been searching. He had had such a medium in mind
when engaged in his first experiments in 1884, which resulted in
the production of the stripping film. He decided to utilize this
solution of gun-cotton in wood alcohol and fashion it into the
foundation for the sensitized emulsion, so that stripping and
other troublesome operations of a like nature might be avoided.
He was moved to this experiment because this solution could be
made almost as transparent practically as glass. Accordingly he
set to work to devise a machine to prepare thin sheets such as
he required from this mixture. _Success crowned his efforts, and
in 1889 the first long strip of celluloid film suited to
cinematograph work appeared in the United States._
Thus had George Eastman removed for Thomas A. Edison the one obstacle
that had hitherto made the latter’s projected kinetoscope impracticable,
and celluloid had become the “Open Sesame” to that wonderland in which
the movie fans of to-day delight to wander.
Like the telephone which was, in its early days, looked upon as an
interesting scientific toy not destined to play an important part in the
daily lives of the people at large, Edison’s kinetoscope was not taken
seriously by the crowds who found it but one of many novel features
combining to make the Chicago World Fair of 1893 a success. They flocked
to see it, marvelled at its ingenuity, but failed, as did Edison
himself, to realize that the world had been enriched by not merely a new
plaything but by a novel medium for influencing the destinies of the
race, the ultimate stupendous significance of which we, even thirty
years later, can only vaguely estimate. It is amazing but true that, so
little did Edison appreciate the fact that he had invented not an
ephemeral toy but the only universal language yet vouchsafed to the
race, he neglected to obtain patents for his kinetoscope outside of the
United States. His oversight in this connection had far-reaching
results, the most important of which historically gave to England
instead of the United States the honor of throwing upon a screen the
first “movie,” as that word is understood to-day.
That a Yankee notion should fail to realize its own possibilities and be
forced eventually to thank an Englishman for placing it upon the heights
from which it was to win world-dominion is not an agreeable reflection
to the ultra-patriotic American, but our story of the evolution of the
movie must now take us across the Atlantic and introduce to us Mr.
Robert W. Paul, electrical engineer and manufacturer of scientific
apparatus, whose workshops were located in Hatton Garden, London.
Reversing the process of the “star of empire” it was Eastward that the
movie, in its search for development, had taken its way. Cradled in
California, it had learned to walk in Menlo Park, New Jersey, and
Rochester, New York, and was now to realize its youthful possibilities
in the British metropolis.
Two peripatetic Athenians, one of them a toy-maker, had seen, admired
and coveted the Edison kinetoscope at the Chicago World’s Fair. They had
the European market in mind for the new plaything and acted at once
without looking into the question of patents. To Paul, at Hatton Garden,
London, came the Athenians with a kinetoscope they had obtained in the
United States, urging him to manufacture duplicates with which they
might supply the English, and possibly the Continental, market. Paul,
however, had read his Virgil and heeded the old poet’s warning against
Greeks bearing gifts. Supposing, of course, that Edison had protected
his invention by English patents, Paul rejected the proposition of the
Greeks. Later, however, he discovered that, so far as the English Patent
Office was concerned, he was free to manufacture kinetoscopes for the
European market and presently went at it with a will and with
considerable success.
But Paul was a live wire with a vision, as, years ago, I clairvoyantly
called Will H. Hays. He realized that the kinetoscope was, like our dead
selves, but a stepping-stone to higher things. It furnished a motion
picture to only one observer at a time. What Paul wanted, and what the
world has proved that it craved, was a device whereby thousands of
spectators could gaze at a movie at one and the same moment. Muybridge
had solved the first problem in motion photography, Edison the second,
Eastman the third, and Paul was confronted by the fourth, perhaps the
most difficult of the quartet.
How this resourceful Englishman managed to render the peep-hole of a
kinetoscope obsolete and replace it by a screen upon which countless
eyes might gaze is a matter of technical and scientific interest, out of
place in the story we are telling. Suffice it to say that what he
achieved in overcoming the obstacles confronting him has given him a
high place on the list of inventors who, one by one, and in widely
separated corners of the planet, made possible, during a half century of
effort, the motion picture of to-day.
We get from Frederick A. Talbot a side-light on an historic episode in
London that was the turning-point in the career of Robert W. Paul, and
of even greater importance to the human race than any but a few
far-seeing movie enthusiasts have yet realized. Says Talbot:
About three o’clock one morning, in the early months of 1895,
the quietness of Hatton Garden was disturbed by loud and
prolonged shouts. The police rushed hurriedly to the building
whence the cries proceeded, and found Paul and his colleagues in
their workshop, giving vent to whole-hearted exuberance of
triumph. They had just succeeded in throwing the first perfect
animated pictures upon a screen. To compensate the police for
their fruitless investigation, the film, which was forty feet in
length, and produced a picture seven feet square, was run
through the special lantern for their edification. They regarded
the strange spectacle as ample compensation, and had the
satisfaction of being the first members of the public to see
moving pictures thrown upon the screen.
Unfortunately the law-abiding fervor that animates the soul of the
London “Bobby” did not get into the camera on that epoch-making night.
Had it done so, the early career of the motion picture might have been
less objectionable to the guardians of morals on both sides of the
Atlantic. But that’s another story—to be told in a later chapter. It is
only just to say here, however, that it was not the fault of Robert W.
Paul that in their early years the movies went, more or less, to the
bow-wows.
Of Paul and his sensational achievement as the father, or, rather, the
step-father, of the movie there is much interesting data extant, the
leading features of which are destined to hold a permanent place in the
history of the newest of the arts developed by Man’s genius. How, in
partnership with Sir Augustus and Lady Harris, he made of the Olympia
Theatre in London the first picture palace in the world, catching the
popular fancy with what he called his “theatograph”; how he was
eventually in control of eight London theatres showing motion pictures;
how his contract with the Alhambra Theatre for two weeks of pictures in
March, 1896, was stretched eventually to cover four years are part of
the early records of the screen and account for the name “Daddy Paul” by
which this ingenious and daring Englishman is known in movie circles
across the water.
But even Paul’s early successes with motion pictures in the London music
halls did not open his eyes, or the eyes of his colleagues, to the
possibilities and permanency of the new form of entertainment they had
given to the world. Both Paul and Sir Augustus Harris believed that the
fickle public would soon tire of what seemed to be to them merely an
ephemeral novelty, to be soon relegated, as had been countless
vaudeville innovations, to the over-flowing theatrical lumber-room. One
of the strangest features of the history of the motion pictures during
the period of their early youth is that hardly one of their scientific
or commercial exploiters, from Edison down, had anything like a full
appreciation of the future that awaited the screen, of the marvellous
power for growth that lay in the germ from which the toy kinetoscope had
sprung.
There are those who assert that the ultimate salvation of modern
civilization will be accomplished by a triple alliance established by
the United States, England and France. Those who make this prediction
have in mind, of course, a trio of fighting nations who, by force of
arms, will eventually compel an unruly world to come to order and accept
the point of view cherished by the conquerors. But is it not possible
that America, England and France, having worked together as a triple
alliance to perfect the motion picture, have given to the race a medium
for enlightenment that may make another world war in defence of
civilization unnecessary? Is it not, at least, conceivable that these
three nations, whose inventive and progressive genius made, through
Daguerre, Edison and Paul, the motion picture possible may find, in time
to save humanity from a hideous cataclysm, that the screen, in a
democratic world, may so strengthen the influence of peace-making
diplomacy as to render eventually armies and navies practically
obsolete?
And in this connection, it is interesting to note that the claim of
France to a high place in that triple alliance which made the movies a
tremendous power for both good and evil in a perturbed world does not
rest wholly upon Daguerre and his invention of the daguerreotype. No
account of the evolution of the motion picture would be complete without
reference to the impetus given to the new industry in “Daddy” Paul’s
halcyon days by the Messrs. Lumière and Sons, of Paris, France,
manufacturers of photographic apparatus, dry plates, etc. The Edison
kinetoscope had come within their purview in 1893 and they had realized
at once, as had Paul, that a motion picture that could have but one
observer at a time was merely a butterfly in the chrysalis. The Messrs.
Lumière solved ingeniously, and in their own way, the problem that had
confronted Paul and are entitled to a part of the glory that goes to
those who changed the kinetoscope from a peep-show for one to a screen
display for hundreds.
It was the French machine that brought Edison’s one-eyed toy back to the
country of its birth raised to the dignity of an amusement for adults.
Through the energy and far-sightedness of Richard G. Hollaman, head of
the Eden Musée, of New York, the Lumière apparatus, in the Fall of 1896,
created something of a sensation in the American metropolis. To the Eden
Musée, known to fame for its presentation of historic personages of the
past, belongs the honor of making the path to glory easy to the
celebrities of to-day. Fame was now to discard stuffed effigies as a
reward for greatness to use the screen to bring the exalted of the earth
down to the masses. The movie had been finally launched upon a career
that was to lead it toward heights from which to-day it can see a future
that, unless the human race wantonly commits hari-kari, will be
unimaginably glorious.
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CHAPTER IV
THE MOVIE GOES TO THE BAD
_The Era of Fly-by-Night Speculation—The Mushroom Movie Craze—The
Screen’s Youthful Indiscretions—Stupidity and Cupidity as Partners—The
Degradation of a New Art-Form—Boy-Made Scenarios—The Stage Versus the
Screen—A Future for Both._
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CHAPTER IV
THE MOVIE GOES TO THE BAD
WHOEVER asserted that “you can’t indict a whole nation” made a sweeping
generalization that was both historically and psychologically accurate.
In what I have said, and am about to say, regarding the evil influences
affecting the early years of the movie, I do not wish to do an injustice
to those early promoters in the new industry who refused to degrade the
screen, or to treat it as an ephemeral, wild-cat speculation. There were
producers, at the very outset of the industry, who builded perhaps
better than they knew, and who, because of their refusal to take the
path of least resistance, are now, after a quarter of a century of film
exploiting, the most successful and influential factors in the industry.
They prevailed where those whose pernicious activities threatened the
rise, perhaps the permanency of the movie, fell by the wayside.
It is regrettable, nevertheless, that the childhood of the movie was so
deeply influenced by various pioneers who could not realize its power
for good nor foresee its future greatness both as an art and as a
moulder of public opinion, morals, and enlightenment. But the screen in
its early years was dominated largely by get-rich-quick exploiters,
adventurers out for the easy money flowing into the coffers of the movie
“palaces,” less admirable in most ways than the hard-boiled
treasure-seekers who flock to newly-discovered gold-fields. There is
something of the romantic and heroic in the Argonauts who developed
California, the South African diamond mines and the Klondike. They
risked their lives in a great game of chance and won or lost in a
dramatic struggle in which the winners had displayed necessarily certain
sturdy, sterling qualities.
The gold-bearing realm of the movies, on the other hand, was invaded at
the outset by a good many speculative fortune-seekers who staked upon
their ventures nothing but their craftiness and their audacity. They
were about as admirable as a bucket-shop gambler who, by expending a
minimum of money and energy, hopes for a movement of the market that
shall make him rich over night. The movie, as an anonymous writer in
Collier’s Weekly says, was, in its early days,
nothing that could justifiably attract a big investor, or a real
novelist, or a good actor. The first movie-actors were for the
most part of the old-time chorus-girl and spear-carrier type;
the great scenario-writers were the shop-girls or office boys
who were told of the sudden need for stories, with no real
training or knowledge of writing—with here and there a newspaper
cub or magazine embryo who stumbled into a new gold vein where
stories written in an hour could be sold for fifteen dollars;
the first investors were the clerks or advertising men or born
gamblers, usually in touch with the cheap end of the theatrical
world, who had a little money to invest in a new scheme,
provided it “looked good” and “wasn’t too big.”
It is a safe bet that the majority of my readers can remember the time
when they looked upon motion pictures with a mingling of contempt and
impatience, realizing vaguely, perhaps, the promise the screen suggested
of better things but disgusted with its seemingly stubborn adherence to
cheap claptrap, crude melodrama, and unspeakably vulgar farce. My
personal experience in connection with the movies is, I imagine, typical
of that which has come to thousands of Americans during the past quarter
of a century. I can still remember the thrill I experienced when I first
gazed upon human beings in motion screened by a camera. What the
photographed puppets did was not, at the moment, of great consequence.
The mere fact that they came and went, walked, ran, danced before my
eyes was startling enough. I was fascinated by a scientific achievement
that was of itself sufficiently interesting to warrant my presence in
that audience of long ago.
But my subsequent activities as a movie fan in embryo were of short
duration. Like thousands of my fellow Americans, I came, I saw, but I
did not conquer—in fact, I was repelled. For years thereafter I avoided
the movie palaces, realizing that I was temperamentally unfitted to
enjoy optical contacts with adultery, murder, theft and sudden death.
Nor was my sense of humor of a kind that found anything to laugh at in
squash-pie farce.
But even the cupidity and stupidity that had their effect upon the
screen in its earlier years could not kill the goose that was destined
eventually to lay something better than golden eggs. Though ignorance,
avarice and vulgarity for many years influenced, to too great an extent,
the movies, they could not destroy its inherent power of regeneration,
nor the cumulative force exercised by the higher type of producers which
eventually made that regeneration possible. How the screen was saved
from becoming the exclusive property of the underworld by the survival
of the fittest, or the most enlightened, of the early promoters, will be
told presently, but it is interesting, at this juncture, to discuss for
a moment the question as to why its earlier career was so deplorably
reprehensible.
Reference has been made to the fact that in the United States, England
and France the first exploiters of motion pictures were under the
delusion that this new form of entertainment was of merely ephemeral
value, that its drawing-power as a theatrical novelty would soon pass
away. Thus it was that in this country small men, of small means,
hastened to “take flyers” in the latest get-rich-quick device, and
throughout the United States was observed a mushroom growth of “picture
palaces,” financed on a shoe-string and designed to collect “easy money”
before it became uneasy. There were those among the pioneer promoters of
motion pictures who had read of the tulip craze in Holland, or of the
Mississippi bubble in France, and imagined that the bottom would some
day suddenly fall out of the “movie boom,” ruining those who had not
“cashed in” in time. They failed to realize that humanity could not
afford to lose an inestimable boon that had come to it, namely, a new
method for the telling of stories.
There had existed, before the movie’s birth, but four media for the
dissemination of narratives—the tongue, the play, the printed story, and
the printed poem. In the childhood of the race, tale-telling was
confined to word of mouth. Later on, the stage came into existence, and
mankind’s craving for stories was partially satisfied by the drama. The
invention of the printing-press gave to a soul-hungry race the book,
with its infinite capacity for telling tales, old and new, to the
grown-up children of the race.
But from Gutenberg’s time to Edison’s Man had found no new medium
through which his eternal craving for stories could be assuaged.
Literature and the drama, despite the impetus vouchsafed to them by the
printing-press, are of aristocratic origin and have failed to adapt
themselves wholeheartedly to the broadening tendencies and demands of
the age. Democracy needed a new approach to the romance of existence, an
approach that the millions could make without too great a sacrifice,
and, lo, the movies blazed the way to it, despite the fact that their
advance guard was for the most part unworthy of the high mission that
chance had thrust upon it. These pioneers had in their hands the fifth
device which Man has found for satisfying his soul’s appetite for
inspiring tales, more universal in its appeal than the tongue, the play,
the novel or the poem, and many of them degraded it, alienating in the
beginning those conservative, constructive forces in the community which
have only recently come to the assistance of the screen.
Wells and Van Loon, each in his own interesting way, have told us
recently the tragi-comic story of Man’s evolution from slime to
Shakespeare. On a large canvas it is the same picture that the movie
presents in miniature from grime to Griffith. The great weakness of the
motion picture industry throughout its formative years, a weakness still
too much in evidence, is at the top and not at the bottom. The movies
for years lost the support of the more enlightened classes of the
community not because camera-men, carpenters, electricians and stage
hands were not competent but because the powers in control of the
completed output, the “bosses” of the new industry, failed to make the
best use of the power that had come to them. Says the producer who
recently made his public confession through the pages of _Collier’s
Weekly_:
The directors were hard to deal with. They reflected the one
greatest fault of the entire industry: they knew not that they
knew not. Without adequate background, for the most part,
without adequate training or knowledge of human character,
without even a rudimentary philosophy or idealism, or sense of
real values, to qualify them for leadership, they were given
money and authority and power and told to make films for the
multitude. Surrounded by minor sycophants, they soon came to
believe themselves almost above criticism. A sincere critic was
more apt than not to be regarded as an enemy.
There is something grimly ludicrous in the fact that for years after the
screen had proved conclusively that the race had finally found an
effective new method of telling stories more widely appealing, more
direct in its methods than the play, the novel or the poem, the courts
of last resort dominating the output of the films were composed largely
of men without sufficient education to appraise the value, or lack of
value, of the scenarios upon which, in the last analysis, depended the
success or failure of their ventures. They seemed to be ignorant of, or
indifferent to, the illuminating generalization to be adduced from the
history of literature that there is nothing too good for the masses,
that that which survives in letters the blue pencil of posterity is the
best, not the mediocre or the worst. Had they found themselves several
centuries ago in the Mermaid Tavern at London, they would have turned
their backs upon Will Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and hurried out to the
inn-yard to hobnob with the stable-boys. And the tragic feature of the
situation lay in the fact that for a long period the autocrats of the
screen failed to realize that a scenario can not rise higher than its
source, that you can’t get blood out of a stone, nor a screen
masterpiece out of a cub office-boy.
But though these powers behind the films were for a long period blindly,
and often disastrously, indifferent to their highest interests in
connection with the sources from which they obtained the stories their
new tale-teller told to the millions, they displayed an enthusiastic
admiration for astronomy. They studied the stars. Would a given matinee
idol “screen well?” Would a certain popular actress endure the searching
ordeal of the camera? If they would, the public would flock to the
movie’s box-office even though the scenario-writers had done their
worst. Followed an era of star-gazing upon the part of the movie fans
and of slow but certain enlightenment upon the part of the directors and
producers. The latter discovered after a time that the fame of an actor
is no safeguard against the destructive influence of a structurally poor
picture-drama. They gradually had glimmerings of a basic truth,
knowledge of which in the past would have saved countless theatrical
managers from bankruptcy, namely, that, as Shakespeare sapiently
remarked, “the play’s the thing!” The telling of a story either on the
stage or on the screen is a justifiable venture, as a very wise and
rather jaded public knows, only if that story possesses certain elements
that make it as a tale worth while. Even Douglas Fairbanks would score a
failure in a dramatization of the multiplication-table.
But ordinary horse sense was acquired only slowly by the movies. It is
an amazing story of stupidity, reckless expenditure of money, emphasis
in the wrong place, exploitation of stars out of their legitimate orbit,
appeals to the lowest passions in human nature; of tragic failures and
inexplicable, actually laughable, successes, of cities built and
abandoned, of fortunes made and lost, of a new, marvellous, mysterious
art in the making—this tale of the kinetoscope in search of its kingdom.
But it is worth telling for many reasons, not the least of which is that
the coming of the screen into its own has had, and is having, a
disintegrating effect upon the commercialized stage. What the ultimate
outcome of this iconoclastic influence of the movie upon the stage is
likely to be is a subject that must be reserved for a later chapter, but
it is enlightening, in connection with the foregoing review of what may
be called the fly-by-night era of the films, to glance at what has been
happening to the American theatre during the years in which the picture
palaces have been rising from the slums to the avenues.
Walter Pritchard Eaton in _Scribner’s Magazine_ for November, 1922,
says:
As a means of supplying drama to America as a whole our
commercialized professional theatre has broken down. The reasons
need not concern us here. They are many, no doubt. One, of
course, is the rise of the motion pictures, which are cheaper to
present and to witness, and which enable the local theatre
manager to keep his house open six or seven days in the week.
