Moving Picture News (Jan-Jun 1913)

B 2 8 4 a u a 'THE CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE ARE COPYRIGHTED" INCORPORATING Jftooma -picture Cales AMERICA'S LEADING CINEMATOGRAPH WEEKLY PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY The CINEMATOGRAPH PUBLISHING COMPANY, 30 West Thirteenth Street, NEW YORK CITY Telephone, 4092 Chelsea ALFRED H. SAUNDERS, Editor (20 years Expert in Cinematography'). This newspaper is owned and published by the Cinematograph Publishing Company, a New York corporation. Office and principal place of business No. SO West 13th Street, New York. Alfred H. Saunders, President: John A. Wilkens, Secretary, and W. M. Petingale, Treasurer. The address of the officers is the office of the newspaper. SUBSCRIPTION: $2.00 per year. Postpaid in the United States, Mexico, Hawaii, Porto Rico and the Philippine Islands, Canada and Foreign Countries: $2.50 per year. All communications should he addressed to The Moving Picture News, 30 West Thirteenth Street, New York City. ADVERTISING RATES: $60 per page, $30 J-page, $15 i-page, single colum* $20, $2 per inch. Discounts, 20% 12; 10% 6; 5% 3 months. Entered as second-class matter in the New York Post Office Volume VII May 3, 1913 Number 18 EX-CATHEDRA WESTERN PICTURES THE question was asked me by one of the exhibitors the |&ther day, regarding my opinion of the Wild West" pictures that are being so largely used nowadays, if I thought they were anyway true to life ? My reply was emphatically No ! They are as far from being true to life as it is possible for anything to be. The old melodramatic plays created heroes that were never known in everyday life. The same with the moving picture, scenario writer, and producer. The farther away it is from true reality, the more exciting and blood-curdling the thoughts engendered by the picture are, the better the directors seem to like it. but the public are getting so satiated with this sort of food that they are turning in disgust against it. I am only a naturalized American, but prior to, and since taking out my citizenship papers, I have had the highest respect for the frontiersmen who opened out the West civilization; the development of the West is an epoch in American history, and unless history lies, those were days of the true "pioneers," and "vikings" of America, when such hotchpotch as we see in the films was absolutely unknown. The cowboy then was one who attended to the cattle, and the rough life made a man of him, and yet an honest transcript of those early days is denied to the West either in literature or in the drama or in moving pictures. In my conversations with literary men I have asked the question. Why? and have been invariably met with a shrug of the shoulders and an answer that distortion is the rule ; everyone simply plays to the gallery. The consequence is that boys and girls who visit the motion picture theatre are being taught the rankest falsehoods regarding life in the West without the slightest regard to truth. The pioneers of the early days are lowered to the level of cowards, or raised to meet some perverted contention. I was reading the other day Theodore Roosevelt's "Winning of the West," and I have looked in vain to find references to "Alkali Ike" or "Rattlesnake Pete," and suchlike tommyrot. Xot a single mention does he make throughout the whole book of any such individuals, and he ought to know. Turning over an old copy of the Evening Post I came across the following article, "The Imitation Bad Man," written by Emerson Hough : "Perhaps some day there may arise a publisher who will print a novel about a Westerner who is just a man; perhaps he may find an artist who can paint a picture depicting some Western character, and make him just a man. If this departure from the ancient and accepted foundry output shall prove profitable — as likely it will — the result will be the crowding out from his last lurking place of the 'Imitation Bad Man'; his only record then will remain on the gravestones of the big, sane, law-loving land west of the Missouri. The epitaph of the wouldbe desperado is that which comes to be written over all insincerity, 'Died of self-deception.' There is no poorer epitaph than that, and when I look round at some of the people who are deceiving themselves so grossly to-day, I wonder if those who are left from them will dare put such an epitaph on their gravestone." The moving picture is the worst offender in this selfdeception, and by watching the pictures I got the impression that the only tangible things the West ever possessed were swaggery men in sombreros, armed with six-shooters, which before they could draw out of the holster, they would be dead men, swathing their limbs in leather, wrist and abdomen swathed with semi-like armor ; putting one in mind of the arenas of old in which the gladiators held forth. . Talking with an old cattle rancher, whom I took to see one of these Wild West pictures, he said it made his blood boil, and he would like that photographer in his clutches to give him a bastinado first, then show him what real Western life is like. He said that the pistol barrel of the picture cowboy was .such that it was two inches longer than it ought to be, and before the picturesque pistols could be pulled out of the halter a Texan Rancher wearing his belt properly would be able to shoot every man shown in the picture. This is a hint for directors. Bringing this to the attention of manufacturers they said that they were simply giving the public what it wants. The answer is not at all convincing because while the exchanges and the exhibitors may be compelled to use these films, not having anything better to show, the public often grumble in a pretty loud manner, and such pictures are only an insult to intelligent audiences, and in this instance the picture makers try to make water run uphill.