Modern Screen (Dec 1931 - Nov 1932 (assorted issues))

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The producer looks back to the not-so-distant past when the youngsters flocked to see his pictures. Why aren't his pictures as popular with the children of today? Mr. Tarkington tells you. TOO MUCH By BOOT TARKINGTON MY DEAR MR. HEYN : In your kind letter to me you ask for my "opinion on the serious problem of bringing the children back to the movies," and I realize that in expressing an opinion I am displaying some hardihood ; for, at about the time that silent moving pictures began to be talking moving pictures, my eyes failed me, and now, though my vision is beneficently restored in one, it is not the sort of vision that permits me to look with any ocular pleasure at pictures that are not stationary. Indeed I have seen only one talking picture, and therefore my knowledge of what the movies now offer to children is gained through "what people say" and through what I see upon the billboards outside of moving picture theatres. It must be apparent to anyone that very few movie posters display the sort of picture or flaunt the sort of title that would induce well-conducted parents to urge their 36 carefully brought-up children to patronize the entertainment thus advertised. Most of the billboards, indeed, show a highly-colored woman's head, usually furnished with an astonishingly elongated neck strained painfully from the lady's effort to gaze skyward into the brilliantly tinted masculine face directly above hers ; and the words emblazoned about this pair are likely to account for their uncomfortable position in ways not reassuring to parents, guardians, uncles, aunts or probation officers. Superficially! it would seem that one need venture no farther than the sidewalk to discover why children do not go to the movies as much as they ought : they are not allowed to go there. But I am told that the titles of talking pictures are misleading, that "no one pays any attention to movie titles anyway," and that as a rule the more improperly suggestive the title of the picture, the more demurely proper is the picture itself. I am given (Continued on page 117)