Another reason is the increased cost of transportation. Another
reason is the complication of modern life, even in the
“provinces,” so that the theatre, having to compete against
other attractions (or distractions), no longer appeals so
universally, or at any rate no longer finds all the people with
the surplus cash to patronize it at the excessive modern scale
of prices.
Later on in the essay quoted above its author speaks of himself as one
of those “who love the drama and believe the movies a mean and
stupefying substitute for its imaginative and intellectual appeal.” If
Mr. Eaton’s opinion of the screen, as thus forcibly expressed, is based
upon its past, the past of a Prodigal Son utterly unworthy of the fatted
calf, it is not, as the reader of what I have thus far written will
admit, without reasonable justification. But is not the present of the
movies encouraging, is not their future promising? Succeeding chapters
of this book will, I hope, go to prove that Mr. Eaton is too hasty in
assuming that eventually the screen may not atone for any seeming damage
it may have done to the stage.
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CHAPTER V
THE MOVIE DEVELOPS A CONSCIENCE
_Grows up in the Slums—Used and Abused as a Money-Getter—Goes from Bad
to Worse—Will Hays Called to the Rescue—Pulpit, Press and Playwrights
Thunder Against it—The Responsibility of the Public—The Light in the
Darkness._
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CHAPTER V
THE MOVIE DEVELOPS A CONSCIENCE
NOT long ago the good people of Stratford-on-Avon, England, arose in
their might, held a great mass meeting, and decreed that Shakespeare’s
birthplace should not be desecrated by the movies. Lacking sufficient
clairvoyance to realize that possibly the motion picture of the near
future, with its natural colors and its synchronization of movement with
the tones of the human voice, may be destined to give Shakespeare a new
lease of life and a larger public than he has hitherto possessed, the
Stratford-on-Avonites were not without justification for the protest
they registered against the more or less disreputable pictures that
threatened to invade a shrine hitherto dedicated to the loftiest
achievement the realm of the drama can boast. But Shakespeare’s
birthplace will see the day when its inhabitants will repent of the
narrow-mindedness they have shown as regards the movies.
It is not for us Americans, however, to jeer at Stratford-on-Avon for
its aggressive conservatism. Our immediate ancestors blocked the wheels
of progress in many mischievous, if not laughable, ways. The School
Board of Lancaster, Ohio, adopted in 1826 the following resolution:
“Such things as railroads are impossibilities and rank infidelity. If
God had designed that His intelligent creatures should travel at the
frightful speed of fifteen miles per hour by steam, He would clearly
have foretold it through His holy prophets.” The advent of the bath-tub,
destined to be one of the crowning glories of America, was denounced by
our medical men as a menace to the public health. Philadelphia, Pa., in
1843, endeavored by ordinance to prohibit all bathing between the months
of November and March. Boston, Mass., in 1845, made bathing, except when
prescribed by a physician, unlawful, and, at about the same time,
Virginia put a tax of thirty dollars a year upon every bath-tub in a
commonwealth that can claim to be the cradle of American liberty!
Whatsoever is new under the sun must fight for its place in the sun. For
centuries the printing-press had to struggle for freedom against
powerful restrictive influences that looked upon it as “an agent of the
Devil.” The telegraph, telephone, bicycle, automobile and wireless have
all had their bigoted opponents, who feared that the broadening of
humanity’s contacts would become an increasing menace to their own
narrow beliefs and habits. Is it strange, then, that the movie, a new
form of art qualified to make an instant appeal to both the good and the
bad in human nature, should have had, at the outset of its career, a
hard struggle to justify itself to the more conservative elements of the
community? Bad boy that he was in his earlier years, the movie made it
difficult for a public largely puritanical in its origins and tendencies
to believe that the youngster could be reformed, that he had in him
untried and unmeasurable powers for upward progress, that he was a
prodigal son of Art and Science fated to exercise a controlling
influence upon the destinies of the race.
However, there is an element in the make-up of the American people that
leads it, even at the eleventh hour, to institute reforms whenever an
institution seemingly worth saving must either be heroically treated or
permitted to go completely to the dogs. There came a time when negro
slavery must be destroyed if our Federal Constitution was to survive. At
an enormous cost of life and treasure, the blacks were freed and the
Union preserved. It became apparent recently to the American public that
there were destructive influences at work within our three most popular
forms of amusement, that our stage, our base-ball diamond and our movie
screen were in jeopardy from internal perils, as were our governmental
institutions in the early sixties.
What Judge Landis is endeavoring to do for our national game and
Augustus Thomas for our stage is, in a general way, what Will H. Hays
has been called upon to effect in the field of the motion picture. For a
quarter of a century the movies in America, if not going from bad to
worse had shown no marked signs of repentance for their early
indiscretions. Cut-throat competition had long exercised its evil
influence upon the industry and the law of the jungle had prevailed in
its financial affairs. How this new commercial activity, despite its
unbusinesslike methods, its apparent disregard of the economic laws that
are said to underlie all competitive industries, and its seemingly
happy-go-lucky indifference to the multiplication-table actually forged
its way upward until it placed itself high on the list of the business
enterprises of this country is a marvel and a mystery that only
financial wizards could explain.
When Will H. Hays resigned as Postmaster General of the United States to
enter, in a position of commanding influence, the motion-picture field
he became an important factor in an industry whose growth has been one
of the marvels of the world’s commercial history. It was no longer a
peripatetic gambler, out-at-heels one day and affluent the next, but a
vast business enterprise sufficiently prosperous to afford the luxury of
a general house-cleaning. It is easier for the well-to-do to be
respectable than for the down-and-outs, and the movies had reached a
point financially when, without disastrous monetary sacrifice, they
could essay the task of shortening their list of sins of omission and
commission.
Going to the root recently of the new influences at work in the motion
picture realm, and of his official connection with them, Hays said:
There has been some query as to just what this effort which the
industry is making at this time is all about. It is simply that
those men who make and distribute pictures have associated
themselves to do jointly those things in which they are mutually
but non-competitively interested, having as the chief purposes
of such association two great objectives—and I quote verbatim
from the formal articles of association, which have been filed
in the office of the Secretary of State at Albany, N.Y.:
“Establishing and maintaining the highest possible moral and
artistic standards in motion picture production and developing
the educational as well as the entertainment value of the motion
picture.”
Later on in this book, we shall have occasion to refer in detail to what
Hays and his colleagues have accomplished in their efforts to improve
the tone of the movies. But just here it is well to direct the course of
our narrative into the two channels referred to in the clause of the
producers’ agreement above quoted, following the flood of movies devoted
to mere amusement for awhile with searching eyes, and later on making a
survey of the rapidly broadening stream of pictures designed for
educational purposes. From the latter, perhaps, it may be expedient for
us to go forward with some confidence toward a more minute consideration
of the dynamics lurking in the screen for the furtherance of a method of
world-wide enlightenment that may eventually save civilization from the
disintegrating forces by which, both externally and internally, it is
menaced.
“The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world” is a sweeping
generalization intended by the poet to be a compliment to motherhood.
Whether it is a compliment or a condemnation depends wholly upon one’s
point of view regarding the world. If the world is worth saving, the
hand that rocks the cradle is worthy of all honor; if it isn’t, then
motherhood has been unjustifiably glorified. Believing, personally, that
the human race is not without many reasonable claims to salvation, we
turn curiously to the movies in their capacity as a public amusement to
see whether, leaving their educational function for further
consideration, they display as a pastime anything that looks like a
gleam of hope for the regeneration of the race.
Have we, in fact, cause for optimism regarding the future of the
amusement screen? We find to-day the press, the pulpit and the
playwrights denouncing the shortcomings of the movies, chastising their
secret faults and their open transgressions; editors, preachers,
dramatists posing as Savonarolas at a spiritual crisis in the career of
a young but alarmingly potent world power. These are portents in the sky
that promise well for the future of the screen. If our leading thinkers,
writers and publicists, yes, and picture producers, were indifferent to
the sins of omission and commission attributable for a quarter of a
century to the movie its case would be hopeless. But it is worth saving,
as the best minds in our country well know, and the criticism that it is
always undergoing is a most encouraging phenomenon.
The regeneration of the movies must be both through external and
internal sources. A producer who recently relieved his over-burdened
soul in _Collier’s Weekly_ puts the whole matter in a nut-shell when he
says:
We must have better pictures. And to get them we need these two
things: inside the industry, the higher standards and leadership
that can only come in with intelligent capital; and outside the
industry, the support and encouragement of such good pictures as
are already made. We of the motion-picture industry who stand
for more intelligent pictures can only provide them if you on
the outside, in addition to criticising in no uncertain terms
the stupid films that offend you, will take the trouble to hunt
up, and go to see, and boost, the photoplays that are good
enough to merit your interest. When you do that we can have
better movies.
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CHAPTER VI
THE MOVIE AND THE LIBRARY
_Its Rise from Mush to Masterpieces—Its Debt to D. W. Griffith—“The
Birth of a Nation”—A New Way to Tell Old Tales—“The Three
Musketeers”—“The Count of Monte Cristo”—“The Four Horsemen”—How
Book-Worms May Renew their Youth._
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CHAPTER VI
THE MOVIE AND THE LIBRARY
DR. JEKYLL has begun belatedly to make his elevating influence felt in
the movies. Press, pulpit, producers, are backing him in his fight
against Mr. Hyde. But the latter seems to be a psychological cat with
nine lives. The power which he has exercised for evil in the realm of
the photoplay for a quarter of a century he refuses to relinquish
without a fight, and an immediate and complete victory for Dr. Jekyll
only the most optimistic dare to predict.
Look at a list of movie titles recently compiled by a somewhat cynical
observer desirous of proving his proposition that for one photoplay
worthy of approval the screen shows a score whose appeal is only to
either the depraved or the unintelligent: “Only a Shop-girl,” “The Lure
of Broadway,” “More to be Pitied than Scorned,” “The Darling of the
Rich,” “Deserted at the Altar,” “The Woman Gives,” “Thorns and Orange
Blossoms,” “The Curse of Drink,” “How Women Love,” “From Rags to
Riches.” Month after month, year after year, the type of mind that
considers Laura Jean Libbey’s novels admirable dominates too large a
percentage of the output of the movie studios. The dime-novelish taint
that was placed upon the screen at the outset of its career has been
until recently only a shade lighter than it was in the beginning.
An old fight is being waged upon a new battleground. Generation after
generation the so-called “elevation of the stage” has been a project
dear to the hearts of many worthy men and women. The scope of the
age-long engagement between the powers of darkness and the powers of
light to dominate the drama has been vastly enlarged, and while the
adherents of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are still in conflict for
possession of the stage, their multiplied cohorts are also fighting
tooth and nail to put good or evil, God or the Devil, progress or
retrogression, civilization or its opposite, in control of the screen.
In other words, both the stage and the photoplay are outward and visible
signs of an inward and spiritual combat the outcome of which is to
determine the question whether mankind’s future course is to be upward
or downward. For this reason the screen, appealing to a larger clientèle
than is influenced by the stage, and one more in need of the uplift that
may save humanity from a return to barbarism, becomes logically an
object worthy of the most earnest consideration and study by all those
of us who believe that Man does not live by bread alone, that the soul
of the race can be saved if the various media for impressing it are
purged of their evil influences. If it is true that there are sermons in
stones, it follows, as the night the day, that there may lurk within the
dynamics of the screen the possibility of divine revelations. For be it
said right here, the first universal language will be capable ultimately
of a saving grace to the race only if it finds a message to deliver to
humanity that is not of the earth earthy. It’s the man behind the gun
who wins battles. It will be the prophet and seer and poet behind the
screen who may eventually bring about the triumph of mankind over the
powers of darkness. But when? That is the question. If those in control
of the screen to-day should see a group of seers, prophets and poets
invading their stronghold there would be something doing most
detrimental to the dignity of the interlopers. The camera might, in
fact, catch a film, to be subsequently entitled “High-brows Bounced from
a Studio,” that would tickle the eyes of millions of groundlings. In
short, the real power and glory of the screen are still concealed in the
womb of Time. But their advent and their triumph are inevitable.
Otherwise, a polyglot world would be doomed to go eventually to the
dogs—a racial cataclysm too horrible to be contemplated.
Let us look more in detail into the data which furnish reason for the
hope expressed above that the screen may eventually fulfill its loftiest
mission to mankind. What is there in the phenomena at present manifested
in the realm of the movies that justifies our optimism? Suppose we turn
first to D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” recently dubbed by a
noted critic “a celluloid _Peter Pan_ which will never grow old.” Year
after year this early and revolutionary achievement of a far-sighted
producer finds a new and enthusiastic public, opening the eyes, as it
did at the outset, of despondent doubters to the possibilities of the
screen as a dignified and uplifting interpreter of significant crises in
the history of a people. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” was also the
birth of a new era for the screen.
I have taken the liberty above to refer to my early inclination to
become a movie fan, to my disgust and revolt as the screen for years
failed to show regard for its higher possibilities, and to my
comparatively recent renewal of a hope that had been almost destroyed by
the photoplay’s youthful indiscretions—to use a term rather mild and
inadequate. I am sure that I shall speak of an experience that came to a
large number of Americans, who had given up the movies as hopeless, when
I say that “The Birth of a Nation” revived in me the conviction that the
screen has before it a great future, a splendid mission, a message to
deliver to humanity that may atone eventually for its juvenile sins of
omission and commission. For the first time, so far as I was concerned,
this Griffith picture revealed to me a fact, of which I had long been
vaguely conscious, that the screen was not inherently a medium for
pandering to the grossest passions in human nature, for visualizing
merely the social phenomena that years ago gave to the Jack Harkaway
stories and the _Police Gazette_ their vogue. D. W. Griffith had put
into concrete form a conception of the movies as a vehicle of combined
entertainment and enlightenment that had, for the first time, made all
things worth while possible to the screen. In that corner of the Temple
of Fame dedicated to the real benefactors of the latest, and probably
the last, method of telling great stories to a tale-loving race, to the
names of Muybridge, Edison, Eastman and Paul must, in all justice, be
added the name of Griffith. And there are other producers worthy of
mention in this connection. Rex Ingram, who gave us “The Four Horsemen”
and “The Prisoner of Zenda”; William de Mille, whom we have to thank for
“Clarence” and “Grumpy”; Fred Niblo, who screened “The Famous Mrs. Fair”
and “Blood and Sand,” come to mind as among those who have seen, as has
Griffith, the higher possibilities of the movie.
Of course, we have with us always the carper and the skeptic, the
pessimist who argues that one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and that
Will H. Hays, capable of organizing victory for the Republican Party and
of improving our Postal Service, is essaying an impossible task when he
endeavors to widen and make permanent the loftier scope that Griffith
and other praiseworthy producers have given to the screen. But these
atrabilious knockers, short-sighted, narrow-minded, and unimaginative,
have failed to take a bird’s-eye view of the varied influences and
enterprises now in action with the avowed purpose of perpetuating the
impetus given to the better type of photoplay by the permanent success
of “The Birth of a Nation.”
Cannot even the most uncompromising pessimist admit that from those
pioneer days when a crude scenario written by a cub office-boy was
screened, for want of better material at hand, to the present moment
when there is nothing too majestic in the imaginings of
master-fictionists to deter the camera, become a dramatist, from making
use thereof, there has been an upward trend of the movies that is not
merely encouraging but intoxicating? There may be, here and there, of
course, a man of letters, not sufficiently broadened by his wide
reading, who considers the screening of an immortal novel by Dumas,
Dickens, Victor Hugo, or other wonder-worker in narrative literature, a
kind of sacrilege which he will always refuse to countenance. To him the
Robin Hood of song and story is a revered personage upon whom Douglas
Fairbanks has cast of late something of a slight. Let Alfred Noyes write
musical verse about the picturesque bandits of Sherwood Forest, but, in
the name of the Great God of Letters, don’t allow the new art that the
screen has made possible lay profane hands upon a hero whom Literature
adopted long ago!
Little good will it do to their ridiculous cause, of course, for
lettered reactionaries at this late day to attempt to protect the
library from the scenario-writer. The screen has an insatiable maw for
dramatic tales, old and new, and more and more, as time passes, will the
telling of tales in the universal language of the eye become a factor in
race-enlightenment.
Nor is the screen really committing sacrilege in making use of the
literary achievements of master tale-tellers. Since the movies first
began to present photoplays based upon the world’s great novels, there
has been a constantly increasing demand at our circulating libraries for
the works of worth-while authors possessing the narrative gift. The
telephone actually increased the vogue of the telegraph. The wireless is
enlarging the working-field of the telephone. By the same token, the
screen is not narrowing but broadening the realm of letters. The appeal
that it makes to countless millions who have been hitherto indifferent
to, or ignorant of, the outstanding achievements of our great
imaginative writers is a new and potent factor in the intellectual and
spiritual life of the people.
Furthermore, the movie, in its traffic with the best in fiction, is of
service to the man of letters who is sufficiently open-minded to welcome
new contacts with old masterpieces. The screen does not merely bring
great stories down to the masses, it frequently revivifies the
enthusiasm of the aging and jaded book-worm for great stories. Is it
disloyalty to my degree of Doctor of Humane Letters to confess that
within the year my youth has been temporarily renewed for a few hours as
I watched the screen telling me in a new way Dumas’s stories of “The
Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo”? Would I not be a
hopeless literary snob if I refused to admit that I derived pure and
unadulterated joy from the unfolding before my eyes of half-forgotten
tales which had been among the keenest delights of my romance-loving
boyhood? If this be treason, at all events it’s honesty. I have acquired
the habit of late of patronizing the theatre that advertises a
picture-play derived from some novel, old or new, and recounts, by means
of the silent drama, a story worthy of repetition.
While on this phase of my general subject, I find that I can go
conscientiously further than I have above and assert that the screen
may, in certain instances, present an author’s narrative with even
greater impressiveness than his printed book was able to compass. “The
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” was, to the minds of many competent
critics, a much overrated novel. It displayed not only the merits of
Ibañez as a story-teller but also his grave defects. His tale was rather
clumsily developed, and its interest was not cumulative. It is hardly
going too far to say that the author narrowly avoided handicapping his
achievement by an anti-climax.
But the screen presentation of “The Four Horsemen” was absolutely free
from the shortcomings above ascribed to the novel. Not only was it
marvellously effective in its appeal to the eye, but the logical and
dramatic unfolding of the basic story was a striking revelation of the
valuable service that an expert scenario-writer may render, now and
then, to the professional writer of novels. For the many outrages that
fictionists have received at the hands of the film-makers some atonement
is offered at times, and “The Four Horsemen” as a photoplay proves that
the pot may sometimes be unjust in calling the kettle black.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The screen may commit—yes,
frequently has committed—mayhem, assault and battery and actual murder
upon the revered form of some great masterpiece of narrative literature;
but you who are well-read, you who love the “old melodious lays that
softly melt the ages through,” and the tales told by the great
romancers, pause before you recklessly indict a new art, groping its way
toward a full realization of its possibilities and powers. By turning
your haughty back upon a photoplay made from some famous novel, you may
conceivably lose an opportunity for drinking again from that Fountain of
Eternal Youth which you, more fortunate than Ponce de Leon, discovered
one day in a library when you were still a boy.
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CHAPTER VII
THE MOVIE’S APPETITE FOR PLOTS
_Ravenous for Screen-Food—A Ghoul Exhausting the
Grave-Yards—Contemporary Novelists Fail to Supply the Demand—A New Art,
a New Technique and a New Possibility—Scenario-Writing To-Day and
To-Morrow—Will the Screen Beget its own Hugos and Barries?_
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CHAPTER VII
THE MOVIE’S APPETITE FOR PLOTS
THE need of motion-picture producers for new raw material for the screen
grows apace, and is constantly harder to satisfy. Otherwise, the camera
would not at present be endeavoring to make pictures of Einstein’s
Theory of Relativity. It is rumored that Bergson, Freud and Coué have
been approached by hard-pressed producers on the subject of their movie
picture rights. The dilemma confronting the photoplay promoters is more
serious than that which for generations past has worried the theatrical
managers. The appeal of the dramatist is to tens of thousands of people,
that of the scenario-writer to millions. It doesn’t require much of a
head for mathematics to realize that the food-supply of the screen is
much more quickly exhausted than that of the stage.
