Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1919)

64 Photoplay Magazine an instant, gij^antic, international success. It was reprinted in Enj^lish the world around, and was translated into many foreign languages. It was a literary tour-de-force. It was squaring the circle, circumnavigating the globe via the poles, lifting one's-self by one's boot-straps. It was the supreme stunt in words, for it was eulogy in the first person, for the first time. Immediately thereafter and ever since every writer with a ware to cry or a cause to shout has helped himself to the Davis idea. Generally without thought of credit, and at length Mr. Davis, gifted with a sense of humor that has probably saved him from rat poison or ._-gun-in-the-drawer, bought the largest scrapbook ever made, and hired a pasting secretary. So far, the "I ams" total more than eight-hundred. Some are the stentorian declarations of noble causes — democracy, brotherhood, learning, the motion picture. There are also, in the big book, "I am Peanut-Brittle," "I am the Union Suit," and "1 am a Cracker." The "I Ams" will doubtless expand to infinity, but we wanted you to know who started them all. In The ever-advancing picture show is Japan, doing more than making mere entertainment. It is advancing most of the other arts in the sheer impetuosity of its own rush. Listen to this testimony of the screen's great service to music, in far-away Japan. The quotation is from a letter by Shoji M. Iwamoto, Tokio correspondent of The Musical Courier: "Even at villages or small country towns we see one or two movies with an orchestra annexed to them, and American notes (i. e., compositions) are played. Within the last five years the music for these country movies was in so poor a condition that one or two men used to beat drums and blow bugles for the show — and the people thought it a band! But at present spectators are not contented with mere drums and bugles, and movies men, too, acknowledge the value of real music for their performances — hence the number of musicians as well as the kind of musical instruments used are multiplied and variegated to meet the taste of the patrons. In Tokio, Osaka and other large cities there are orchestras of ten or twenty men, but I am sorry to state that the wage is very poor indeed, as the musicians do not form a union for their common interest." Liberty and Everett Dean Martin is director The Screen. ^^ ^^^ Cooper Union forums of the People's Institute, in New York City, and he is now chairman of The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. In taking his place as chairman of this enduring committee, Mr. Martin said, speaking of its work: "The National Board has had an incalculable influence in raising the general standard of motion picture art, and its success has been largely due to the fact it is a purely advisory and not a coercive censorship. My sole reason for accepting this responsibility is the fact that this issue between the advisory and coercive methods of human improvement involves the whole question of whether freedom is possible in American democracy. "Something of the spirit of the forum is essential, I think, to the successful democratic solution of this as of every other public problem. People respond best to ideals when they are permitted to feel they can contribute something on their own account. An extended and very close association with popular assemblies has convinced me that the coercive method is worse than a failure. People's opinions, their likes and dislikes, are in no way changed by having standards forced on them from without. "It [has been said that a legal censorship would be a blow at civil liberty quite as serious and of the same nature as a permanent censorship of the press. To my mind this is true. If the American people surrender the free theatre they might as well give up free press, free speech, freedom of assemblage. They will encourage a species of legislation which in the end will destroy the last vestige of personal responsibility." Cray's Homer Croy has just published Enthusiasms. ^^^ most interesting, and in some ways the most prophetic volume on motion pictures since the writings of the late Hugo Munsterberg. Mr. Croy's work bears the perfectly uninspired main title, "How Motion Pictures are Made," but going behind this purely tentative caption one enters a veritable garden of investigation, summary and opinion. Mr. Croy is an overwhelming enthusiast in his belief in the screen's complete ultimate artistic suprenjacy and vast utility. In fact he goes farther than many of the rest of us are yet ready to go in such avowals. For instance, he says that he is convinced that the general monthly magazine has lost its grip on popular favor, that the weeklies are beginning to slip, and that many functions of the daily newspaper will eventually be superseded by the universal faculties of the superfilm of tomorrow — at once an illustrator, a superior fictionist and a newsgatherer. Most film men tell you that the screen story in general will continue to be sun-painted in black and white; but Mr. Croy thinks that color photography, in an ultimate practical process, will have general adoption for all film purposes. He also says that the subtitle is extraneous, and will eventually be sloughed off as we come nearer to perfect story-telling by pictures only. Of more serious and scientific interest is his essay upon the return of the barbaric "pictograph" to civilization — the use of "picture writing" as a genuine language. The cave men and the savage tribes invented it, the Greeks with their statues and the Egyptians with their hieroglyphs perfected it — after which it was forgotten, save in the illuminated manuscripts of the monks, for more than twenty centuries.