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Movie Audience
Have Both Grown Up
elude that former patrons of the legitimate theater are now to be found among the fifteen million new talkie fans.
The other evening in Hollywood a critic dining at a restaurant near the Chinese Theater noticed a number of new faces in the before-the-theater crowd, faces he recognized as being always present in the symphony audiences, and among the boxholders when the opera comes to town. From other snatches of conversation he learned that it was the first visit of many of them to a motion picture house. Among these new weekly fifteen million movie fans we may number many people with a passion for the opera, trained voices and an understanding of musical technique. "People who have been willing to pay six to ten dollars a seat to hear Lawrence Tibbett, Mar>' Lewis,
or John McCormack, will surely pay sixty-five cents to hear them in the talkies," says C. Graham Baker, First National executive.
High-Toned Music
ERNO RAPEE fifteen years a^o was hired as conductor of the Rivoli Theater orchestra by S. L. Rothafel, or "Roxy," ashe is more affectionately known. "Roxy," even then, was looking beyond the tinkling piano of the nickelodeon, to a film future when picture patrons would be of the sort to appreciate the finest music that the finest orchestra could give them.
"Every time I entered the pit to conduct an overture," says Rapee, "I had in mind the belief that my audience — the movie audience that had always been considered the least receptive to genuine music — would some da^ be eager for the best I could give them.' For many years, while other picture houses were still feeding their public with popular and trashy tunes, the Rivoli patiently taught its pa
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trons to understand and like more classical music. At the same time the character of the movie audience itself was changing, growing more critical of its entertainment. For the last four years Rapee and his symphony orchestra of one hundred and ten musicians have been able to give a motion picture audience the finest music ever written, music which ordinarily would never have been heard outside of the concert hall or opera house!
In 1910, a raucous soprano bawling {Continued on page j8)
At top, Sid Grauman, who, like "Roxy," hat helped movie audiences to change; center, a typical movie theater exterior before the era of stars; left, the interior of Warners' new Hollywood Theater, New York City
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