In so far as the libraries are concerned, the movies have begun to
exhaust the resources vouchsafed to them by the writers of the past.
Their fate is like that which menaces our nation in connection with our
forests. For many years we have been cutting down our trees without
taking thought for the morrow by providing for a new growth of forest
where our improvident axe has had its wanton way. The screen has
recklessly leveled both its giant sequoias and its scrub-oaks and finds
itself in sore straits for timber that will stand the strain it puts
upon it.
The younger generation of fiction-writers are not furnishing the studios
with material with which to repair the gaps made as the romances of the
past are, one by one, fed to the capacious maw of the hungry screen.
Mark Twain asserted that there were only seven original stories in
existence—or was it thirty?—and inferred that the latest novel by the
most original of contemporary writers must be, of necessity, a variation
upon one of these ancient, basic yarns. There still exists the suspicion
that our greatest humorist was “spoofing us,” as an Englishman would
say. But the output of fiction to-day, both in America and Europe, leads
to the conclusion that our imaginative writers were not born to the
purple as master plot-makers. They repeatedly shock us, sometimes
disgust us, often interest and amuse us, constantly furnish us with food
for reflection and apprehension, and once in awhile startle us by their
brilliancy—but, for the most part, their novels do not “screen well.”
They lack, as a class, the absorbing narrative interest that makes tales
like “Monte Cristo,” “Les Misérables,” “Lorna Doone,” “A Tale of Two
Cities,” and many other masterpieces of the older generation of
romancers, effective on the screen. They seem to be influenced by the
fear that Mark Twain was right in his depressing generalization, and
that it is better to put forth a novel with little or no plot than to be
accused of employing modern methods for telling an ancient tale.
From these modern fictionists the screen asks for bread and they give it
a stone—sometimes a precious or semi-precious stone, but not what the
newest and hungriest of the arts needs for its continued sustenance.
This is the more remarkable because of the fact that we are living in an
age more stimulating to the imaginative mind than any of its
predecessors. We are called upon to rebuild a shattered world, to
salvage what was of value in a dethroned civilization and to reconstruct
the affairs of mankind upon new bases.
It is no figure of speech [remarks President Harding, in his
recent message to Congress], to say that we have come to the
test of our civilization. The world has been passing—is to-day
passing—through a great crisis. The conduct of war itself is not
more difficult than the solution of the problems which
necessarily follow.
In other words, the human race since 1914 has been going through
unprecedented experiences which of necessity furnish material for the
teller of romances, the builder of plots, the novelist, the dramatist,
the scenario-writer, richer, more varied, more illuminating than has
been hitherto vouchsafed to imaginative genius. But, as Virgil once
grumbled, “the mountains were in labor and brought forth a little
mouse.” Science is going forward to-day from one startling triumph to
another, the creative imaginations of its greatest minds rising to
adequate control of the new and splendid opportunities recent progress
has brought to them. But Art, especially that field of it reserved to
the origination of dramatic tales, seems to be suffering under a blight
that forces it to give birth either to monstrosities or to weaklings,
and to clothe its worthless offspring in garments fashioned to delude
the weak-minded into believing that what is offensive to common-sense
and good taste is necessarily a child of genius. The screen, with fame
and fortune to bestow upon the teller of tales, is forced to become a
ghoul haunting old graveyards at night because the living are unworthy
of a great opportunity, because the fictionist of to-day goes far afield
in quest of strange gods instead of worshipping at the eternal and
inspiring altars which gave inspiration to the master-romancers of the
past.
The situation confronting the photoplay producer at this moment, as
outlined above, bids fair to become worse rather than better, unless
some radical solution of the problem dealing with the constant renewal
of worthy dramatic material for the screen can be found. The most
disreputable type of movie drama has fallen into a permanent condition
of innocuous desuetude, in so far, at least, as the vast majority of
picture theatres are concerned. It has been replaced by photoplays of a
much higher order, until to-day the screen is engaged in giving to the
public splendid presentations of great masterpieces of fiction and drama
entitling it to approval and sympathetic encouragement. But you can’t
eat your cake and have it too. You can’t feed an audience of several
millions daily with the cream of the world’s imaginative literature
without shortly resorting to skimmed milk and eventually coming to the
end of your lacteal resources.
The point toward which we have been driving is this: The movie, with its
stupendous resources of capital, its enterprising and ambitious
personnel, its right to believe, through its experiences of a quarter of
a century, that no obstacle can check its triumphant progress, is like
an army that can conquer the world only on the condition that its
commissariat solves the problem of food-supply. It is possible, of
course, that when the screen has fully mastered the technique involved
in color reproduction and the synchronization of voice and action the
photoplays now attracting the movie public may receive a new lease of
life. We who have enjoyed, for example, “The Count of Monte Cristo” on
the screen, despite the fact that neither color, sound nor perspective
assisted the development of Dumas’s absorbing story, would be inclined
to give it our attention again when Edmond Dantes is no longer clad in
black-and-white and has found his voice. But it is best to let the
marvels of the future take care of themselves. For the present, we must
confine ourselves to the screen as it is, and as it seems likely to
remain for an indefinite time to come.
However, there must come a crisis in the future, under present
conditions, when the movie producers will be hampered by a lack of
screen material unless they have been far-sighted enough to provide
against this contingency. There are among them forward-looking
exploiters of the latest story-telling medium who have formulated, in
rather a vague and general way, a possible solution of the problem
confronting them. They are encouraging writers possessing imagination
and originality to take part in the development of a new form of the
dramaturgic art which makes direct rather than indirect use of the
screen. In other words, the movie displays a growing tendency to demand
from creative minds its own special requirements; to turn, so to speak,
away from the libraries to the librettists. Eventually, it is safe to
assert, there will come a day when scenario-writers will not spend a
large part of their time listening to echoes for inspiration but will
beget screen plays from internal instead of external impulses. In a not
distant future, it is reasonable to predict, the movie will, of dire
necessity, develop its own type of dramatic story-tellers whose
fecundity may make Mark Twain’s assertion, quoted above, seem more than
ever humorous rather than accurate. The movie must do this or run out
eventually of screen material, for the dead tale-tellers have little
more to offer it, and contemporary novelists have not, from the picture
producers’ standpoint, risen to a great opportunity.
Of course, the future of the movie, no matter how glorious it may be,
must be, of necessity, circumscribed, as are fiction and the drama, by
the basic limitations applying to human passions. Love, hatred, loyalty,
jealousy, ambition, generosity, cupidity, philanthropy, selfishness, and
the other dominating motives impelling men and women to beget the raw
material of drama will not be increased in number because the screen has
developed a new method for telling tales to a story-loving race. While
the widely-accepted generalization that human nature never changes may
not be true, it can not be questioned that the scenario-writer of the
future will be forced to deal with the same manifestations of Man’s
psychic make-up which engaged the attention of Æschylus, Sophocles,
Molière, Shakespeare, and the lesser dramatists. But as the nations
to-day are striving to find a new way to pay old debts, so is the screen
seeking a new way to present the eternal dramatic clash of old passions.
As the kinetoscope thirty years ago begot a novel form of amusement, so
is its successor, the movie screen, bringing into being a new type of
dramatic technique. The scenario-writer is something besides a
combination of story-teller and playwright. He is experimenting in a
youthful artistic medium, whose resources and possibilities are as yet
only partially revealed, and he has become a pioneer in a realm that
belongs to a kind of specialist bearing resemblance to both the novelist
and dramatist but differing from them in ways peculiarly his own.
The future welfare of the screen, in so far as it is confined to the
amusement field, depends largely upon how stimulating to men and women
possessing creative imagination this new method of tale-telling, rapidly
developing its own technique, may prove to be. Will the movie produce
its own Hugos, Sardous, Stevensons, Barries,—perhaps, its
Shakespeare—who, fascinated by the most democratic method yet devised
for genius to appeal to the masses, shall eschew the old methods for
telling new tales and reach immortality by means of the photoplay
scenario? If you who have read the preceding chapters of this book,
believe, as does the writer, that the only universal language yet
devised by Man is the most important contribution to the spiritual
resources of the race that has been made for centuries, you will be
inclined to hope that scenario-writing for the screen may become an
occupation worthy, in succeeding generations, of the exclusive devotion
of many imaginative creators.
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CHAPTER VIII
THE MOVIE AND THE CONTINUITY WRITER
_The Screen Demands the Inevitable—Movie Audiences no Longer Easily
Fooled—They can Tell a Hawk from a Hernshaw—The Value of the Screen as a
Mirror of Life—Man’s First Universal Means to Self-Knowledge._
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CHAPTER VIII
THE MOVIE AND THE CONTINUITY WRITER
WAS it Brander Matthews, Henry Van Dyke, Richard Burton or Clayton
Hamilton who asserted that any given novel must be placed in the
category of either the Impossible, the Improbable or the Inevitable?
Whoever it was, he helped to clarify the thinking of any writer who may
find himself dealing with the topic of screen tales and tale-tellers, of
the movie drama and the continuity writer. Every art has its own special
sins of omission and commission. The poet who tells a story in verse may
take liberties denied to the novelist relating the same story. The
continuity writer who places this tale upon the screen enjoys certain
prerogatives denied to either the poet or the novelist, but he is also
bound by limitations and restrictions inherent in the medium through
which he is working as a raconteur.
It is not easy to fool a movie audience in regard to the Inevitable.
Jove may nod now and then when he is engaged upon an epic poem or a
romantic or realistic novel but he must remain wide awake when he is
writing scenarios for the screen. Scott, Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Read,
Dumas, Victor Hugo, Thackeray may “get away,” to use a slang phrase,
with a lapse of memory, an injected anachronism, even the reintroduction
of a character who has been killed off in an earlier chapter. The
impressive flow of their narrative, their charm of style, and the
tendency of a reader to forget minor details in what he has already read
of a tale, have enabled the great story-tellers to commit strange,
almost unbelievable, blunders in the unfolding of their narratives
without seriously marring the value of their work. But when a
tale-teller is employing the movie screen he can not afford to take
liberties with the basic proposition that seeing is _not_ believing
unless there is the logic of the Inevitable in the sequence of the
events portrayed.
The above is asserted under a full realization of the fact that for
years the story-telling films tried to the breaking-point the patience
of their more enlightened supporters by frequently sacrificing the
Inevitable to the Expedient, allowing the logic of events to go to the
bow-wows because a reel must be cut, or a movie star exploited, or a
scene over-emphasized for the sake of its advertising value. Lincoln
asserted that you can’t fool all the people all the time, but at one
period it seemed as if the screen were stubbornly endeavoring to perform
this miracle. A picture-play, whatsoever might have been its origin,
succumbed, as a rule, to a tendency to underrate the general
intelligence, the power of memory, and the knowledge of life and human
nature possessed by the average movie audience.
But times have changed. Continuity—that is, the spinal-column of a
picture-play,—manages, for the most part, to keep the cervical, dorsal
and lumbar vertebræ of the narrative in a normal juxtaposition, with the
result that dramatic monstrosities are gradually disappearing from the
screen. It is still possible to fool some of the people all the time,
but it no longer pays, so far as movie audiences are concerned, to throw
common-sense into the discard when the screen essays to tell a dramatic
story. Recently in a small city within a hundred miles of New York the
proprietor of a motion-picture theatre spoke to me of a great change
that he had observed of late in the attitude of his audiences toward the
silent drama.
They won’t stand for many things they overlooked a short time
ago. They demand both logic and accuracy in our pictures. South
Sea scenes must be taken in the South Seas and African wild
beasts must be filmed in their native habitat or our patrons
revolt. At the present rate of progress, the next generation,
through the aid of the screen, will become so worldly-wise that
even county fairs will be made safe for the farmer.
There is much that is worth serious consideration in the above quoted
opinion of one whose professional welfare depends upon the keenness of
his judgment regarding the trend of public opinion in connection with
the screen. Somewhat quaintly he gives expression to the conviction that
the movie and its clientele react upon each other and that the general
tendency of this mutual action and reaction has been toward the
elevation of the screen and the enlightenment of its patrons. In this
elevation of the screen the continuity writer has, of course, played a
leading part. The time has gone by when he could recklessly substitute
the Impossible or the Improbable for the Inevitable and retain his
professional standing. That he has been guilty of sins of omission and
commission, has shown at times a lack of imagination, and has frequently
failed to conform to the axiom that a story, no matter through what
medium it is told, must, to be effective, preserve to the end the
element of suspense is undoubtedly true. The fact is that the ideal
continuity writer is, as is the poet, born not made. The technique of
scenario writing can be acquired by anybody with average intelligence
but to employ it for the highest possible purposes of the screen is to
show the possession of something akin to genius. Such being the case,
the law of the survival of the fittest, working out in the studios, has
decreed that though many are called to continuity work but few are
chosen in the end to lead the film drama toward the heights to which it
is destined to attain.
Suspense! Ah, there’s the rub! To tell a dramatic story by means of
pictures to a miscellaneous collection of movie fans, wise in the
niceties of this new method of narration, in such a way that the
interest of the on-lookers is won at the outset, maintained throughout
succeeding scenes, and intensified as the climax is reached, is to
accomplish a feat requiring a combination of technical skill and
imaginative inspiration that places a real triumph of the continuity
writer’s art high upon the list of worth-while creative achievements.
That such a large percentage of picture-plays have failed to satisfy the
demand of audiences for drama that stresses the Inevitable, conforms to
the logic underlying real life, and preserves to the final
screen-curtain the suspense that it is the mission of dramaturgic art to
beget is not strange, therefore, when we take into consideration the
natural and acquired powers demanded of the ideal continuity writer.
Furthermore, it must be borne in mind that the scenario-maker has been,
and will continue to be, blamed for shortcomings of the screen that
cannot be justly laid at his door. He is more or less at the mercy of
the director and the film-cutter, a victim frequently of exigencies
against which his devotion to the underlying principles of dramatic
exposition cannot prevail. A picture play that may be effectively
complete when presented in a metropolitan theatre may be so eviscerated
for provincial use that the continuity writer, lauded in the cities, is
often forced to undergo unjustified suburban censure. But, as is
suggested in another chapter, the comparatively new art of the
continuity writer is bound eventually to overcome its earlier handicaps
and, in its bestowal upon the race of a novel medium through which
creative genius can manifest itself, will beget a type of
super-scenario-maker to which the screen’s future splendid achievements
must be, of necessity, largely due.
The meaning of life Man doesn’t know. Art is, and always has been, Man’s
testimony to the fact that he believes that life has a meaning and that
his quest for that meaning is not destined to be forever futile.
Recently the race came into possession of what seemed to be at first a
new toy, not to be taken too seriously, but worthy, as it presently
appeared, of development as a most fascinating addition to our
recreational resources. But of late the public has begun to realize
vaguely that the screen is becoming something of more vital importance
to mankind than merely a plaything that serves only as a time-killer.
The fact to which the provincial manager above quoted called my
attention, namely, that movie audiences are constantly emphasizing their
demand for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
possesses a significance that is entitled to the most earnest
consideration. Is it possible that Man has come finally into possession
of an art-form enabling him to come nearer to solving the riddle of the
Sphinx we call Life than has been hitherto possible?
There will be those among my readers, I fully realize, who will feel
that my inclination all through this book has been to take the screen
too seriously, to overrate its psychical dynamics and to underrate its
gross materialism, to prophesy for it a future that could be made
possible only if producers became archangels and movie patrons pilgrims
to a shrine where the soul of the race became no longer of the earth
earthy. Well, so be it. Perhaps, as regards the subject in hand, I am
allowing my naturally optimistic liver to dominate my habitually
pessimistic brain. But neither I nor my critics will live long enough to
know which of us was in the right. A conviction, nevertheless, has come
to me of late out of which I am sure that I shall never be
shaken—namely, that when Man recently found a way to stop living, now
and then, that he might look at life, he took the greatest step forward
that he has ever taken toward becoming a philosopher. He pauses
periodically in these days before a screen and sees, as he never did
before, what manner of creature he is. By so doing, he must eventually
attain to a self-knowledge such as he has hitherto craved but has not
known how to acquire.
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CHAPTER IX
THE MOVIE IMPROVES ITS MORALS
_War and Love Degraded—The Crook and the Vampire—Pursuers and
Pursued—The Box-Office Finally Vindicates Dr. Jekyll—The Photoplay’s
Marvellous Future—Booths and Barrymores Pass, Shakespeare Remains—Survey
of the Screen as an Amusement Concluded._
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CHAPTER IX
THE MOVIE IMPROVES ITS MORALS
FOR ages the interest of the individual in dramatic episodes in real
life was in direct ratio to his propinquity to the locality in which
these episodes occurred. Until recently, a civil war in China seemed to
be of less significance to the average New Yorker than a Tong outbreak
in Chinatown, just as to his ancestors Aaron Burr’s treasonable schemes
were of greater moment than Napoleon’s efforts at world-dominion. But
the New Yorker has learned, since 1914, that what happens in Peking or
Canton may affect him more vitally than anything which may occur in Mott
or Pell Street. Against his own volition he has become, perforce, a
citizen of the world and is compelled to subscribe to Terence’s dictum,
sensationally delivered to the Romans centuries ago: “_Homo sum, humani
nihil a me alienum puto._”
This change in the mental attitude of the average American toward what
may be called the real perspective of current events, a change that has
had an effect upon the screen as a peripatetic journalist by making it
constantly more cosmopolitan, has not as yet revolutionized its
activities in its earlier and more important rôle as a photoplay
producer. As a medium for drama the screen is only just beginning to
break away from the influences that controlled it when it first set out
on its career as a pioneer in a new art, namely, the silent presentation
of plays and stories. It is still necessary for us who enjoy a photoplay
of real merit to exercise care at the entrance to a movie theatre lest
we be confronted presently by a screen drama unworthy the attention of
intelligent observers. Why this deplorable situation continues to exist
it is worth our while to consider.
There are those among the erudite who assert that the oldest of the arts
is Poetry. Like Lord Byron, mankind “lisped in numbers, for the numbers
came.” Homer and his brother bards, Latin, Teutonic, Norse, twanged
their lyres, harshly or majestically, as the case might be, in
glorification of only two themes, namely, War and Love. And so was it
later on with the troubadours and minnesingers, they harped and sang the
splendors and the mysteries of combat and of passion. Long ago was Man’s
belligerency set to word-music and the martial hero owes to the poets
the false and misleading radiance that throughout the ages has
surrounded his name and deeds. And when they sang of love it was the
love of a Lochinvar for a maiden not of a Lincoln for a people.
The youngest of the arts, like the oldest, has confined itself
practically to war and love. But the screen drama has been more
reprehensible than poetry in that, in its youth, it has chosen to
glorify the kind of warfare that is least worthy of public exploitation,
namely, the eternal conflict that goes on between the lawless and the
law-abiding, between the crook and the constable, between the underworld
and the upper. Realizing that the scenario-writer, like the playwright,
must base a dramatic story upon some kind of clash or combat, our
photoplay producers for nearly a quarter of a century have permitted the
screen to concern itself too often with a crude type of melodrama that
was untrue to life and offensive to good taste, obtaining the clash
essential to its being by the same methods employed by the
dime-novelists of fifty years ago.
And as the screen depicted, in its quest for drama, a type of ignoble,
petty warfare, so did it indulge in a debasing use of the passion of
love in its early efforts to make financial hay while the camera
clicked. The rake and the vampire, the seducer and the siren, the
vicious and their victims deified in the movies official sociological
statistics and gradually led a large percentage of the public toward the
belief, subconscious, perhaps, that the respectable element in our
communities is wholly negligible, that the world is made up almost
entirely of the pursuers and the pursued, with illicit love as the
motive force. The Eighteenth Amendment to our Federal Constitution
informed an amazed generation that we Americans are strongly influenced
by an inherited puritanical strain; but while, as a nation, we were
adopting Prohibition, we were flocking daily by the millions to gaze at
photoplays sufficiently shocking to draw our forefathers protesting from
their graves. Consistency is not a jewel possessed, as has been
repeatedly proved since Cromwellian days, by the Puritan. When, in our
beloved country, he gave up winking at the bar-tender he betook himself
to the movies and winked at the bar-sinister. But his conscience
troubled him, and presently he began to talk to his fellow-Roundheads
about the shortcomings of the screen. The Puritans had triumphed
recently over the saloon. Would it not be possible for them, they asked
each other, to eliminate presently from the movie the debasing features
that have disgraced its youth?
But where does liberty end and license begin? At what point does free
speech change into unlawful utterances? How many, and how drastic,
should be our sumptuary laws? Where lies the golden mean between
ultra-socialistic paternalism and that extreme of individualism for
which the anarchists strive? These queries, all of which exercise a
disquieting influence upon our national life, are of the same class to
which the problem now confronting the producers of photoplays belongs.
That the screen must repent and reform, must see to it that its maturity
is less censurable than its youth, is a proposition accepted by both the
producers and the public. But where shall the scenario-writer draw the
line in his effort to make the second quarter-century of the movie less
reprehensible than its first? It is a question hard to answer, but there
is one illuminating fact that is gradually having its influence upon the
output of the studios, namely, that a clean and decent photoplay is more
likely to become a financial success than one which appeals to the baser
passions of the public.
In this regard, history is but repeating itself. The most successful
American plays, from the box-office standpoint, have been, for several
generations past, those which eschewed the licentious and the immoral.
And, by the same token, it is safe to predict that the movie fans of
this country will continue to prefer Douglas Fairbanks in “Robin Hood”
to Nazimova in Oscar Wilde’s “Salome.” Leaving ethics wholly out of the
discussion, and placing the problem strictly upon a business and
financial basis, there seems to be overwhelming evidence to the effect
that an investment in clean pictures is safer than in soiled.
Of course, the regeneration of the photoplay must be, of necessity, a
slow process. We must look facts and figures in the face and admit at
the outset that the millions of Americans who daily attend movie
theatres are not, on the average, highly intellectual, nor over-prudish
as critics. They pay their money to the box-office to be amused, not
instructed nor uplifted, to get recreation rather than rescue. A stream
cannot rise higher than its source, nor can a picture-play win success
if it soars above the head and heart of the average movie fan. Until
recently, the producers, as a class, underrated the intelligence of that
head and the responsiveness of that heart to the highest that is in
mankind’s complicated make-up. One of them said to me recently that that
cross-section of our American civilization represented by the young men
drafted for the World War had proved, as statistics showed, that the
percentage of illiteracy in this country is so great that a
movie-manager who produced a really high order of photoplays was surely
destined to “go broke.” That his rivals in the screen drama have
successfully controverted his proposition by replacing, to their own
advantage, the old salacious and nonsensical picture plays by screen
dramas of a much higher type he would not acknowledge. His mind is of
that pessimistic kind that despairs of the republic—and of civilization
as a whole—because Tom, Dick and Harry, Fritz, Tony and Ivanovitch for a
whole generation patronized unprotestingly the sort of mixed sentimental
slush and moron-made melodrama which he, and his kind, served out to
them. He failed wholly to realize that, despite the high percentage of
illiteracy in the United States—nay, on account of it—it was his sacred
duty to endeavor to raise the average of intelligence in our country
instead of sending out photoplays that dragged it down to a lower level.
And “the play’s the thing!” as Shakespeare remarked long ago. The screen
idol, like the old matinee idol, has been exploited and advertised and
flattered, foisted upon an easily-misguided public, at the expense of
the drama itself; and more than one short-sighted producer has lived to
regret the day when he hitched his wagon, containing all his worldly
goods, to a movie star instead of trusting his welfare to his
scenario-writers. That there is light in the darkness a close observer
of the present tendencies of the screen, so far as drama is concerned,
must admit, but it will be a long time before photoplay producers as a
class grasp the underlying and immensely illuminating fact, broadly
applicable to both the screen and the stage, that, while Booths and
Barrymores come and go, Shakespeare goes on forever. In the last
analysis, the screen and the stage are media for the telling of dramatic
stories and their well-being, in the long run, depends not upon
shooting-stars but upon planetary playwrights.
In approaching the conclusion of the first half of this series of
articles which has given, inadequately and sketchily, a bird’s-eye view
of the past and present of the movie as a purveyor of amusement, the
writer finds himself turning to other fields of endeavor in which the
screen is pushing forward as a pioneer with the hope in his heart,
amounting to a certainty, that the screen drama in America is upon the
threshold of a great and glorious future. Revolutionary changes in the
photo-drama are being brought about by methods arousing intense
scientific and technical interest. It has seemed best to postpone their
consideration until later on, when we turn from the studios to the
laboratories, from the scenario-writer to the surgeon, from the movie
hero to the captain of industry in our effort to visualize the wide and
growing field that the screen is conquering for its own. And the realm
of movie endeavor into which we are now about to enter is, to my mind,
of greater interest and significance than that which we have been
hitherto investigating. Mankind’s toys do not possess for us the
fundamental importance of our tools and our test-tubes.
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CHAPTER X
THE MOVIE MAKETH—WHAT KIND OF A MAN?
_Pictures that Combine Instruction and Amusement—“Nanook of the
North”—Passing Phases of Life Preserved for Posterity—African Big Game
Screened for our Descendants—President Harding on the Movie’s
Possibilities—Visualization Civilization’s One Best Bet._
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CHAPTER X
THE MOVIE MAKETH—WHAT KIND OF A MAN?
BEFORE going on to a discussion of the utilitarian as contrasted with
the recreational functions of the movie, it seems advisable to consider
for a moment a type of screen presentation that is both entertaining and
educational, fascinating the observer by its dramatic presentation of
the adventurous spirit that has forever urged mankind to dare the perils
of the outlands while, at the same time, it preserves for posterity
phases of wild life that may conceivably become obsolete in the near
future. “Nanook of the North,” depicting, as it does, the primitive but
heroic existence of an Eskimo endeavoring to find shelter and sustenance
for his family in the Arctic regions is an outstanding achievement in
this bifunctional form of screen-picture. If, as Stefansson asserts, the
far North is destined eventually to lure to its cold but stimulating
embrace a much higher civilization than has hitherto existed near the
Pole, Nanook and his kind are fated to succumb, despite the sterling
qualities they have displayed in overcoming the handicaps of their cruel
environment, to adventurous pioneers from the South, bringing with them
a greater menace to the Eskimos than that with which old Boreas has
vainly threatened them for ages.
Belatedly, but with thrilling efficiency, the camera is giving to us and
to our descendants pictures of savage and half-savage life against which
the irresistible power of the regnant races of the earth has issued a
decree of annihilation. The polar seas, the islands of the Pacific, the
deserts, mountain-tops, jungles, are shown to us on the screen as they
are to-day, as if this generation were frantically endeavoring to assure
itself that this romantic planet of ours is not really doomed to become
eventually as prosaic and uninteresting as Main Street.
In illustration of the above, permit me to quote here from an article of
mine in a recent number of _The Independent_:
The call of the wild and the rattle of a Ford car are strangely
incongruous sounds, but they have been dramatically brought
together of late. Adventurous dare-devils in various parts of
the world are using the camera to rescue from oblivion the
vanishing fauna of the outlands. The defiant jungle surrenders
unconditionally to the tin Lizzie. I recently spent an enjoyable
and enlightening evening watching H. A. Snow hunting big game in
Africa with his gun and his photographic apparatus and
repeatedly looking death in the face that posterity might
possess a picture of the animal life under the equator that is
destined presently to become obsolete. The lion, rhinoceros,
elephant, giraffe, zebra, hippopotamus, wild buck, ostrich,
baboon, camel, gnu were ours for a time to study at close range,
revealed to us in their native habitat without the necessity
upon our part of spending months in constant peril from heat,
snakes, carnivora, fever, and other enemies which war against
the white man in African wilds.
As I watched the screen that evening, my memory went back nearly
half a century. It brought to my mind the picture of a boy
curled up in a library chair and absorbed in the pages of Paul
du Chaillu’s book “Under the Equator,” a book whose revelations
of wild life in Africa subjected the author to a period during
which he was suspected of being a Baron Munchausen, or, as we
would say to-day, a Dr. Cook. There were skeptics who bluntly
asserted that the French explorer had evolved the gorilla out of
his own inner consciousness.
Eventually, of course, du Chaillu’s veracity was established;
but, victim as he was of the limitations of his generation, he
could not at first furnish to the public convincing proof that
his tales of adventure and discovery in the African jungle were
founded upon fact. To-day the explorer, arctic or tropical,
returns to civilization as to Missouri—prepared to show all
scoffers that their incredulity is ridiculous. Defiantly he has
turned a crank while sudden death from a polar bear or a jungle
elephant is close at hand; and eventually the imminence of the
peril, the suspense of a tragic moment, are within the power of
the screen to transmit to wide-eyed audiences safely seated
twenty thousand miles away from the scene of the thrilling
episode!
As the camera is more thorough and convincing in its revelations
of the drama of the jungle than is the pen so is it more
extravagant in its use of the material that makes the wild life
of the outlands interesting to the untravelled public. There may
remain untamed animals in Africa that the Snows have not
effectively screened, but a fair acquaintance with equatorial
fauna leads me to the conclusion that the camera can afford now
to rest upon its laurels in so far as the creatures of the
jungle are concerned.
Omnivorous, insatiable, the screen is sending out its camera-men
to all the corners of the known and the unknown earth, to the
end that you and I may learn eventually every secret that our
planet has hitherto concealed. The truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth—that’s why Man, who has become a
peripatetic photographer, is venturing to lands afar. And the
public is glad to confer applause, and more material rewards,
upon those who mirror for us some dramatic phase of life upon
earth to-day especially if, as is the case with the big game of
Africa, it bids fair to pass presently forever out of existence.
President Harding, whose present exalted position gives him unequalled
facilities for observing the potential tendencies of the day, has become
an enthusiastic believer in the uplifting possibilities that the screen
has begun to manifest. Much of what we study in our youth, says the
President, might be
made dramatically interesting if we could see it. Next in value
to studying history by the procedure of living through its
epochs, its eras and its periods, would be to see its actors and
evolutions presented before our eyes. If we are to understand
the present and attempt to conjecture the future, we need to
know a good deal about the backgrounds of the past. The Europe
of the later middle ages, of the period just before and at the
beginning of the Renaissance, could be wonderfully portrayed in
a series of pictures dramatizing “The Cloister and the Hearth.”
I do not know whether anybody reads “The Cloister and the
Hearth” any more, but I am sure that one family with which I am
pretty well acquainted would be glad to patronize a combination
of picture serials and really intelligent talks with this story
as the basis and with the purpose of giving a real conception
and understanding of the Europe of that epoch.
Mr. Harding has grasped fully the significance of the motion picture in
connection with the past, present, and future of the race. He has
suggested the screening of Wells’s “Outline of History” and of Van
Loon’s “Story of Mankind,” and has called attention to the possibility
that, under the direction of the Federal Bureau of Standards, films
might be taken illustrating the fundamental principles of the science of
geology. Realizing, as he does, that ignorance is the enemy democracy,
in order to survive, must overcome, and that the surest safeguard to our
institutions is enlightenment, President Harding has thrown himself
wholeheartedly into that growing movement which is destined eventually,
if Fate is kind to us, to make the motion picture worthy in its
achievements of the splendid possibilities that are within its grasp.
That potent, pushing, perverse offspring of the printing-press, the
newspaper, has begun to realize that it can be no longer exclusively
typographical but must become in part photographical. It is following in
the footsteps of the screen in making use of the only universal language
the ingenuity of Man has yet devised. A recent editorial in the New York
_Tribune_ says:
The _Tribune_ was the first newspaper to adapt for journalistic
purposes the printing of the half-tone photograph. The
innovation started the rising flood of news-in-pictures which is
so distinctive a feature of the American press of 1923.... Some
of the events of the day’s news can be visualized for the reader
simply by the printed word. Others need the aid of a picture.
Others still find presentation possible in a picture alone....
The universal appeal of pictures can be taken advantage of for
sound informative and educational purposes, instead of for
scandal and filth. Indeed, it should be so used, as the London
_Times_ and other conservative newspapers have realized through
their daily pages of pictures.
“The universal appeal of pictures!” Mankind from the days when our
ancestors sketched reindeer upon the walls of their caves has felt their
appeal, but only recently has its universality become of crucial
significance to the race. The printing-press, as we realized
despairingly in 1914, has failed to save civilization from its recurrent
attempts at suicide. Men read and talked, and, then, as had their
illiterate progenitors, grasped their weapons and went to fighting.
Neither from books nor from debates has mankind in the mass grasped that
enlightenment which often comes to individuals but which is not
sufficiently wide-spread and compelling to defend the race from constant
reversions to brutish manifestations.
And now comes visualization—in movie theatres, in newspapers, in
schools, colleges, churches—to mould, for good or evil, the plastic soul
of Man. What will the harvest be? Who can say? Francis Bacon asserted
that “reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an
exact man.” Something more, as the centuries have proved, is necessary
to make the human race what it should be. Is it not barely possible that
some Bacon of the future will exultingly exclaim: “The screen maketh a
civilized man!”?
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CHAPTER XI
THE MOVIE AND THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC RELATIONS
_The Screen Wins Powerful Friends—Societies Representing Sixty Million
Americans Endorse it—Its Power for Good Recognized by Altruists—The
Movie’s Allies Mobilized—The New Art is Backed by Old Philanthropies._
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CHAPTER XI
THE MOVIE AND THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC RELATIONS
THE conviction expressed at the end of the preceding chapter that in the
screen civilization has finally found a medium through which Man’s
loftiest ideals, hopes, dreams, visions and good resolutions may find a
way to fulfillment has been vouchsafed a new _raison d’être_ of late,
the importance of which can not be overrated. The existing reasons for
the belief that the movie is to be a weapon wielded in the cause of
righteousness against the powers of darkness were greatly increased in
number and force when representatives of sixty national civic,
educational, social and religious organizations functioning in this
country met, at the invitation of Will H. Hays, in June of 1922, to
discuss with him the problems of the motion picture industry and to
devise ways and means for bringing about a better situation therein. The
outcome of this gathering was the formation of the Committee on Public
Relations, for “the establishment of a channel of intercommunication
between the agencies instrumental in forming and interpreting public
opinion and the motion picture industry.” This committee, coöperating
with the organization known as the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors of America, Inc., is wielding the influence begotten of a
combined membership of 60,000,000 people, scattered throughout the whole
country, in behalf of
the increased use of motion pictures as a force for good
citizenship and a factor in social benefit; for the development
of more intelligent coöperation between the public and the
motion picture industry; to aid the coöperative movement
instituted between the National Education Association and the
motion picture producers for the making of pedagogic films and
employing them effectively in schools; to encourage the effort
to advance the usefulness of motion pictures as an instrument of
international amity by correctly portraying American life,
ideals and opportunities in pictures sent abroad and by properly
depicting foreigners and foreign scenes in pictures presented
here; to further, in general, all constructive methods for
bringing about a sympathetic interest in the attainment and
maintenance of high standards of art, entertainment, education
and morals in motion pictures.
Not the least important of the appendices to be found at the end of this
book is that which gives a list of the national organizations composing
this Committee on Public Relations. It is in effect a record of a great
mobilization of the uplifting agencies of the nation on the side of
righteousness and progress in a struggle between good and evil for
control of the newest and most powerful of the vehicles at man’s
disposal for influencing his fellowman. As has been demonstrated in
another chapter, the screen has become the most effective and
wide-reaching of all the media yet devised by human ingenuity for
influencing the heart, mind and soul of the race. Realizing this, the
organizations referred to above (listed with approximate fullness in the
appendix), representing more than half the entire population of the
United States, have thrown the weight of their enormous influence upon
the side of those builders of a better civilization who are striving to
make the motion picture more worthy of the important place it has so
recently assumed in the life of the world. Never before in the history
of the race has such a unification of effort by the great altruistic
organizations of a nation been made in times of peace, and for the
purposes of peace, as that which was begun a year and a half ago by the
Committee on Public Relations. What the screen could do to improve the
social order was recognized at the very moment it was seen what the
social order could do to improve the screen—and, lo, there came about an
alliance that, to those who grasped its full significance, stood
revealed as one of the greatest forward steps civilization has ever
taken. The organized powers of uplift and enlightenment had seen that a
new, untried, undisciplined force, pregnant of both good and evil, had
come into the world and they had rallied to its assistance at the
psychological moment, to the end that the future of the screen, and
therefore of the human race itself, might present a more satisfactory
aspect than it has hitherto exhibited.
Says Mr. Jason S. Joy, Executive Secretary of the Committee on Public
Relations:
I am often asked the following three progressive
questions—First, why are the organizations affiliated with the
Committee on Public Relations interested in the motion picture?
Second, why are they working with the motion picture people
rather than against them? Third, why do they coöperate with the
so-called “old-line” companies rather than exclusively with
independent companies?
I am able to answer these questions to my own satisfaction.
Admitting that motion pictures exercise a powerful influence for
good or evil, it is to the selfish interests of these
organizations to make motion pictures an influence for good. As
to the second query, let me say that constructive coöperation is
capable of greater results than destructive criticism,
particularly when it is accompanied by a willingness to
privately but fearlessly condemn evil practices when they are
found to exist. It seems to me wholly foolish and futile to cry
out against any practice unless at the same time you are able to
suggest a solution or at least an attempt at a solution of the
problem. I am convinced that one of the most harmful habits of
our day is the one which has been adopted by certain amateur and
professional reformers who with half truths loudly condemn the
motion picture industry and everybody connected with it. My
answer to the third query is this: The Committee on Public
Relations is working with the so-called “old-line” companies
because these companies have demonstrated their ability to make
the kind of pictures the public has hitherto demanded and have,
therefore, manifested their knowledge of the technique and
business methods of making pictures; because, also, they have
demonstrated and expressed their desire to attain the ends for
which the Committee is working, and because they have asked the
Committee to coöperate with them, and are coöperating with the
Committee. Within parenthesis, let me say, that there pass by me
at the cross-roads where I sit no end of Sir Galahads rushing
forth to conquer the world. These persons are usually
well-equipped with ideals and enthusiasm and often with money,
but because they lack the technical ability which results from
long experience they come back with little to show for their
efforts except a trail of broken promises, unpaid debts, and
lost ideals. Our best and only hope for the future lies with the
well established companies who have proved their ability in
their profession.
The human race moves forward and upward through the efforts of those who
know how to perform the miracle of hitching their wagon to a star while,
at the same time, they keep their feet upon the earth. Taking at random
a few of the sixty organizations comprising the Committee on Public
Relations we come upon such sharply contrasted bodies as the Society of
Colonial Dames and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs; the Academy
of Political Science and the Salvation Army; the Girls Friendly Society
and the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World; The National Council
of Catholic Women and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association; the American
Federation of Labor and the Boy Scouts of America, etc. Now all these
societies, fraternities, sororities, or whatsoever they may be, helping
by their membership to make up the 60,000,000 Americans who have come
officially to the support of the motion picture industry, have, each and
every one of them, reached a position of power and success by wasting no
time in endeavoring futilely to put salt on the tail of the millennium
but by combining loyalty to high ideals with practical efficiency in
dealing with this world as it manifests itself to the worker who dreams
and the dreamer who works. In other words, our great altruistic
organizations discovered at the outset of their respective careers that
the ideal and the practical are necessary to each other but, to produce
results, must plan how to make constant compromises with each other for
the sake of actual progress.
The motion picture producers have gone through, as an organization, the
same experience that has come to the Colonial Dames, the Salvation Army,
the Boy Scouts, or any one of the organizations holding membership on
the Committee of Public Relations. They have learned by experiment that
progress is made possible only through a working adjustment between
idealism and realism. If idealism is allowed to become rainbow-chasing,
or realism to become revolting, the balance that assures a steady
movement in the right direction is destroyed and disaster results. Every
earthly institution that survives has been forced to fight its way to
permanency against the disintegrating influence of its own extremists,
its ultra-conservatives and ultra-radicals. In the long run, it is the
middle of the road that leads nations and institutions into safe
environments.
The great question at issue in connection with the motion picture
industry, as it is with any given line of human endeavor, is this: Is
its course upward or downward, will its future be free from the
shortcomings of its past? Let me say here, very frankly, that had I not
felt months ago that an affirmative answer to these queries was not
merely justified but had been made imperative by facts and figures this
book would never have been written. But as the work has progressed, and
I have been obliged to look at the motion picture field through both a
telescope and a microscope, I have been convinced by an overwhelming
mass of evidence that the general trend of the newest of the arts is, in
spite of all that I have said about its youthful indiscretions, in the
right direction.
It can never attain perfection—nothing that is man-made can hope to do
that. But the movie, whatever may be said against it by its detractors,
is constantly making progress toward a commanding position where, it is
conceivable, it may eventually confer upon mankind the inestimable boon
of which the author, as stated in the first chapter of this book, has
had the audacity to dream. And be it said just here that if the full
dynamics of the screen as a world-civilizer are completely developed,
eventually both producers and public will owe a great debt of gratitude
to the Committee on Public Relations.
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CHAPTER XII
THE MOVIE AS A PEDAGOGUE
_The Entertainer Becomes an Instructor—Schools and Colleges make the
Screen a Professor—Visual Instruction more Effective than
Text-Books—Educational Films as Teachers of History—The Screen an Ally
to Historical Accuracy—Can it Save the Race from a Threatened
Cataclysm?_
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CHAPTER XII
THE MOVIE AS A PEDAGOGUE
THE utilitarian evolution of the movie has been as remarkable as the
recreational—though much less spectacular. The screen seems to have come
like a poultice to heal the blows of ignorance, of worn-out methods in
schools, hospitals and laboratories, and to act as a tonic upon all the
movements and enterprises that make for the betterment of the race.
Modern scientists, philanthropists, statesmen, educators, sociologists,
uplifters of all kinds, may appropriately paraphrase Robert Burns by
exclaiming “a screen’s amang ye takin’ notes.”
Visual education—that is, intellectual stimulus through motion
pictures—has made amazing progress in our schools and colleges during
the past few years. It has been proved by statistics, based upon the
results of examinations, that students instructed by screen-pictures
obtain higher marks than those who have been seeking knowledge on a
given subject only through text-books.
Evidence upon this point has become of late cumulative and conclusive.
Data to show that the Esperanto of the Eye is a more efficient
instructor than either the spoken or the printed word is ours in
abundance, but only one or two striking proofs of the proposition will
suffice for our present purposes. Two years ago Professor Joseph J.
Weber, of the University of Kansas, conducted a series of enlightening
tests in Public School No. 62, New York City, with the following
results:
Four hundred and eighty-five pupils in the school were examined as to
their knowledge of geography. It was found that their average rating as
a class was only 31.8. Oral teaching, without the aid of correlated
motion picture films, raised this average presently to 45.5, a gain of
13.7. The films were then used after the oral lessons and an average of
49.9 was obtained, a gain of 18.1. By the employment of the films before
instead of after the oral instructions the average percentage was
increased to 52.7, a gain of 20.9.
At about the same time, Professor J. W. Sheppard, of the University of
Oklahoma, made an experiment in visual education at a high-school in
Madison, Wis. Abstract and concrete subjects were taught to a group of
pupils of ordinary intelligence by means of the films only, to a second
group by a superior instructor only, and to a third group by an average
instructor only. In a searching examination subsequently the pupils
taught by the films scored an average of 74.5, those taught by the
superior instructor an average of 66.9, and those by the inferior
instructor an average of 61.3. In this game of twenty questions the
screen had won the pot by a safe margin.
The significance of the above is revealed in its entirety when we
realize that even the movie as a purveyor of amusement has not wholly
neglected its obligations as a pedagogue. The millions of Americans who
daily watch the screen in quest of recreation are, willy nilly, obliged
to absorb something in the way of added knowledge. Geography,
history—both ancient and contemporary,—botany, astronomy, physics,
ethnology, archæology and other educational sources are tapped, even in
the least pretentious movie theatres, to stir the imaginations and
enlarge the general knowledge of their patrons. It is safe to say that
the American people, even though our schools and colleges had not
welcomed the film as an aid to education, would have vastly increased
their information regarding our planet and the history and achievements
of the human race merely through the homage that the amusement screen
has paid, perforce, to erudition.
But what the recreational screen has done casually and inadequately for
the dissemination of general knowledge, is, of course, negligible
compared with the influence that has been exerted by the educational
films whose use in the class-rooms of our schools and colleges has been
for some years past constantly on the increase. The growing importance
of the film as an adjunct to instruction is shown by the fact that its
progress has not been left to chance, as was the evolution of the
recreational movie. The realm of visual education has been taken over by
men and organizations whose qualifications for the task they have
assumed assure to the screen in the class-room a great and splendid
future. Concerning this matter, Will H. Hays recently said:
The Society of Visual Education contains thirteen presidents of
colleges, six of normal schools, three representatives of large
foundations, seventy-six professors and instructors in colleges
and universities, nine state superintendents of public
instruction and seventy-one city superintendents of schools.
There are other groups of educators in the motion picture
field—notably the National Academy of Visual Instruction and the
Visual Instruction Association of America. An incomplete list
shows twenty-eight colleges and universities which have
organized departments for the distribution of films. At least
seventeen of our largest educational institutions are giving
courses to their students on the use of the motion picture for
visual instruction. Columbia has courses which teach photoplay
writing and the mechanics of production. The University of
Nebraska has erected a film studio on its campus, and the
Universities of Yale, Chicago, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan,
Oklahoma, Illinois and Utah have started the production of their
own motion pictures.
Let us confine ourselves for the moment to what the educational films
are doing in the realm of history, leaving their achievements as
pictorial aids to the study of astronomy, physics, ethnology,
palæeontology, geology, and other sciences, for later consideration. If
the Esperanto of the Eye is to be instrumental in giving to this and
coming generations an accurate picture of our race’s past, it is
essential that our films dealing with history should be accurate in
detail. A falsehood exploited by the screen can do more damage than a
misrepresentation imbedded in a text-book. It is encouraging, therefore,
to those of us who believe that educational films are destined
eventually to exercise an influence for good upon mankind that may save
it from a return to barbarism to realize that the screen as an adjunct
to the teaching of history is receiving valuable assistance from our
most eminent professors in this field of study.
There is much data at our disposal to prove that the Olympian heights of
erudition are deeply impressed by the obligations which the enlightened
gods owe to films fashioned to instruct lesser and more ignorant
mortals. It will suffice for our present purpose, however, to prove the
existence of a general and praiseworthy trend in visual instruction by
giving, in some detail, an account of an enterprise, sponsored by the
Department of History of Yale University, that is of importance in
itself, but, more than that, significant in the promise it gives of a
splendid future for the educational film.
In a despatch from Chicago, Ill., under date of Tuesday, August 1, 1922,
a correspondent of the New York _Evening Post_ says:
History was rewritten here to-day, shorn of its romance and
amplified by facts, by the Yale University Press. To do this,
mediæval sailors, dressed in gayly colored tights and jerkins,
with huge knives in their belts, clambered through the rigging
of the Santa Maria off Jackson Park, and Christopher Columbus
leaned over the rail, crucifix in hand, and gazed at the
receding shores, while two camera men kept grinding away at
their machines. All this was done that the popular idea of
history might be revised and the school children of America
might have accurate information, uncontaminated by the legends
and myths which have grown around the discovery of America
during the last 400 years.... The Yale University Press is
making a series of historical pictures for school use which the
History Department of the University asserts will be as accurate
as research and study can make them. On board the Santa Maria
there were mutinies and troublesome times. Martin Alonzo Pinzon,
a Spanish gentleman who owned the Santa Maria, commanded the
Pinta, and furnished the cash for the expedition. Much more is
made of Pinzon in the film than of Queen Isabella, the
Professors of History at Yale being inclined to doubt the legend
that Her Majesty ever patronized a pawn-shop to give assistance
to the dare-deviltry of Columbus.
What visual instruction in history is to become presently is a
fascinating subject in dwelling upon which the imaginative optimist,
reading the signs of the times, can not but take keen delight. The past
is to be to the student no longer a graveyard, in which he rambles
confusedly, reading ridiculous epitaphs upon monuments whose comparative
impressiveness is misleading, but a series of dramatic performances,
appealing to the senses, the mind and the soul, in which the _dramatis
personæ_ will present history as a serial-play in which the latest act
is one in which he himself is taking a minor part.
Never before, in the history of the race, has mankind taken so deep and
wide-spread an interest in the past of mankind as it exhibits to-day.
There appears to be a world-wide feeling that, unless the race can learn
the lessons that the great catastrophes that have repeatedly overtaken
civilization teach, the outlook for the future is appallingly dark. On
New Year’s Day, 1923, a body of prominent American educators issued an
appeal to the public in which the following striking sentences occur:
The present situation in international affairs, involving as it
does the imminent peril of war, must give concern to every
thoughtful observer. After a devastating conflict which has cost
millions of lives, created immeasurable hatred and piled up a
debt of $50 for every minute of time since Christ was born, the
nations of the earth, apparently having learned nothing and
forgotten nothing, are once more playing the old game of
competitive imperialism and competitive armament.
The above, startling but unanswerable as it is, has a direct bearing
upon the subject we have just had under discussion, namely, the teaching
of history through visual instruction. The advantages of this method for
schools and colleges, conclusively proven though it has been, will be of
no permanent and uplifting value to coming generations unless the screen
as a pedagogue finds a way to give to a race that is constantly
repeating old and fatal errors a message and a warning that shall
influence the young men and women who are to mould the world’s future to
avoid the disastrous errors of their progenitors. From this point of
view it becomes apparent that to those into whose hands has been placed
the dissemination of educational films has been vouchsafed a great
opportunity to benefit a race that is in sore need of guidance, of some
impetus that shall make its future less deplorable than its
blood-stained past.
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CHAPTER XIII
THE MOVIE INTERPRETING THE PAST
_Philip Kerr vs. H. G. Wells—Is the Race Doomed to Commit Hari-Kari?—The
Failures of Diplomacy—The Screen Revealing Man to Himself—History the
Best Bet of a Warworn Race—Teaching the Young Idea How Not to
Shoot—Peace Via the Film._
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CHAPTER XIII
THE MOVIE INTERPRETING THE PAST
WHETHER the first antidote the race has discovered against polyglot
poison can save civilization before it is blown to pieces by high
explosive shells is a problem that assumes new significance daily, as
diplomacy continues to commit, in its blind and fatuous egotism, its
historic blunders. The head-lines in the newspapers furnish a sad
commentary upon the present status of the collective wisdom of mankind.
The average intelligence of the race as it is manifested in
international affairs is below the standard set by a day-nursery, where
a singed child, it is confidently assumed, will avoid the fire. The high
cost of war in life and treasure has been demonstrated to the race in
recent years by a world-wide conflict that threatened the very
foundations of civilization with destruction. Did mankind learn the
lesson taught by this titanic struggle? If it did not, if it continues
to provide itself with new and deadlier weapons for the waging of
unimaginably awful combats, what can be done at the last moment, as this
may prove to be, to save civilization from ruin as it totters upon the
very edge of a fatal precipice?
The tragic importance of this query may seem, at first sight, to throw
into comparative insignificance the topic we have under discussion,
namely, the teaching of history in our schools and colleges through
visual instruction. But our pointed question and our general theme are,
as will presently appear, closely related to one another.
Philip Kerr, for five years confidential adviser and secretary to Lloyd
George, is among those who hold that we who indulge the hope that the
screen may eventually act as a poultice to heal the blows delivered by
diplomacy against the peace of the world are but chasing another rainbow
that has at its end not a pot of ointment but a gigantic pile of
dynamite. At Williamstown, Mass., last summer, Mr. Kerr said, to an
audience of scholars and statesmen of international prominence:
If we look back through history we shall see that what has
happened in the last eight years is not a unique nor isolated
phenomenon. For example, there was a world war for the first
fifteen years of the last century, ending with the battle of
Waterloo. We can trace back through the ages an ever-recurring
procession of devastating wars engulfing the whole of the
civilized world, followed by peaces of exhaustion, which in turn
gave way to new eras of war. The question I have been asking
myself for the last two or three years has been this: Have we as
the result of the terrible experiences of the late war, and of
the victory of the Allies, any real security against a
repetition of a world war. To this question I have to answer,
No.
To this deplorable and hopeless conclusion Mr. Kerr comes because he
finds that mankind does its thinking not in terms of humanity, but of
states; that the world, in so far as international problems are
concerned, is as parochial as it was a generation or a century ago.
“Life,” remarked a flippant pessimist, “is just one damned thing after
another.” To Mr. Kerr’s despondent eyes history seems to be just one
devastating war after another, with no end to the infernal succession
now in sight. But is it not barely possible that history, gaining from
the screen a new method of exposition, a new way of approach to the soul
of Man, may eventually convince the human race that there is a more
sensible solution to international problems than through bloodshed?
It is through the study of history alone that Man can, in the opinion of
H. G. Wells, find his way toward higher planes of existence out of the
mire in which he is now stuck. In his book “The Undying Fire,” Wells,
speaking through the hero of his story, says, in explanation of his plan
for the improvement of society:
I want this world better taught, so that wherever the flame of
God can be lit it may be lit. Let us suppose everyone to be
educated. By educated, to be explicit, I mean possessing a
knowledge and understanding of history. Salvation can be
attained by history. Suppose that instead of a myriad of tongues
and dialects all men could read the same books and talk together
in the same speech—think what a difference there would be in
such a world from the conditions prevailing to-day.... This is a
world where folly and hate can bawl sanity out of hearing. Only
the determination of schoolmasters and teachers offers hope for
a change in all this.
Philip Kerr and H. G. Wells examining, as they do, the same historical
data, shocked, as they both are, by mankind’s constant repetition of
ancient and easily avoidable errors, reach, from the same premises,
diametrically opposite conclusions. Kerr denies that our race can obtain
from a study of its past any hope for its future. Wells, on the other
hand, holds that history can be made the handmaiden of progress and that
those who teach it can become, if they are worthy of their sacred
mission, the saviors of an imperilled race.
At the present moment, of course, it is impossible to determine whether
the pessimism of Kerr or the optimism of Wells is entitled to the
verdict of the court. The evidence is not all in, and, from present
appearances, the case seems destined to a long and tedious life, going
down on appeal, as it must, from one generation to another. But would it
not be a hopelessly mad world which, on the issue involved in this
contention, backed Kerr against Wells? Imagine the race abandoning
itself to despair, admitting that it can find within itself no safeguard
against its impending doom of hari-kari, turning heart-sick and hopeless
from futile peace-conferences and gazing in sullen silence at the
mobilization of new armies under old catch-words in various parts of a
blood-soaked planet! Even if Wells shall prove to be in the end a
dreamer of dreams and chaser of rainbows, defeated in his effort to put
salt on the tail of the millennium, is it not more reasonable to take a
gambling chance on his possible victory as an idealist than to give
abject surrender with Kerr to the evil influences that for countless
ages have made of our planet a recurrent shambles?
Common-sense, then, forces us to the conclusion that, in the perturbed
world in which we at present find ourselves there is no feature of our
complicated modern life more entitled to earnest consideration than the
screen as historian. In schools, colleges and movie theatres, with films
depicting significant episodes in Man’s past or illuminating events of
to-day, a mirror is vouchsafed to this generation in which it can see
both itself and its progenitors in a light that now for the first time
clarifies our sight. The regeneration of the individual through
religious influences is effected in large part by means of a
self-revelation that begets repentance and reform. To employ a bit of
slang to illustrate the point, all sinners come from Missouri and refuse
to be rescued blindly. They must be shown. The wicked, war-soiled,
wantonly selfish nations of the world have never had, so far as the
masses of the people are concerned, the truths of history visualized to
their startled eyes. Is it not possible that when the errors, the
tragedies, the cumulative horrors of the past are revealed to them, when
the majority of men and women turn to the evidence of their senses
rather than to gossip, rumor and hearsay for historical enlightenment,
Mankind, horrified at his scowling face and bloody hands, as he sees
them for the first time in a mirror, will take an oath to remove the
brand of Cain from his brow, the blush from his cheeks as the screen
shows him what man’s inhumanity to man really means?
The late Viscount Bryce, just before his regrettable death, delivered
eight lectures in the United States on “the large subject covered by the
term International Relations.” “It is History,” says Bryce, “which,
recording the events and explaining the influences that have moulded the
minds of men, shows us how the world of international politics has come
to be what it is. History is the best—indeed the only—guide to a
comprehension of the facts as they stand, and to a sound judgment of the
various means that have been suggested for replacing suspicions and
enmities by the co-operation of States in many things and by their good
will in all.” But Bryce, than whom no publicist of our times has held
higher place as a seer and prophet, speaks not in an optimistic vein in
his last published utterances.
The great lesson of the war, that the ambitions and hatreds
which cause war must be removed, has not been learned, and if
this war has failed to impress the lesson upon most of the
peoples, what else can teach them? This is why thoughtful men
are despondent, and why some comfort must now be sought for,
some remedy devised at once against a recurrence of the
calamities we have suffered.
Bryce is in agreement with the leading minds of to-day striving for a
solution of international problems. They see no way out of the
difficulties and perils confronting the race unless some new and
hitherto unknown method be found to prevent mankind from repeating the
scarlet sins that have disgraced and incarnadined the past. Arbitration,
conciliation, alliances, treaties, congresses, leagues, peace palaces
and palaver—what have they accomplished that can be cited to confute the
pessimism of Philip Kerr or to suggest the remedy the necessity for
which James Bryce, with the clairvoyance of a dying man, acutely
realized? What the race needs at this critical hour is both a message
and a medium, a warning and a way, a revelation and a road, with a light
from the past shining on the pathway just ahead.
And Man has at his command this way, this medium, this road, upon which
gleams a radiance that might easily save the race from destruction, if
he had sufficient sense to learn from his past just a few elementary
lessons in common-sense, just a few basic truths that, once grasped,
would change history from a record of recurrent crimes to an epic tale
of Man’s triumph over himself.
History as told by the screen in the class-room—is it not possible that
the destiny of mankind is thus to be decided? The plastic minds of the
young intrigued by the story of Man’s rise from protoplasm to poet, from
amœba to aeronaut, from cave-man to lord of creation may be so
impressed, within the next few generations, by the tragic absurdity of
civilized man’s periodical reversions to savagery that some divine day
the enlightened youth of the world will go out on a universal strike
against old idiocies and cruelties, and to the screen that taught
history will be given the glory of bringing mankind at one bound within
striking distance of the millennium.
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CHAPTER XIV
THE MOVIE TAKES ON NEW FUNCTIONS
_Solves Many Problems—Becomes Actor, Artist, Singer, Scientist, Teacher,
Drummer—As a Hamlet Shows Mother Earth Two Pictures—Will the Race Go Up
or Go Down—The Screen Possibly a Savior._
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CHAPTER XIV
THE MOVIE TAKES ON NEW FUNCTIONS
HAS a race harassed, well-nigh hopeless, forever committing old errors
under new incitements, found in the screen both a pedagogue and a
peacemaker, potent for rescue if its possibilities are grasped in time?
The query may seem fantastic, the hope it suggests quixotic, the promise
at which it hints premature. But the question is, perhaps, the most
important before the world to-day and upon its answer may depend the
future of the race.
In an address before the National Civic Federation at Washington, D. C.,
on January 17, 1923, Elihu Root said:
The manifest purpose of the great body of voters in democratic
countries to control directly the agents who are carrying on the
foreign affairs of their countries involves a terrible danger as
well as a great step in human progress—a great step in progress
if the democracy is informed, a terrible danger if the democracy
is ignorant. An ignorant democracy controlling foreign affairs
leads directly to war and the destruction of civilization. An
informed democracy insures peace and the progress of
civilization.
At this crisis in the career of humanity there is but one medium by
which the democracies of the world can be given the information
necessary, in the opinion of Mr. Root, to avert the cataclysm
threatening humanity, and that is the motion picture screen. That this
medium is becoming, by leaps and bounds, better equipped for its
gigantic task of world-salvation is apparent to even the most careless
observer. During the short time that has elapsed since the author wrote
the first sentence of this little book, the movie has enlarged its
scope, possibilities and actual achievements in a startling and
bewildering way. To illustrate this point, which is of crucial
significance in connection with the topic now under discussion, let me
quote a few head-lines culled at random from the metropolitan press of
recent date.
“Revolutionary Talking Movies—Widespread Changes Predicted if
New Invention is a Success.” “‘Color Film Great,’ says C. D.
Gibson. Artist at Private Exhibition Finds Effects Wonderfully
Reproduced.” “Ditmar’s Film Gives Life to the Prehistoric. Zoo
Curator Presents Real Live Monsters.” “Talking Movie Hailed in
Berlin by Scientists as Great Success.” “New Method Gives
Perfect Color to Motion Pictures. First Film a Riot of Color but
Not at Expense of Reality.” “Stereoscopic Film Indicating Depth
Shown Here.” “Scientist Brings Talking Film. Prof. de Forest
Here with Device Whereby Even Operas May Be Produced on Screen.”
“Modern Wizards Bewilder Edison. Watches Voice Filmed.”
“Einstein’s Relativity Theory in Pictures. Fascinating,
Ingenious and Revolutionary.”
The above list might be greatly prolonged, but it serves the purpose we
have in hand as it stands. It means that the possibilities of the screen
are being realized at an amazing rate of progress, that the Esperanto of
the Eye, which found its alphabet when Edison invented the kinetoscope,
has now become a universal method of expression fitted to reveal
eventually all human knowledge to the race in such a manner that it can
be sensed, if not comprehended, by even illiterates and morons. There
are, of course, technical problems connected with color, depth and the
synchronization of voice and movement which it may be impossible for the
ingenuity of man to solve, but the year 1923 will appeal to the future
historian of the movie as a period in which the screen entered a domain
possessing hitherto undreamed of facilities for intensifying the potency
of the playwright, actor, scientist, educator, statesman, philanthropist
and salesman.
The last-mentioned beneficiary of the screen, commonly called “drummer,”
is worthy of a moment’s attention just here as helping to prove our
general proposition that there is no field of human activity that has
not been, or that will not be, influenced and perhaps greatly changed by
the growing vogue of the movie. A recently-published editorial in the
New York _Herald_ says:
The power of the screen to divert trade from one country to
another is a subject that has been hitherto little discussed. An
article in _Commerce Reports_, the weekly survey of foreign
trade issued by the United States Department of Commerce,
however, declares that the motion pictures displayed in foreign
countries influence the consuming public in the choice of
markets. In fact, so great has been the influence of the motion
picture in diverting commerce to the United States that foreign
newspapers have already cautioned their film producers not to
ignore the opportunities for commercial expansion that are
inherent in the drama shown on the screen.
As Terence remarked long ago, so might the movie remark to-day: “Nothing
that is of interest to mankind is outside of my sphere of endeavor.” In
an address delivered last year at the University of Pennsylvania, Sir
Auckland Geddes, British Ambassador to the United States, said:
It is hard to find ground upon which our civilization can
certainly and safely stand in the future. As one looks around
the world to-day and sees in country after country the power,
the direction of force, passing from the hands of the people who
have long held that power, sees wealth being destroyed, sees all
the surplus margin of wealth disappear, one realizes—not
immediately but looking forward into the future—that we have
cause to take steps to spread the appreciation of research, so
that no shift of political power can possibly take place that
will not keep it in the hands of those who understand the
importance of research.
Research! From generation to generation, mankind has been engaged in
making investigations and discoveries that have constantly enriched and
enlarged the treasure-house of human knowledge. But research, by which,
as the British Ambassador asserts, civilization may save itself from
destruction, has been hitherto an affair of specialists, not of the
multitude, an activity carried on in laboratories or in desert solitudes
or on lonely mountain-tops, and its results have been made manifest only
to the erudite few. But, lo, through the screen the movie theatre
becomes at one moment a laboratory, at another a desert solitude, at
another a lonely mountain-top. Audiences of millions become
experimenters in all realms of research, temporary astronomers,
physicists, chemists, travellers, hunters, entomologists,
ornithologists, archæologists—what you will. Erudition is fed to the
masses in small quantities, and the more they eat of it the more they
crave. “Know thyself!” cried the old Greek Philosopher to the individual
man. “Know thyself!” exclaims the screen to the race at large, and
proceeds to show to mankind the way to that universal self-knowledge
that, if it comes to man in time, may protect his future from the
blunders, crimes and tragedies that have disgraced his past.
The screen may well be represented to our mind’s eye as a modern Hamlet
who says to a blood-stained Mother Earth:
Look here upon this picture—and upon this! I show you to
yourself as you have been—and to yourself as you may be. Look
here at the horrors and devastation, the cruelties and crimes of
yesterday and to-day. Then turn your eyes upon the world of
to-morrow as I shall reveal it to you in its splendid
possibilities—a new world, peaceful, industrious, contented,
going forward from one great triumph in progressive civilization
to another, differing from the earth that was and is as light
from darkness, as day from night! I show you the way, I reveal
to you the decision that you must make. If yours be the baser
choice, if you continue to repeat, generation after generation,
the old blunders, the old crimes, I shall not be to blame. I,
the screen, show you two roads, the one leading upward, the
other downward. You may, by seeing your racial soul in the
mirror I hold up to you, go to Heaven or to Hades. Your
journey’s end depends not upon me but upon you.
What does Man crave—what has he always craved? Freedom. Freedom from
what? From avoidable ills—preventable diseases, unnecessary poverty,
unjustifiable wars, preventable accidents, every ill, in short, that not
only darkens his life but offends his intelligence.
The history of mankind [says Louis Berman, M.D.] is a long
research into the nature of the machinery of freedom. All
recorded history, indeed, is but the documentation of that
research. Viewed thus, customs, laws, institutions, sciences,
arts, codes of morality and honor, systems of life, become
inventions, come upon, tried out, standardized, established
until scrapped in everlasting search for more and more perfect
means of freeing body and soul from their congenital thralldom
to a host of innumerable masters. Indeed, the history of all
life, vegetable and animal, of bacillus, elephant, orchid,
gorilla, as well as of man is the history of a searching for
freedom.
At last, through his own astounding but too-often misdirected ingenuity,
Man has found that which alone could remove from his limbs the shackles
that have held him captive throughout the centuries. He has discovered a
universal language that may conceivably bring about the brotherhood of
the race and the reduction to a minimum of the ills that flesh is heir
to. But with the coming of the Esperanto of the Eye the salvation of the
race is not assured. While the screen may minimize eventually the evils
that spring from a world-wide confusion of tongues, it can permanently
eradicate those evils only by the dissemination of a message that shall
exert an uplifting influence upon the perturbed soul of humanity.
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CHAPTER XV
THE MOVIE AS A WORLD POWER
_Its Enormous Audiences—It Speaks to all Men—What Message Does it
Carry?—The Race at the Parting of the Ways—Have International Marplots
Won Control of the Screen?—The Fate of Civilization in the Balance._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XV
THE MOVIE AS A WORLD POWER
IN a very important particular the title first chosen for this little
book was a misnomer, a fact that grows more apparent to the author as he
approaches the end of the task he has essayed. “A Biography of the
Movie,” the name I had selected for my projected volume, implies, at
this period of the evolution of the picture screen, either too much or
too little—too much if it suggests a comprehensive history of a life
that has but recently begun, too little if it fails to show that the
facts and figures available regarding the development of the motion
picture demonstrate the dynamics of the screen as a medium for racial
intercommunication. There came, of course, to the writer the temptation
to dwell in detail upon the romantic story of the rise of the movie from
insignificance to world-dominion, from poverty to affluence, from a
plaything to a power, to mention names made famous by the screen, to
maintain, in short, the same attitude of mind toward the cinema and all
its works that impelled Merton of the Movies to idealize the new art and
industry whether he looked at them through a telescope or a microscope.
That a work based upon the more personal aspects of the movie’s
evolution can be both readable and timely has been proved of late by the
success achieved in book form by the personal reminiscences of one of
the leading producers in the motion picture realm. But had I succumbed
to the inclination to give what may be called the lure that lies in
gossip to this little volume, I should have taken merely the path of
least resistance and have left wholly undone the real task I have
essayed, namely, that of getting an idea, a prophecy, a promise, a
possibility—whatsoever you may be pleased to call it—into the minds of
my readers, to the end that the project referred to in the first chapter
of this book may receive eventually the consideration to which I, with
all due modesty, believe it is entitled.
In other words, I have been endeavoring to explain briefly how the toy
kinetoscope of a quarter of a century ago by becoming a universal medium
of expression has made what men and nations say to each other in this
new world-language of crucial significance to the future of
civilization.
Now just here we come face to face with the most significant, the most
tragically important, feature of the tremendous subject with which we
are dealing. Is Man, triumphant at last over the evils that befell him
at the Tower of Babel, possessing for the first time in his racial
career a universal language, actually in possession of soul-stirring
truths that, reaching the race at large, shall overcome the powers of
darkness menacing our modern civilization? Let me repeat the concluding
sentence of the preceding chapter: “While the screen may minimize
eventually the evils springing from a world-wide confusion of tongues,
it can permanently eradicate those evils only by the dissemination of a
message that shall exert an uplifting influence upon the perturbed soul
of humanity.”
Shall Christ or Cæsar, idealism or materialism, altruism or animosities,
progress or reaction dominate the screen? The importance of the answer
that the future makes to this query can not be conceivably
over-estimated. To repeat an assertion I made in a preceding chapter,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are struggling for domination over the soul of
the screen and the issue of the conflict is still in abeyance.
A timely truth finding lodgment in the perturbed souls of men might
conceivably save the race from destruction. By means of a modern
invention an idea, opportunely dropped from the clouds by heroic airmen
behind the German lines, destroyed the morale of the cohorts of reaction
and brought victory to the Allied arms. Two things were here essential
to success—the message itself and the medium for its dissemination. Of
the two, the message is, of course, infinitely the more important. But
Wilson’s words, at that special crisis, would have been futile had they
not been given wings by Wright.
Civilization stands in sore need of a message of a unifying and
peace-begetting nature. The screen offers it a medium whereby such a
message could be carried to the ends of the earth, to be known of all
mankind through the Esperanto of the Eye. But whence shall this message
come? By what authority, by what sanction, shall it force itself upon
the minds and hearts and souls of all men? If the screen falls
eventually wholly into the control of demagogues, a medium for
enlightenment that might save the race from the threatening evils of the
future will not merely fail to fulfill its highest mission but will
become the most powerful weapon of those who would undermine and
presently destroy existing civilization.
As an uplifting, educational, civilizing force, the movie appears to be
approaching the parting of the ways. As has been shown in preceding
chapters, it has vastly enlarged its scope and possibilities as an
influence, direct or indirect, upon the daily lives of millions of human
beings. It has of late solved the major mechanical problems that
confronted it. At its present rate of progress, the cinema will soon
become more powerful as an influence upon the minds of the masses than
are the newspaper, the novel and the play taken together.
For the sun never sets upon the screen! Day and night, in all parts of
the civilized, and an increasing portion of the uncivilized, globe the
motion picture is making its imprint upon the minds and souls of
countless millions of men, women and children. It has taken possession
of a polyglot world and is speaking daily to the human race in a tongue
that is understood as readily on the Congo as at Cambridge. But what is
it saying? “Ah, there’s the rub!” Is the screen merely a mirror in which
Man looks upon his own face and turns away heedless of what his
countenance might have taught him? Has the race finally found a way to
that self-knowledge which might mean its eventual salvation only to
misuse, as its wont has been, its newest medium for advancement? Can
nothing be learned from the screen by the restless, harassed,
apprehensive millions of the earth that shall make this first universal
method of communication worthy of the possibilities for world-wide
uplift that it possesses?
The answer to these queries depends largely upon your personal point of
view, upon the philosophy of life which dominates your mental processes.
If you are influenced by that widely-accepted generalization to the
effect that “human nature never changes” you will not be inclined to
take seriously our contention that by forcing Man to observe and study,
by means of the screen, the blunders, idiocies, crimes and tragedies of
his past he may be forced eventually to repent and reform, to make of
his future something less reprehensible than his past has been. But
human nature is not fixed—it is fluid. It has changed, and it is always
in the process of changing. In fact, the time may not be far distant
when not only the individual but the race at large, hitherto at the
mercy of endocrinal glands, will find in the laboratory methods whereby
thyroids and pituitaries and adrenals and the other chemical arbiters of
the fate of men and nations may be so dominated by science that human
nature will not merely change with heartbreaking slowness for the better
but will spring at a bound into its supermanhood.
The above fantastic possibility is not, at this stage of the new
biology, to be taken very seriously, but the suggestion thrown out
serves, at least, to call attention to the fact that never before in the
history of the race has Man been more concerned in his destiny than he
is to-day, more inclined to turn away from old methods of solving the
riddle of his being, methods that have long played him false, and to
turn hopefully to new teachers, new sciences, new hopes, new horizons.
And, lo, at this great moment, when, as never before, Man craves all
knowledge that he may know himself, chance—if such there be—has
vouchsafed to him the one thing needful for a racial self-revelation,
namely, a universal language.
As I wrote the above, this morning’s newspapers were making the
following announcement to their readers:
Plans for carrying on the work toward international peace by the
Carnegie Endowment in Europe, Inc., became known yesterday when
Justice Guy of the New York Supreme Court approved an
application for the incorporation of that organization. Among
the objects to be attained by the corporation are: To advance
the cause of peace among nations, to hasten the abolition of
international war, and to encourage and promote peaceful
settlement of international differences. In particular to
promote a thorough and scientific investigation and study of the
causes of war and of the practical methods to prevent and avoid
it. To diffuse information and to educate public opinion
regarding the causes, nature and effect of war, and means for
its prevention and avoidance. To cultivate friendly feelings
between the inhabitants of the different countries and to
increase the knowledge and understanding of each other by the
several nations, etc.
Praiseworthily lofty and noble as the projects outlined above may be, it
is no disparagement of their promoters to assert that there is nothing
startlingly new in the design they have at heart. In all generations
there have been altruists who envisaged a world freed from war, but
always has it happened that they have been aroused from dreams by the
thunder of the guns. From one point of view at least, the saddest of
countless sad sights in Europe after August 2, 1914, was the Peace
Palace at the Hague.
But if there is nothing especially novel in what we may call the
Carnegie creed as above worded, there is this to be said for the peace
promoters of to-day that they have one great advantage over all their
predecessors, even over those of ten years ago. A new medium for
preventing Man from repeating his former errors and crimes is, by leaps
and bounds, reaching a marvellous state of development. There is every
reason to believe that the message above referred to, which a
blood-stained race sorely needs, is that which the Carnegie Foundation
is desirous of bringing to the minds and souls of men. But have the
powers of evil and unrest, the promoters of international jealousies and
hatreds, selfish demagogues craving always more power that they may make
the worse appear the better reason, out-generaled the forces of
righteousness and placed the screen in bondage to their pernicious
designs? If they have, and the Esperanto of the Eye is to speak for Mr.
Hyde instead of Dr. Jekyll, then has another great calamity befallen a
race that had no need of more.
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CHAPTER XVI
THE MOVIE AND THE CENSOR
_The Movie Ran Wild for Years—Not Threatened with Censorship Until too
Old to Need it—What Christ Thought of Pharisees—History and Common-Sense
Against Censorship—Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis Denounces it—Tories vs.
Freemen, Yesterday and To-Day—American Constitution Doomed if Censorship
Prevails._
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CHAPTER XVI
THE MOVIE AND THE CENSOR
WE Americans are forever boasting of our sense of humor, but we have a
deplorable way of exhibiting a complete lack thereof at certain crises
when its saving grace alone could rescue us from ludicrous
inconsistency. When in the early life of the movie it most needed
supervision and restraint it was allowed to run wild at its own free
will, and at once became a naughty, mischievous boy, covered with mud.
As it grew in years and achievement, developing gradually new and higher
ideals, its need for parental discipline automatically decreased, and it
exhibited internally those guiding, corrective powers that have made it
constantly more worthy of the sympathy and support of the best element
in our civilization. And then came to pass a manifestation of belated
Pharisaism upon the part of certain narrow-minded influences in our
community that would have been laughable had it not been fraught with
serious consequences to a novel art-form struggling to find its
appointed place in the life of the world. Where was America’s boasted
sense of humor when the demand for movie censorship waxed loud—for
minorities always make a great noise—long after any reasonable excuse
for such a censorship, if such excuse there could be, had forever passed
away? What would be said of a father who had allowed his son to indulge
in every kind of youthful indiscretion until the latter had almost
reached his majority and then, when the boy had shown signs of
repentance, reform, regeneration, confined him forcibly to his room and
fed him physically upon bread and water and mentally upon the old Blue
Laws of Connecticut? Neither the heart nor the brain of such a father
would appear to us as sound.
In the eleventh chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke, Christ is
quoted in ringing, uncompromising denunciation of that reactionary,
tyrannical exercise of usurped authority which, through varied methods
and media, has checked the progress of the human spirit toward
enlightened freedom throughout all the centuries:
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as
graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not
aware of them.
And again he cries:
Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens
grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens
with one of your fingers.... Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have
taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves,
and them that were entering in ye hindered.
“Ye have taken away the key of knowledge!” The crime of crimes, the
unforgiveable sin! In this indictment that He brings against
professional hair-splitters and obstructionists, selfishly standing in
the way of human progress, the Christ gives divine sanction to Man’s
efforts to satisfy the irresistible craving in his soul for light, ever
more light, in the darkness through which he gropes. The fruit of the
Tree of Knowledge is not, as in the old Eden legend, accursed, but is
proclaimed by the Savior as food essential to that spiritual growth
without which there could be no hope for our race.
The late Andrew D. White, in his great book dealing with the obstacles
against which Science has had to struggle in its effort to enlarge the
diameter of Man’s knowledge, paints a vivid picture of the tragic
effects wrought by various forms of censorship upon the pathetic,
heroic, Christ-sanctioned efforts of the human race to employ freely the
key of knowledge to the end that we may always use “our dead selves as
stepping-stones to higher things.” Prison, the stake, massacre, war—what
weapon has not been used by the foes of enlightenment that they might
check mankind in its rise toward heights upon which the ancient,
unhallowed prerogatives of a few reactionaries could not survive? And
always, in some form or other, censorship has been the most serviceable
weapon, both in times of war and times of peace, by which relentless
unprogressives could break the spirit of those who strove to loosen the
shackles of ignorance from the human spirit. The marvel is not that Man
knows so much to-day as the fact that he has won what he knows against
almost insuperable odds.
There came to New York from somewhere in the West a year or so ago a
loquacious fanatic who loudly asserted that the earth is flat. The
metropolis refused to take this peripatetic crank seriously, gave him a
passing glance and laugh, and went on its busy way, momentarily
astonished, perhaps, at the amazing stubbornness displayed by outworn
errors in refusing to remain dead and buried. It is seldom, of course,
that the call of the past, the urge to ignorance and reaction, is so
blatantly and audaciously sounded, but Dowie of Zion City differed only
in degree and not in kind from those frequently well-intentioned but
always misguided busybodies who believe that the screen can be kept
decent not by public opinion and commercial common-sense, but only by
groups of three, or five, or seven individuals wielding the arbitrary
power of censorship.
The advocacy of official censorship of the movies is based upon a
fallacy. Where the misguided men and women urging censorship make their
chief error is in their attitude toward the rank and file of motion
picture patrons. They base their demand for censorship upon the sweeping
generalization that the majority of the millions of Americans who daily
attend the movies crave salacious pictures and must be forcibly
prevented from getting what they crave. This shows not merely ignorance
of the psychology of the American people, but is an exhibition of
indifference to the teachings of our national history that would be
ridiculous if it were not so pernicious in its practical results.
Furthermore, it is in essence the astounding proposition that there are
millions of our countrymen who flock daily to the support of an
institution that is openly undermining our most cherished ideals,
brazenly attacking the home and poisoning the minds of our youth by the
inculcation of ideas subversive of our existing civilization. Can not
the fanatics who are demanding censorship realize that if the motion
picture producers did not understand the American people, and our
inherent and inherited inclination for cleanliness and decency, better
than do the censor advocates the movie industry would have gone to
financial smash long ago? Furthermore, if the American public is not to
be trusted to choose its own amusements, and to automatically censor
them at the box-office or the park gate, is it competent to make its own
laws, elect its own executives, in short, to carry the American
experiment in government by the people to the splendid success that
awaits it? This query is searching and fundamental. Advocacy of
censorship in any form for the people of this country is a manifestation
of un-Americanism that is as surely foredoomed to failure as was George
III’s attempt to enforce a tax upon our ancestor’s tea. In truth,
censorship, both fundamentally and historically, springs from power
usurped and not from an altruistic regard for the moral welfare of a
community. Its beneficiaries centuries ago learned how to camouflage
their love of tyranny behind an assumed regard for the welfare of the
public. But the people of the United States, as becomes daily more
apparent, are too well informed, too sensitive to the unceasing efforts
of old tyrannies to gain new victories, too jealous of the heritage of
freedom that was won for them on hard-fought battlefields, to surrender
their priceless liberty of thought and speech and educational and
recreational choice to an outworn and discredited form of supervision.
The significance of a recent election held in one of our historic
cradles of liberty, the State that can boast of Concord, Lexington and
Bunker Hill, in connection with the subject under discussion can hardly
be over-estimated. In 1921 the legislature of Massachusetts was induced
to pass a censorship law. By petition it became a matter for referendum,
and on November 7, 1922, the electorate of the Bay State voted upon the
question whether or not they desired a censorship of the motion picture.
The people defeated the measure by a vote of 553,173 to 208,252, a
majority of 344,921 against censorship. Again had Massachusetts given an
outward and visible sign of her inward and spiritual detestation of
Toryism not essentially different in kind from that which she displayed
when “a snuffy old drone from a German hive” was endeavoring, by force
of arms, to hold her in leading-strings. What intrigues, if it does not
startle and perplex, a thoughtful historian in connection with the above
is that to-day in this country there is a clash, affecting the lives of
every one of us, between the ideals which a century and a half ago
placed George of England and George of Virginia in opposite and warring
camps upon certain basic propositions connected with the subject of
human liberty. But it is inconceivable, of course, that the spirit of
George the Thirdism can have anything but a temporary influence in the
United States in the twentieth century, despite the noise now made by
short-sighted, misguided or actually unprincipled champions of movie
censorship—a censorship that, were there nothing else to urge against
it, is an unnecessary and expensive luxury in light of the fact that the
States and cities of our nation are adequately provided with laws and
ordinances protecting the amusement-seeking public from indecent and
immoral exhibitions.
The Rev. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N.Y.,
one of the ablest, most eloquent, scholarly and influential divines in
this country, referring in a recent sermon to matters touched upon in
this chapter, said:
The descendants of the Puritans and the Dutchmen, whose fathers
rebelled against the censors of the James I era, dictating to
them what creed and government they must accept, find it hard,
after three hundred years of freedom of press and speech, to go
back to the very thing from which their ancestors fled. Long ago
the historians said that the American Republic was the vision of
John Milton in his plea for the liberty of the printing-press,
set up in code and constitution. The genius of our Republic is
personal responsibility, individual excellence. A father and
mother must rise up early and sit up late to teach their boy and
girl to think for themselves, using their intellect; to weigh
for themselves, using their judgment; to decide for themselves,
using their own conscience and will.
“Hell is paved with good intentions.” The tragedy that we call human
history is made more understandable by these depressing, revelatory
words. The fussy, the futile, those whose hearts are kindly but whose
brains are weak, whose motives are praiseworthy but whose methods are
inept and inadequate, have, from the beginning of time, made life harder
than it need be for their fellow-men. When these well-intentioned but
badly-balanced busybodies combine with stronger characters whose motives
are reprehensibly selfish to mould men in the mass to their own narrow
pattern, denying to the individual that freedom of choice regarding his
own affairs that is one of the essential bulwarks of Anglo-Saxon
civilization, an internal menace has come to American institutions more
threatening than any external peril now within our purview.
But censorship of the movies will be, in all probability, only a passing
and more or less localized phase of our national tendency to indulge in
mischievous experimental legislation. If not, however, if censorship
should ever become both national and permanent, then would be sounded
the doom of those emancipatory institutions which have made of our
American experiment in self-government the one great hope, the one
burning beacon-light, for an over-governed, over-burdened, over-censored
world.
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CHAPTER XVII
THE MOVIE AS A WORLD LANGUAGE
_The Esperanto of the Tongue—Its Rapidly Increasing Vogue—All Countries
Taking It Up—Its Inferiority to the Esperanto of the Eye—Together They
May Save the World—“The Covered Wagon”—Its Success as a Picture—Rheims
Cathedral and a Prairie Schooner Symbols of Man’s Balanced Fate—Will the
Race Choose to Construct or to Destroy?_
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CHAPTER XVII
THE MOVIE AS A WORLD LANGUAGE
IT would be inexpedient, I believe, for me to bring this inadequate,
but, I hope, more or less illuminating, investigation of the origin,
present status and future possibilities of the screen to an end without
going more into detail regarding what I have called the Esperanto of the
Eye. That many of the ills to which flesh is heir, especially those
springing from misunderstandings between races and nations, might be
avoided, in great part, at least, by means of a universal language is
far from being a recent idea. Like most seemingly modern
generalizations, such as the theory of evolution, the law of the
conservation of energy, and other apparently recent forward steps, the
possibility of a tongue that should be understood of all men had come
within the purview of the Greek and Roman writers of the classic period.
But the intervention of the so-called Dark Ages, delaying Man’s upward
progress by a thousand years, extinguished many a light which “the glory
that was Greece” had given to the world, and it was not until
comparatively recent times that any effort of a practical and promising
nature had been made to provide the race with a poultice for healing the
blows inflicted upon it at the Tower of Babel.
To-day, however, the universal language known as Esperanto, a survival
of the fittest from several tongues designed in recent years for general
use, is making real progress in various parts of the world. The report
of the General Secretariat of the League of Nations for 1922 says:
“Language is a great force, and the League of Nations has every reason
to watch with particular interest the progress of the Esperanto
movement, which should become more wide-spread and may one day lead to
great results from the point of view of the moral unity of the world.”
The astonishing progress of Esperanto in its conquest of a polyglot
globe is dealt with by John K. Mumford in a recent most readable article
in the New York _Herald_, in which he says:
Since 1920 on an average a new book in Esperanto has appeared
every other day. Text-books and dictionaries exist in French,
English, Arabic, Armenian, Czech, Bulgarian, Danish, Esthonian,
Finnish, German, Greek, Welsh, Hebrew, Spanish, Dutch,
Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Georgian, Catalonian,
Chinese, Croat, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese,
Rumanian, Russian, Ruthenian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Slovakian,
Slovenian, Turkish and Visayan (Philippine Islands). Many
millions of these books have been distributed.
Whatever may be one’s attitude toward the League of Nations, the
advocacy of “the moral unity of the world” by that organization must
meet with approval by the vast majority of right-thinking men. Through
moral unification only can the human race reach that plane of
civilization upon which freedom from the major ills which now afflict it
can be attained. And that the Esperanto of the Tongue, a universal
language that is rapidly enlarging the scope of its influence, can
perform a mighty service in the cause of peace and progress can not be
doubted. But compared to the Esperanto of the Eye, the universal
language sprung from the screen, its conquest of the earth is painfully
slow, and its final complete triumph would still leave the
world-language of the eye more potent in many ways than the
world-language of the tongue.
To illustrate the above, let me quote again from Mr. Mumford, who, in
discussing the benefits bestowed by Esperanto upon commerce, says: “In
Esperanto a business concern can get out a circular setting forth the
merits of a washing machine or a face lotion so that even an Eskimo
woman can read it, provided she has taken six months lessons in the
universal language.” But in the twinkling of an eye this Eskimo woman
could learn from the screen what it might take her half a year to glean
from the advertising circular. Furthermore, for many years to come, the
Eskimos, not to speak of the more highly civilized races, are more
likely to be in constant touch with the Esperanto of the Screen than
with the Esperanto of the Printing-Press.
Of course, what men or nations say to each other is essentially more
important than the vehicle which they use for saying it. Neither the
Esperanto of the Tongue nor of the Eye can be of great service to the
cause of civilization unless they disseminate enlightenment rather than
confusion, good rather than evil, love rather than hatred, unless they
tighten rather than loosen the bonds that hold the nations together in
times of peace.
But what Man may do ultimately with his new media for world-wide
intercommunication can be, at this juncture, only a matter for vague,
though, perhaps, hopeful, conjecture. There is one fact, however, that
stands out in startling significance as we contemplate the progress
which mankind is making toward the final removal of all barriers toward
racial self-knowledge—namely, that humanity seems, for the first time in
its career, to feel that the Sphinx whose other name is History is
presently to reveal the secret which, throughout all the ages, it has
managed to conceal. The disappearance of the last frontier, the solving
of Earth’s ancient mysteries, the coming of the wireless and the
Esperanto of the Tongue and of the Eye seem to presage some new
revelation to the soul of Man that shall remove forever from the
entrance to the Garden of Eden that angel with the flaming sword.
Strange, is it not, that close study of the movie and all its works,
both good and bad, should intensify the optimism of one who only a few
short years ago had abandoned all hope that civilization could ever
again be given the opportunity to regain its higher self and fulfill the
promise it had once vouchsafed to the race? One foggy morning in the
Autumn of 1917 I found myself, in company with a fellow
newspaper-correspondent, representing an English daily, on the French
front, in the shell-torn square in front of the grand old cathedral at
Rheims. That very morning high explosives from the German lines had done
further damage to this ancient glory of Gothic architecture, and torn
and shattered, defaced and despoiled, it limped toward Heaven, sadly
crippled but forever sublime. As I stood gazing, awe-stricken and
depressed at the desecrated façade, the outward and visible sign of
Man’s inhumanity to God, my English companion approached me, stuck his
monocle into his eye, gazed at the ruin before us, and drawled, “My
word, but it has been knocked about a bit, hasn’t it?”
Yes—and so has our modern civilization been knocked about a bit, to
state the case with typically British reserve. As with Rheims cathedral,
so with the social structure Man has patiently and painfully erected
through recent centuries; it must be repaired, strengthened, and, above
all, defended from the iconoclasm that may menace it in the future. And
for this renaissance of civilization, and its protection from the
internal and external foes by which it was recently so nearly destroyed
and by which it is still threatened, the cinematograph can, if God is
willing and Man is wise, be of greater service than the majority of
people yet fully realize.
Not a day has gone by recently when I have not come upon some new proof
that the pessimism which overwhelmed me as I gazed in 1917 at the
outraged façade of Rheims is not unreasonably to be replaced by an
optimism begotten of the movie. I saw Man in those dark days on the
French front in his iconoclastic mood, wantonly destroying the proudest
relics of the creative genius of his forebears. To-day I find the screen
achieving wonders in conserving, for the sake of posterity, the memory
of epic, epoch-making deeds of derring-do that not only glorify our past
but inspire us with hope and courage and ambition for the future.
In illustration of this, let me say something of a recent motion picture
destined to win new friends for an art-form which has only of late been
recognized by the more conservative of our intelligenzia as worthy of
their interest and regard. The screening of Emerson Hough’s historical
romance “The Covered Wagon,” which deals with the heroic achievements of
the pioneers who blazed a trail, in their quest of California gold,
across the prairies and the Rockies, thus conferring a priceless boon
upon a nation in the making, is one of the most important milestones in
the progress of the movie upward toward its highest plane of endeavor.
Says Jesse L. Lasky, of the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, speaking
of his organization’s splendid contribution not merely to movie fans but
to those who believe that by the visual study of his past Man may find
both warnings and inspirations for his future:
We did our utmost to make this the picture of a decade—a living,
moving, historical spectacle which would be of great worth to
the world. For the reason that we feel that our efforts have
been successful we are therefore going to offer prints to the
Smithsonian Institution for preservation in the archives of that
institution. Probably never again will a real buffalo hunt be
staged, and it is doubtful if any producers will again undertake
the immense task involved in “The Covered Wagon.”
Before the actual screening of the story was begun, scouting in search
of an appropriate site for the project was carried on in the states of
California, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico
and Arizona. A location was finally chosen in Utah, ninety miles from
the nearest town and railroad station. As the instant popular success,
combined with the historical importance of “The Covered Wagon,” have a
direct bearing upon the prophecy and suggestion which I made in the
opening chapter of this book, I shall quote at some length from Mr.
James Cruze, to whose energy, enthusiasm and skill as a director the
triumphant screening of Mr. Hough’s stimulating novel is largely due.
Says Mr. Cruze:
Did you ever sit on the edge of a volcano expecting an eruption
any instant? That was my position. Our camp was not patterned
after Fifth Avenue, and I never knew when something might not
break loose. One of the difficult problems was the rehearsing of
the Indians for the attack on the wagon train. This had to be
well timed, so that nobody would be hurt. But the Indians got so
excited, whether or not the cameras were grinding, that we could
hardly restrain them.
The breaking of the steers to yoke was another exciting job.
Quite a number of the cowboys with us would not tackle that
work, so we had to get special men. They finally accomplished
this by yoking the steers together and leaving them for
twenty-four hours, and then they were usually willing to stand.
Then that buffalo hunt on Antelope Island, in Great Salt Lake! I
shall never forget that. It was thrilling, too; at least Karl
Brown, the camera man, thought so. He wanted a close-up of a
charging bull buffalo. He had photographed such gems as a
hippopotamus, a rhinoceros and several other animals, even an
elephant; but he found that a bull buffalo bears a distinct
aversion to the camera, or something of the sort.
We had a stockade built to protect the camera men, but Brown had
to get outside for this particular shot. He got it, but only a
narrow shave prevented the buffalo from getting him. One of the
cowboys fired in time and we had buffalo steak that night. Some
people told me that Brown felt a little delicacy in the matter
and would not eat any.
We forded the Kaw River with our wagon train and our horses and
cattle. We—yes, we got them across. It was a frightful scramble,
and all I know is that we reached the other side. In the end I
was thankful, as any one can imagine, when the picture was
finished. They tell me it’s good. It ought to be.
What can not Man learn eventually through the Esperanto of the Eye?
History is the tale of his conflict between two elements in his nature,
the constructive and the destructive. The picture whose evolution is
presented in detail above preserves for posterity a thrilling record of
our forebears in their Herculean task of winning a continent from
savagery for civilization. It is a representation of Man under the
influence of his eternal constructive impetus. Were I drawing an
illustration for this chapter, I should depict Rheims cathedral
shattered by high explosives beside a prairie schooner drawn by oxen and
ask my readers to judge between them, to say which sketch gave us the
higher opinion of humanity. Is our race to permit eventually its
constructive or its destructive inclinations to dominate its fate? This
is the crucial question agitating mankind to-day, and upon the answer
given to it the future of all things worth while in the world depends.
Who dare assert that that answer is not more likely to be what it should
be because the movie is constantly displaying a fuller appreciation of
the lofty mission upon earth that has been assigned to it?
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CHAPTER XVIII
THE MOVIE AS THE HOPE OF CIVILIZATION
_Buried Civilizations—They Perished from Lack of
Intercommunication—Civilization now World-Wide—Its Salvation Depends on
Mutual Understanding—The Screen the Only Universal Tongue—How it can be
Made to Rescue the Race—A Dream that Should Come True._
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CHAPTER XVIII
THE MOVIE AS THE HOPE OF CIVILIZATION
NO conscientious writer begins the final chapter of a book that has
engaged his energies for a considerable period of time without a feeling
of mingled regret and apprehension. He lays aside reluctantly a piece of
work which, at its inception, seemed worth doing, and whose doing has
given him real pleasure; and, at the same time, he is haunted by the
fear that for the attainment of the purpose which he has had in view he
has left something of vital importance unsaid, has failed to marshal his
facts, figures, suggestions and arguments to the best advantage, and may
have allowed at times his own enthusiasm for the subject he has had in
hand to repel his less sympathetic readers. This latter possibility is
especially disquieting to a writer who has endeavored to stress the
significance of the movie, in its constantly multiplying manifestations,
as a new but possibly determining factor in the struggle of modern
civilization to save itself from the many foes besetting it. It is hard
for “the man on the street,” a clear-headed but rather unimaginative
being, for whom, among others, this book is written, to admit that what
has seemed to him for years past to be but a more or less interesting
form of amusement, too much given to errors of taste and judgment, has
become, of late, through an amazingly rapid process of evolution, a
world power, the influence of which upon the lives of individuals and of
nations can not easily be over-estimated. But the business, politics and
international affairs of the world are dominated for the most part by
this same man on the street, and it is imperative, for the sake of his
own ultimate welfare, as well as for the good of the race at large, that
he be made to realize that the screen as an entertainer, educator,
drummer, possessing a monopoly of the race’s only universal language, is
worthy of his most earnest attention.
In a letter recently written by President Harding to President Sills of
Bowdoin College is to be found the following interesting prophecy:
We shall from this time forward have a much more adequate
conception of the essential unity of the whole story of mankind,
and a keener realization of the fact that all its factors must
be weighed and appraised if any of them are to be accurately
estimated and understood. I feel strongly that such a broader
view of history, if it can be implanted in the community’s mind
in the future through the efforts of educators and writers, will
contribute greatly to uphold the hands and strengthen the
efforts of those who will have to deal with the great problem of
human destiny, particularly with that of preserving peace and
outlawing war.
This recently accepted broader view of history which, as President
Harding says, is an influence making for peace, a new ally to the world
forces struggling for a higher and better civilization, can not be
implanted in the minds of the public, as I have demonstrated in the
first chapter of this book, through educators and writers employing only
the old media for the dissemination of their teachings. Neither the
book, the rostrum, the pulpit, the printed word, nor all of them
combined, have made, nor can they make, that kind of impress upon the
much-too-illiterate public which will compel the race to cease
committing its habitual crimes and blunders.
But, strangely enough, at the very moment when the enlightened minds of
all nations, through the words of contemporary statesmen, scholars and
writers, have become convinced of the “essential unity” of human history
there has been granted to mankind a medium for the universal
dissemination of new ideas, discoveries, facts and generalizations that
has in it the power to perform for the race a service the necessity for
which President Harding has eloquently demonstrated. Scientists and
historians have of late served as continuity writers for the great
picture drama of man’s past, and, lo, the story of the race reveals
itself not as scattered, unrelated incidents but as a majestic,
coördinated tale, but partially told, whose dénouement may be more
splendid than we have hitherto dared to hope it could be.
No student of world affairs can fail to be impressed, despite the
cataclysm that overtook the race in 1914, by the pathetic but hopeful
and inspiring fact that mankind, by a reasonable and not too difficult
confinement of his energies to civilized, peaceful, constructive
activities, could raise itself to a much higher plane of civilization in
a comparatively short time from the slough of despondency in which it
now finds itself. All that is necessary to give Man the buoyancy,
courage and incentive necessary to overcome the evils that beset the
world is the assurance that the iconoclasm that periodically destroys
his own handiwork, the destructive mischievousness of an evil spirit
that he has not as yet exorcised, shall never again be allowed to
function, that wide-spread wars shall be permanently relegated to the
bloody, accusatory past. The osteopaths assert that a slight
maladjustment of even a small bone in a man’s skeleton may doom him to
death from some fatal malady seemingly unrelated to the framework of his
body. Whatsoever may be the truth in this assertion, it serves to
illustrate the point I am making, namely, that the cause of war—any war,
small or great,—appears to be almost always ludicrously insignificant
compared to the damage it does. We are always face to face with the
hideous fact that any slight dislocation of the bony structure of modern
civilization might, as was shown by the recent war of wars, bring about
its complete annihilation. Surely it is incumbent upon us, if we are
not, as a race, madmen or morons, to take full advantage of any new
medium or method that presents itself for the safeguarding of peace on
earth, for the furtherance of good will to men.
Since that red day in June, 1914, when the assassin Gavrilo Princip
fired the shot that not only echoed around the world but almost
overturned the very pillars of civilization’s temple, two antagonistic
tendencies upon the part of mankind have displayed themselves with
unprecedented impressiveness. Man’s destructiveness has been raised to
the nth power, while his constructive ingenuity has been exhibited in an
amazing and encouraging way. The laboratories of the world to-day are
solving problems the solution of which places the human race absolutely
in control of its own destiny. It may, if it so chooses, commit suicide
through high explosives or poison gas, or it may devote itself
successfully to the overthrow and annihilation of the Four Horsemen of
the Apocalypse, War, Famine, Poverty and Disease.
Now what bearing has all this upon the subject-matter of this book, what
has a biography of the movie got to do with the choice mankind must
presently make between a higher civilization and a return to savagery,
between the call of the millennium and the lure of the jungle, between
science making earth a paradise and science making earth a hell? If my
preceding chapters have not supplied a convincing answer to this query,
let me, even though I repeat myself, endeavor, before I bring this labor
of love to a close, to formulate a concise, but comprehensive and
convincing, answer to a question that future generations may consider
the most important that the soul of Man ever asked of the physical
universe. Is it not conceivable that posterity will laud us of to-day
for inventing the Esperanto of the Eye and marvel at us because we
failed to make full use of it to attain that enlightenment which is the
_sine qua non_ of our race’s salvation? May not our descendants revere
us for inventing the screen, while, at the same time, they mock at us
for our delay in taking advantage of its highest possibilities as an
ally to progress, as a defense against racial deterioration?
In various parts of the world of late, in the Arctic regions, in South
and Central America, in Mexico and New Mexico, in South Africa and
Egypt, in Asia Minor and elsewhere, archæologists have, through
excavations and allied activities, brought to light the remains of
prehistoric civilizations so remote in time and so high in character
that a new aspect has been given to various periods in the progress of
the race from the cave and jungle to Paris and New York. It is
unquestionable that Man during the countless ages that have passed has
attained at times in various localities a condition of cultured
enlightenment that appears admirable from our modern point of view only
to lose it again either through internal or external foes, or through
both combined. The outstanding and highly significant fact is this, that
the human race, no matter how splendid a development it might display
sporadically and locally, could make no general and permanent progress
until the nations had devised some method of wide-spread
intercommunication. The earth is a graveyard of great cities and great
peoples who were forced to pass into oblivion without revealing to the
outer barbarians of their time the secret of their greatness. Nor was a
highly civilized people in one part of the world able to form ties with
some equally advanced people far afield—and so, though they both
possessed the key to the higher knowledge, they were ignorant of each
other and both were doomed eventually to perish.
To-day civilization, so far as its surface manifestations are concerned,
is not a localized but a world-wide phenomenon. It can not be completely
buried, as have been so many of its miniature predecessors. The Congo
has its telephones and the Arctic region its wireless. But in so far as
modern civilization is more comprehensive than the Babylonian or the
Egyptian, is not provincial but cosmopolitan, so would its downfall be
more tragically appalling than any catastrophe that has yet afflicted
the human race. And from all parts of the world come to us the voices of
observant men and women who, alive to the warnings vouchsafed to us by
the recent war of wars, are imploring humanity to look not with passion
but with reason at the situation of the world to-day and to take
measures at once that shall drag us back from the edge of the precipice
we have reached.
Has the Esperanto of the Eye, the only medium the race has ever devised
for universal intercommunication, come too late to rescue mankind from
impending doom? Not if rulers, law-makers, teachers, preachers,
diplomatists, statesmen, all men and women who influence the heart, mind
and conscience of human groups, small or great, realize in time that in
the screen the race has found a medium which, rightly used, could mould
for it a future infinitely superior to its deplorable past.
There will be, I fully realize, those who will jeer at the basic idea
underlying the contention that I have made in this little book, ridicule
me for believing that, although a man cannot raise himself by his
boot-straps, mankind at large can elevate itself by means of the
regenerated, ever-increasingly-potent movie. Nevertheless, as I have
been describing in some detail the evolutionary steps that have raised
the screen from a toy to a world power, have broadened its scope from a
plaything to a sleepless influence affecting the destinies of men and
nations, I have been constantly more convinced that the suggestion
regarding a great world centre for the enlightenment of mankind through
visual instruction, made in my first chapter, becomes every month more
feasible, as it also, as the days pass and the world appears to go from
bad to worse, grows more imperatively necessary. The screen is a mirror
in which the race can see itself as it has been and as it is, and a
tongue, comprehended of all men, that might, if it rises to its great
mission, bring salvation to the world.
“A lighthouse of the past, a university of universities, a fountain of
all revealed knowledge, inculcated through a medium understood of all
men, a Mecca for the pilgrims of progress from all comers of the
earth,”—that is my dream, and, for having dreamed it, I know that I am a
better man. By the same token, the human race would become a better race
if it possessed the foresight and common-sense to make my dream come
true!
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APPENDICES
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APPENDIX A
STATISTICS SHOWING THE SCOPE OF THE MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY
Motion picture theatres in the United 15,000
States
Seating capacity (one show) 7,605,000
Average weekly attendance at picture 50,000,000
theatres
Admissions paid annually $520,000,000
The average number of reels used for one 8
performance
Average number of seats in picture 507
theatres
Number of persons employed in picture 105,000
theatres
Persons employed in picture production 50,000
Permanent employees in all branches of 300,000
picture industry
Investment in motion picture industry $1,250,000,000
Approximate cost of pictures produced $200,000,000
annually
Salaries and wages paid annually at $75,000,000
studios in production
Cost of costumes, scenery, and other $50,000,000
materials and supplies used in
production annually
Average number of feature films produced 700
annually
Average number of short reel subjects, 1,500
excluding news reels, annually
Taxable motion picture property in the $720,000,000
United States
Percentage of pictures made in 84%
California (1922)
Percentage of pictures made in New York 12%
(1922)
Percentage of pictures made elsewhere in 4%
United States (1922)
Foreign made pictures sent here for sale 425
(1992)
Foreign made pictures sold and released 6
for exhibition
Theatres running six to seven days per 9,000
week
Theatres running four to five days per 1,500
week
Theatres running one to three days per 4,500
week
Lineal feet of film exported in 1921 140,000,000
Lineal feet of film exported in 1913 32,000,000
Percentage of American films used in 90
foreign countries
Film footage used each week by news 1,400,000
reels
Combined circulation of news reels 40,000,000
weekly
Number of theatres using news reels 11,000
weekly
Amount spent annually by producers and $5,000,000
exhibitors in newspaper and magazine
advertising
Amount spent annually by producers in $2,000,000
photos, cuts, slides, and other
accessories
Amount spent annually by producers in $2,000,000
lithographs
Amount spent annually by producers in $3,000,000
printing and engraving
Hospitals and charitable institutions in 7,000
U. S. equipped for showing motion
pictures, Jan. 1, 1923
The number of schools and churches in U.
S. equipped for showing motion
pictures, Jan. 1, 1923, almost equals
the number of theatres.
Practically every State and Federal
Penitentiary, Penal Institution and
House of Detention in the U. S. shows
motion pictures regularly to their
inmates.
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APPENDIX B
THE SCREEN AS A NEW LIFE GIVER TO LITERARY CLASSICS
The following quotations are culled from recent reports made by
librarians in various parts of the United States:
“The filming of books always causes a great demand for them. A
call comes immediately after the advertisement appears in local
newspapers and lasts months, and, in cases where pictures are
extraordinarily good, years after the film has been shown.
Before the exhibition of the pictures, ‘Peter Ibbetson’ stood on
the shelf. Dumas was read by few, and interest in ‘The Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ lagged. Since the films have been
shown here, these books are circulating constantly.
“Not only do the films increase the demand for a particular
book, but interest is aroused in the time and setting of the
story. For instance, after ‘The Three Musketeers’ was shown,
calls came for the life of Richelieu and the history of the
reign of Charles First. Dumas is now in great demand. ‘Orphans
of the Storm’ brought calls for the life of Danton and the
history of the French Revolution. ‘Passion’ overwhelmed us with
demands for the life of Dubarry and the life of Louis XIV.”
_Walnut Hills Librarian, Cincinnati, Ohio._
“I can say, most emphatically, that the filming of literary
classics does have a very noticeable effect upon the reading of
the books filmed. The increase in the demand and use of these
books is noticeable from the very moment they are announced.
‘Robin Hood’ is on here now, and long before it first appeared,
every scrap of our information on Robin Hood was out in use.
Recently this was true of ‘The Prisoner of Zenda,’ a subject
which has been dead for quite some time in library circulation
and all at once it was revived with a tremendous demand. Not
long ago we had a sudden call from many parts of the city for
material about ‘Fanchon the Cricket’ and later learned that the
film had been running in an obscure community moving picture
house.”
_Charles E. Rusk, Librarian, Indianapolis, Ind._
“In some cases there is a demand for the books in foreign
languages such as Italian and Hungarian, and the showing of ‘The
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ brought requests for the book
in the original Spanish.”
_Librarian of Public Library, Cleveland, Ohio._
“Very often not only the story filmed is called for, but others
by the same author. In the case of ‘Monte Cristo,’ it has led to
a great demand for all the works of Dumas. ‘A Connecticut Yankee
in King Arthur’s Court’ has revived the interest in others of
Mark Twain’s works.”
_Report by a New England Librarian._
“The screen creates a new demand on the part of those who have
not themselves seen the picture. A middlewestern librarian tells
me that many of their calls for the book come from those who
have seen the advertising of the picture, or who have heard
their friends talk about it, or who assume that a book which has
found its way into motion pictures must be out of the ordinary.
By way of anticipating and satisfying this demand, that
librarian has kept a display rack of books in constant
circulation by placing the sign above them: ‘These Books Have
Appeared in the Movies.’”
_Ralph Hayes._
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APPENDIX C
WHAT MASSACHUSETTS THINKS OF MOTION PICTURE CENSORSHIP
In 1921, the legislature of Massachusetts was induced to pass a
censorship law. By petition it became a referendum matter and on
November 7, 1922, the public of Massachusetts voted upon the question of
whether or not the people desired a censorship of the motion picture.
The people defeated the measure by a vote of 553,173 to 208,252, a
majority of 344,921 against censorship.
It was the first time the public of any State had ever been given the
opportunity to register its opinion on this important subject.
Massachusetts is a conservative State. Its people are conservative
people. They rejected censorship by a vote greater than that given to
any candidate on the ticket or to any issue. Their voice at the polls
was based upon a thorough understanding and consideration of this issue.
In this work of enlightenment, the newspapers of Massachusetts performed
a tremendous service to the motion picture. Ninety-two per cent of them
stood staunchly upon the principle that freedom of expression upon the
screen is just as essential to its further development as freedom of the
press is essential to the continued enlightenment of mankind.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX D
SIGNIFICANT DATES IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE MOTION PICTURE
Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé, of France, inventor of photography, born
1789, died 1851.
Desvignes, of France, devised apparatus for animated photography, 1860.
Du Mont, of France, formulated scheme of chronophotography, 1861.
Muybridge, an Englishman, photographs a trotting horse in motion,
California, 1872.
Jansen’s photographic revolver for recording the transit of Venus, 1874.
Dr. E. J. Marey’s photographic gun for studying the flight of birds,
1882.
Stern filed patent in Great Britain for chronophotographic apparatus,
1889.
Roller photography invented by Eastman and Walker, 1885.
Eastman, an American, invents celluloid film, 1889.
Edison, an American, exhibits his Kinetoscope at Chicago World’s Fair,
1893.
Robert W. Paul, an Englishman, throws first movie picture on screen at
his studio in Hatton Garden, London, early in 1895.
Paul shows movies at the Royal Institution, London, Feb. 28, 1896.
Paul and Sir Augustus Harris win success at the Olympia Theatre, London,
with the “Theatograph,” 1896.
Richard G. Hollaman, an American, exhibits the cinematograph at his New
York Eden Musée, 1896.
Charles Urban installs his new projector at the Eden Musée, 1897.
First topical film—the English Derby of 1896—was shown by Paul at the
Alhambra, London, 1896.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX E
WHAT THE MOVIE HAS DONE FOR A GREAT RAILROAD
A little over two years ago, the loss and damage bill of the Illinois
Central Railroad, on carload and less-than-carload shipments, averaged
more than $2,500,000 for a single year.
Seven months after motion pictures were adopted to educate employees in
proper methods of freight handling, in connection with a vigorous
campaign to improve the record, that expense was reduced a cool million
dollars! The reduction has averaged approximately fifty per cent for the
year. Best of all, the bill is still on the down-grade.
In addition to reels on “Loss and Damage,” the Illinois Central Railroad
has produced other films on methods of engineering and switching. Its
“visual education department” boasts a collection of 6000 slides, in
addition to nearly half a million negatives of still photographs.
There are likewise motion pictures made expressly to educate farmers
along the road’s right of way in modern scientific methods of poultry
raising, soil treatment, dairying, potato culture, and packing produce
for shipment. A force of industrial agents maintained by the railroad
holds farmers’ meetings at which talks and films are the order of the
day, and conducts field days and other get-together affairs where “the
movies” constitute an always dependable attraction.
_Visual Education, March, 1923._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX F
FACTS AND FIGURES SHOWING THAT THE SCREEN HAS BECOME THE FIRST WORLD
CONQUEROR
Buenos Aires, Argentina, has 128 motion-picture theatres, with 2,250,000
paid admissions per month.
Montreal, Canada, supports over sixty motion-picture theatres.
Santiago, Chile, has twenty-three motion-picture theatres, and a new one
is now in process of construction which will seat 2,500 people.
American films depicting exciting serial dramas and boisterous comedies
are popular in China. Shanghai has 20 motion-picture theatres; Canton
15; Hongkong 8, Peking, Tientsin and Hankow 7 each.
The first motion-picture drama produced in China with a native cast was
screened July 1, 1921, at the Olympic Theatre, Shanghai, by the Chinese
Motion Picture Society.
In Greece there are about 40 motion-picture houses, 9 of which are in
Athens.
In India, Burma and Ceylon there are about 168 motion picture houses, 16
of which are in Calcutta.
In Java there are 250 motion-picture theatres. American films are the
most popular. One of the largest theatres seats 2,000 Europeans and
2,500 natives.
In Japan there are about 600 motion-picture theatres giving regular
performances and about 2,000 more giving occasional performances. Tokyo
has about 50 houses, Osaka 30, Kobe 15, and Kyoto 10. These theatres
seat between 500 and 1,500 people.
There are in the Netherlands 170 licensed film theatres, with more than
50 other theatres, town halls and society rooms where films are
occasionally shown.
Bergen, Norway, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, has seven motion-picture
theatres, with a combined seating capacity of 4,000. Seventy-five per
cent of the films shown are American.
Lisbon, Portugal, has 3 motion-picture theatres with a seating capacity
of 800 persons each, and thirteen smaller houses seating about 400 each.
There are about 120 motion-picture theatres in all Portugal. American
picture films are rapidly increasing in popularity.
The largest motion picture theatre in Bucharest, Rumania, has a seating
capacity of 1,200.
Sweden is better supplied with motion picture theatres than any country
in the world. With a population of 6,000,000 it has over 600 cinema
houses. Stockholm, with a population of 500,000, has 75 picture
theatres.
Great Britain has about 4,000 motion-picture theatres. The largest and
best appointed cinema theatres in the United Kingdom are found in the
provincial towns of England such as Manchester, Bradford, Leeds and
Liverpool.
France has about 2000 picture theatres, Denmark 250, Belgium about 800.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX G
MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC RELATIONS COÖPERATING WITH MOTION
PICTURE PRODUCERS AND DISTRIBUTORS OF AMERICA, INC.
The Nat’l Society of the Sons of the American Revolution
National Society Colonial Dames of America
National Health Council
Boys’ Club Federation
American Historical Association
The American Sunday School Union
Chautauqua Institution
National Safety Council
American Home Economics Assn.
The Nat’l Community Center Assn.
Community Service
American City Bureau
Central Conference of American Rabbis
Safety Institute of America
Child Welfare League of America
Playground and Recreation Association of America
Commonwealth Club
Actors’ Equity Association
The Woodcraft League of America
American Federation of Labor
Jewish Welfare Board
Girl Reserve Department of the Y.W.C.A.
Russell Sage Foundation
Camp Fire Girls
The Council of Jewish Women
National Committee for the Prevention of Blindness
Nat’l Assn. of Civic Secretaries
Cooper Union
National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations
Associated Advertising Clubs of the World
Girl Scouts
American Country Life Assn.
Nat’l Tuberculosis Association
American Child Health Assn.
National Education Association
Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America
General Federation of Women’s Clubs
The Academy of Political Science
National Child Labor Committee
American Civic Association
International Federation of Catholic Alumnæ
Nat’l Catholic Welfare Council
War Dept. Civilian Advisory Board
Young Women’s Hebrew Association
The Girls’ Friendly Society in America
The Nat’l Assn. of Book Publishers
The Nat’l Security League
Daughters of the American Revolution
The International Committee of Y.M.C.A.
N.Y. Child Welfare Committee
Daughters of the American Revolution
The Salvation Army
Young Men’s Hebrew Association
Nat’l Council of Catholic Women
Girl Scouts
American Museum of Natural History
National Council of Catholic Men
Dairymen’s League Co-operative Assn.
National Board of the Young Women’s Christian Associations
International Federation of Catholic Alumnæ
American Library Association
National Civic Federation
Boy Scouts of America
------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that:
was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
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